[How-To] Manage Software License Entitlements For Your Users And IT Assets

What are software license entitlements?

Software license entitlements enable IT Administrators to entitle, authorize, or give user rights of the licensed software to specific users or machines. This means that as an IT Admin, you can allocate a software license for use on authorized devices and by authorized employees.

Let’s say, you purchased Adobe Photoshop’s software license for a total of 50 seats. You can entitle 50 employees or IT assets within your organization to use this software. If you later run the AssetSonar Discovery Agent and it detects Photoshop installation on 100 IT assets instead of the 50 you entitled, something’s wrong!

The software is being used on 50 other machines you did not initially entitle. Your employees may be using unlicensed versions of the software and you must proactively control the situation before your company encounters legal fine or true-up costs.

You can then check if these employees are using personally purchased versions of the software. If not, you’ll likely have to ask them to remove the software from their devices.

The benefits of software license entitlement

With software license entitlement, you can monitor your software utilization patterns and take corrective actions as needed.

If your software installation and use exceed the entitlement limit, you can ensure compliance by uninstalling the software from unauthorized IT assets or purchasing a license for more seats.
On the contrary, if your license entitlement is not being utilized to its full capacity, you can order fewer seats per license in the future.

Tabs in software license entitlements

AssetSonar’s software license entitlement feature has three primary tabs. These are as follows:

Entitlements: The Entitlements tab lists all the users or machines you’ve added to a software license with the intention of giving them entitled rights to the software.
User Insights The Assigned Installations tab lists all the users that have particular software installed on IT assets checked out to them, and are entitled by the IT Admin to use the software.
Unassigned Users: The Unassigned Installations tab lists all the users that have certain software applications installed in the machines checked out to them but are not given entitlement rights by the IT Admin to use these applications. It also includes devices that are not checked out to any user but have software applications installed on them.

[How-to] manage software license entitlements

This article details a step-by-step method to manage software license entitlements in your AssetSonar account. Let’s get started!

Pre-requisites

Before you start managing entitlements, you need to meet either of the following criteria for successful entitlement:

User-based: You can add a user to the ‘Entitlements’ tab for a specific software license, irrespective of whether the user has an IT Asset checked out to them or not.
Machine-based: The software application to be entitled must be installed on an IT Asset (machine), irrespective of whether the latter is checked out to a user or not.
User and Machine based: The user added to the ‘Entitlements’ tab must have an IT Asset (machine) checked out to them and the software to be entitled must be installed on that machine.

Once entitled, a tag would appear on the assets details page describing the entitlement criteria for the license.

In this article, we use the License for Sigma application as an example. This license has a total number of 10 seats that you can entitle.

Add users to software license

Let’s begin by adding employees to the software license.

In your AssetSonar account, open the Software License Details page from Software → Software Licenses → License Name. Now, go to the Entitlements tab and click on the ‘Update Entitlements’ button as shown.

This opens up an overlay. You can either add individual users to the license or you can just add people by Groups. Through this filter, you can choose users based on their role, department, team, user listings, or custom fields.

Select the users you want to add to the license and click on ‘Update’.

Once updated, the added users will show up in your Entitlements tab.

If you go to the ‘User Insights’ tab, you can see the members which are detected using Figma on their devices.

Tony Stark and Ben Affleck are shown in the Assigned Users table because they are entitled to the Figma License. On the other hand, Peter Parker and Clark Kent are shown in the Unassigned Users table because Figma is detected to be installed on IT assets checked out to Peter and Clark but these members are not yet entitled to use the application via the software license.

You can also take mass action on the Unassigned Installations tab to be able to entitle all these devices for the software.

The Entitlements tab also keeps a count of the number of user-machine combinations you’ve added to a license against its total number of seats and doesn’t allow you to exceed the total available seats.

Member Details page

Alternatively, you can also view all the software licenses a particular user is added to by going to the Member Details page → Software License Entitlements tab.

Take actions on added users

If you want to add users, click on Update Entitlements and search to add new users or click on delete icon to remove a user from entitlements. Click Update to save the entitlements.

For example, you entitled Peter Parker on this license. This action shall show the status of the user to ‘Entitled’ (in yellow). It means that the user has now been assigned a seat from the available license seats. They are authorized by the system to use the software application. However, the system has not yet recognized if the user has actually installed Figma on their checked out device.

It means that the user has now been assigned a seat from the software license. He/she is authorized by the system to use the software application.

You can follow the same steps to un-entitle an employee from using the software and the user will be removed from the list.

Reconcile Entitlements

Now that you’ve assigned entitlements, let’s run the AssetSonar Agent sync to check who’s using licensed software on their IT assets.

On your Software License Details page, hit the ‘Reconcile’ button.

The Agent sync will detect which IT assets have the Sigma application installed on them.

After the reconciliation, Peter’s status changes to ‘Entitled’ (in green). This indicates a successful license entitlement. Peter meets the criteria we specified in the section above.

This indicates a successful license entitlement.

You’ll also notice changes in the Assigned and Unassigned Installation tabs.

Assigned Installation

Peter Parker’s device appears in the Assigned Installations tab because the device in his custody has the software installed and he is ‘Entitled’ to use the software.

Unassigned Installation

On the contrary, Clark is displayed in the Unassigned Users table because he is ‘Unentitled’ to use the software and the machine checked out to Clark has been detected to have Figma installed.

Reduce seats from software license

If some of your employees have left the organization or if you are downsizing your teams, then you would require fewer software licenses. To reduce the number of seats from a software license, open the software details page. Click on the ‘Edit Seats’ button and a dialog box will open up.

Enter the number of seats you want to reduce along with the price per seat. Click on ‘Remove seats’ once you are done. now hit ‘Confirm’.

Mass Member entitlements

AssetSonar also gives you the ability to assign multiple software license seats to a member en masse so you can accelerate the employee onboarding and offboarding processes in cases of mass recruitment or mass transfers in your organization.

You can assign mass entitlements to a Member in two ways i.e. using the:

User-based entitlements
User-machine based entitlements

User-based entitlements

Go to the relevant Member’s Details page and click on Software License Entitlements → Add Entitlements → Add User-based entitlements.

This pops open a dialog box that lists all the licenses with User-based entitlements. You can select from the preferred Available Licenses and update entitlements once done.

User-Machine-based Entitlements

For mass allotting User-Machine-based Entitlements to a Member, go to Software License Entitlements → Add Entitlements → User-Machine-based Entitlements.

Here, you’ll see the Available Licenses that have been created for User-Machine based Entitlements and the machines that have been checked out to the Member, Tony Stark. While assigning the entitlement, you can select which machine you want to entitle for each of the Available Licenses as shown.

After you reconcile the entitlements, AssetSonar will display in green the software that has been correctly entitled to the Member and is installed in the machine checked out to them.

7. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What if I have ‘expired’ software licenses in my AssetSonar account? How can I assign entitlements for those?

A: You cannot assign entitlements to a software license until it is in the Active state. If you have expired licenses in your AssetSonar account, take an inventory of them and decide which software licenses you need to renew based on your requirements. Create new licenses (in Active state) for the software applications you need and then assign entitlements to them accordingly. Delete any past expired licenses after you’ve created new licenses for the software.