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GLPI really needs to handle volume licensing better. For instance, if I buy 50 "copies" of Microsoft Office via Microsoft's Open Licensing plan, then I get *one* serial number and can install the software on up to 50 computers. Ok, so in GLPI if I use the "global" license, then I can set the "number" of license to 50, but it doesn't keep track of remaining licenses when using global, so I guess that's not the way to do it. Ok, so I then add a license using the actual serial number and set the total number of licenses to 50, and at first this *appears* to work, but there are some problems:
1) There is no way to add a comment to the license itself, only to the license copy on a particular machine. This leads me to believe that GLPI is just duplicating the same license across many machines, instead of just linking each machine to a single instance of the license. That doesn't make much sense to me. When you purchase a multiple seat license, you purchase *one* license and can use that for X installations...you don't purchase X completely seperate licenses all with the same serial number. This also makes it impossible to track financials on a multiple seat license without dividing up the numbers between each duplicate license that GLPI creates.
2) GLPI seems to get confused when importing from OCS, in that it will reset the number of available licenses. This happened to me today in fact. So let's say I was over my volume license by 5 seats, and GLPI should have been reporting -5 seats (and it was yesterday) but suddenly decides to report 55 installations with 55 licenses and 0 remaining. Now there's no way to *subtract* from the number of licenses remaining, so I had to uninstall the software from 5 machines, set the number of remaining licenses to 0, and the reinstall the software on the 5 machines. Ok, so now it looks like everything is ok, but something is still wrong. When I click the "check all" button to check off all the licenses, it doesn't check five of the machines, and not the five I removed and re-added. There's a problem in the database somewhere and I don't know how to correct it, nor do I trust that GLPI can keep track of my licensing over time unless I stop synchronizing with OCS.
I would like to see non-OEM software licenses have a one-to-many relationship with computers, so that one license can apply to multiple computers. As it is, it appears as though GLPI wants to force a one-to-one model by creating duplicate licenses.
Last edited by slack (2006-05-11 01:01:32)
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Whoa, I just added a comment to one of the license copies I was talking about above, and the comment was duplicated on 5 other computers. Something is wrong. Should I just start over? That's a lot of uninstall/install clicking.
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