How to Generate a License Position

This lesson explains the third step of license management which is generating the License Position using the License Calculation Engine (LCE).  The LCE was written to support a greater range of product types and to make the existing processing more robust. The LCE reads the qualified License Entitlement Details that are marked to be included in the License Position calculation and processes those records. The LCE uses the 100% qualified License Entitlement Detail (LED) data to provide entitled license counts by applying license, version and edition upgrades.

  • The Current License Position includes coverage end dates and whether coverage for licenses or subscriptions is still active.
  • LCE also determines what upgrades were not successfully applied and allows user to review these records and trace them back to the LED data to determine if licenses were incorrectly qualified, are missing, or simply have not yet taken effect.
  • License Position Records with Active Coverage will always have a Non-Specific version.
  • With Active Coverage you are entitled to use whatever version you have allocated a license to in your environment.

The License Entitlement Calculation feature is located at Manage Licenses > Calculate License Position. This view is limited to only those entitlement transactions that are 100% qualified.

  1. By default all 100% qualified entitlement transactions are included in the license position calculation. It can be beneficial to only work on processing a subset of data or to ignore license entitlement transactions for products that are old and not longer relevant. The MLS Transaction Data includes the entire history of entitlement transactions some of which can be quite old and irrelevant so you may want to exclude those from processing without deleting them. Any selected records can be included or exclused from the License Position Summary calculation using the Include in Calculation and Exclude from Calculation buttons.
  2. If license entitlement transactions have been added from multiple sources, users can click the Process Licenses > Find Duplicates button which will pick out any identical 100% qualified transactions which may represent duplicate records. Delete or Exclude From Calculation any duplicate records.
  3. Click the Process Licenses > Calculate License Position button to start the license position calculation.
  4. If there are any Product Types that are a Coverage Renewal then you will be presented with the option to select an Coverage Renwal Tolerance period. This period specifies the number of days from the Coverage End Date of a prior base License with Coverage that the Coverage Renewal can be applied. The default is 60 days. (For Example: In Microsoft terms, a License with Software Assurance can only have the SA renewed within a given tolerance period. The default is generally 60-90 days, but users may have been given a special exception to extend this period and allowed to purchase a Software Assurance renewal instead of having to purchase a new license.)

License Position Calculation Results

Once the calculation has completed, the License Calculation Result popup window will indicate the total records processed.

The results of the number of records processed is also broken down by Product Type.

Current License Position

The Current License Position dashboard displays the status of the License Position marked as "current". The latest License Position calculation is marked as current by default, but users can also right click on any license positions entries under View License Position to mark a previous one as current. Throughout LM, the Current License Position determines the license counts used for Owned SKUs.

  1. Current License Position displays the one marked as "current" which is either the latest run of the calculation or can be set manually by the user if a prior License Position should be used to reflect owned licenses throughout LM.
  2. View License Positions lists all License Position calculations that have been performed. The Review Calculation Log can help to determine any issues with the license position calculation that resulted in Unresovled Coverage issues. See more about maintaining a License Position in subsequent lessons.