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Software metering and exclusion functionality

Matthias_GebhardtMatthias_Gebhardt Customer IT Monkey ✭
edited August 2018 in Asset Management
Hi Cireson community,

I am quite new to system center and Cireson. I searched the kb/community page for over an hour now but it seems like I am not finding the solution to my problem. If there already is a discussion regarding this topic, sorry for the double post, I was not able to find it.

Ok, here is my problem:
In our company, we are using Microsoft volume licenses with SA. The installation base is kind of a wild spread. At the moment we got all main versions from 2007 - 2016, standard and professional editions, project and visio, same version and edition wildspread.

My goal is, to create software assets which match correctly with the license use rights, for example:
Mircosoft Office 2010 professional, Microsoft Office 2013 professional, Microsoft Office 2016 professional => match against the Office professional license.

But I am failing and it looks like, the cause is my usage of "software metering" and "exclusion".

Let's take Visio Standard for example, it's the asset I am experimenting most with at the moment:

I can't find a normalization for example Visio Standard, which matches correctly only with Visio Standard installations.

I extracted the possible software names after I set the software pattern only to "%Visio%" and left the exclusion pattern empty:
Microsoft Office Visio 2010
Microsoft Office Visio 2010
Microsoft Office Visio MUI (German) 2007
Microsoft Office Visio MUI (German) 2010
Microsoft Office Visio MUI (German) 2010
Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007
Microsoft Office Visio Standard 2007
Microsoft Visio MUI (German) 2016
Microsoft Visio Premium 2010
Microsoft Visio Professional 2010
Microsoft Visio Professional 2010
Microsoft Visio Professional 2016
Microsoft Visio Viewer 2010
Microsoft Visio Viewer 2013
Microsoft Visio Viewer 2016

Maybe I am approaching to whole thing from a wrong direction, but at the moment I believe the possibility to define more "exclusion patterns" should help with my problem.
The ways i tried to define more than one exclusion so far seem not to work (For example: "%viewer%professional%"; "%viewer% %professional%"; "%viewer%;%professional%").

So, is there a way to put it in more "exclusion" words? or maybe just duplicate the exclusion field and use multiple exclusion fields additively?

Kind regards,
Matthias

Best Answer

Answers

  • Matthias_GebhardtMatthias_Gebhardt Customer IT Monkey ✭
    Hi Tony,

    thank you very much for your answer!

    I don't know which version of Cireson we are using and I don't find any "info"/"about" button, but the "bundle" function is definetly in it.

    My Cireson trainter, who initially showed and teached me how to use Cireson, told me that the "software bundle"-function works in a different way, for example:
    If you declare some software assets as a bundle (let's take word, excel, powerpoint), the license counter will count up if alle products are installed. So instead of having your word, your excel and your powerpoint counted seperately, you configure your "Office" bundle and have that counted.

    After reading your suggestion and my attempt to sum up the things I was told about the bundle function, I tend to give this function another try.

    Thank you very much, I will update this thread after I ran some tests. :)
  • Matthias_GebhardtMatthias_Gebhardt Customer IT Monkey ✭
    Hi again!

    It's been a while, but as we all know... sometimes you can do nothing about it. :smile: 

    The last 4 days, we had another session with our service provider for Cireson and this problem was one of the topics we worked on.

    At first, I want to say: Big up and thank you very much Tony.
    After you brought up the 'bundle' functionality, we took a closer look at it and tried to understand, how it works. We also found a new "funtional sign": "|" which is created when using the bundle function.

    After setting up the exact software patterns (we found them by looking up the informations of some clients in the Service Manager of the System Center) it looked really good - at first. ^^'

    We were confident, that it would deliver correct data now - but still, there were wrong informations in Cireson. Still we had (and have) clients with installed Visio Professional edition listed as related assets under the Visio Standard software asset.

    After taking a closer look again at those clients we found a second reason why the data was wrong: Visio itself was to blame.
    Regardless if it is the standard or professional edition, the 2010 version will be detected by the System Center as "Microsoft Office Visio 2010".

    With this new information we took 2 clients and upgraded them to 2016 version and both clients are listed now correctly in Cireson - this makes me quite confident, that we have finally found a solution to my problem.

    Thank you very much again Tony! Your support helped getting into the right track and getting a better understanding of Cireson itself.

    Best regards
    Matthias
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