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Educause Software Licensing Group - Best Practices Repository

At the 10/23/07 meeting of the Educause Software Licensing Group there was a discussion of starting a repository of Software Licensing Best Practices.  This Educause Connect Wiki is intended to serve as that repository.

The goal is for members of the Group to send an inquiry to the rest of the Group about their best practices in fulfilling a particular software licensing function for their campus, then the responses from the Group can be collected here. 

When posting new information here, please include the name of your school, your name and contact information. 

Thanks!

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Software Usage Policy
Submitted by trappler on Tue, 2008/01/08 - 3:15pm.

If your school currently has in place a policy regarding the appropriate use of computer software we'd appreciate it if you could share that policy (ideally a link to it) via a posting this wiki.  Please also share any information pertinent to the development of the policy, such as how or why it was initiated, any challenges encountered during its development, and how faculty and staff are notified about the policy.  Thanks!

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General Acceptable Use Policy
Submitted by bmwest on Tue, 2008/01/08 - 3:41pm.

At Illinois, we don't have a specific written policy for software but we do have general 'computer resources' policies posted at http://www.fs.uiuc.edu/cam/cam/viii/viii-1.2.html (in particular the Acceptable Use Policy section) and http://www.fs.uiuc.edu/cam/CAM/viii/viii-1.1.html (in particular the Licensing and other Restrictions section).  This was written at a campus level before my time so I can't provide any comments on the initiation of the process.  I believe that all faculty, staff, and students must acknowledge that they have read the Campus Administrative Manual during registration/orientation, although I suspect few actually do read it.

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Software Asset Management
Submitted by trappler on Thu, 2007/11/01 - 3:38pm.
Does anyone currently have in place a Software Asset Management (SAM) system/solution that you would recommend?

For us the ideal solution would do the following for a wide range of software products commonly used in a higher education environment:

  1. Track software licenses purchased/owned, including version
  2. Track quantity of licenses installed and last usage date for each
  3. Track terms and conditions associated with each license
  4. Track expiration/renewal dates with renewal reminders
  5. Include associated vendor contact information for each license
  6. Automate as much of collection and updating of the tracked data as possible
  7. If the solution requires a client to be installed on an end user machine, then the client must not cause a noticeable decrease in machine performance
  8. The solution would be scalable --- it would work at the department level, for multiple departments, but roll up data at higher levels including campus-wide
  9. The solution should provide a variety of reports or summaries, including the ability to develop custom reports
If your school has a SAM system/solution that does any of these function well, we'd appreciate it you could share with the group information regarding that system/solution including the process by which you selected this product, the process by which you implemented your SAM system, and your experiences (pros, cons) with your current system.  Thanks!
 
 
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SAM-esque features
Submitted by bmwest on Tue, 2007/11/13 - 3:47pm.

Not so much a SAM, we use e-Academy's ELMS system to distribute software and it performs many of these functions in varying degrees of ease/success as noted below:

  1. Each order is tied to a NetID so we know who bought/owns a specific product title (such as Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 for Windows).
  2. ELMS can report how many licenses have been ordered but not installed or used.
  3. The EULA is agreed to by the purchaser at the time of purchase and contains the terms of the license.  It is always available for future reference.
  4. Expiration & renewal information is provided to the purchaser at the time of purchase and it is expected that they will ensure the renewal if needed.  However, we also keep renewal dates in our calendar and send out renewal reminders ahead of time to those whose licensing/maintenance will soon expire.  This is a fairly manual process outside of ELMS currently, though.
  5. We maintain a vendor database detailing particulars of products and contracts with the vendor.  This is outside of ELMS.
  6. While most of it is automated, certain components such as license ownership transfers, renewal reminders, and vendor information are separate, manual components.  However, I these items could be addressed within ELMS by requesting the features from e-Academy.
  7. As it is purely a distribution portal, no client is required.
  8. We started 5 years ago at about $107k and expect over $2M and 60k transactions this FY.
  9. Reports of most data can be pulled into a CSV file for further manipulation as needed.

 

Again, this is not a SAM per se, but does provide some SAM features in a product intended for the necessary task of distributing the software.

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