Do I Need to Set Up a Suite of Applications?

FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R1 (On-Premises)
There are two reasons for recording details of a suite and its member applications:
  • The suite is separately licensed, and you need to distinguish between installation of the suite (such as Adobe Creative Suite) and installation of a free-standing application that may sometimes be a member of the suite (such as Adobe Photoshop).
  • Recognition of a suite helps clean up all related evidence, both for the parent suite and for its child applications.
In FlexNet Manager Suite, suites and applications are generally treated alike. The only distinction is that a suite can contain applications (which are then called members of the suite). Notice that:
  • A single application can be a member of several suites (for example, Adobe Photoshop is available as a member of Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe Technical Communications Suite, amongst others).
  • Suites cannot contain other suites (there is no nesting).
After you link the license to its suite, FlexNet Manager Suite calculates license consumption for both the suite and its member applications. When you also have another license for the application if it is installed separately, compliance against this license is calculated automatically for the installations that are not part of the suite.
Tip: You do not need to apply any license priorities to handle applications that are either members of suites or are installed separately.

FlexNet Manager Suite (On-Premises)

2020 R1

What Happens When I Set Up Member Applications of a Suite?

FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R1 (On-Premises)
  • Clean-up. When an installation of the suite is recognized by any means (application, installer, file, or WMI evidence), the evidence for all of its member applications is ‘soaked up’ as part of the suite. The member applications are not recognized as installed separately on any computer where the suite itself is recognized as installed. It is important to add applications that are members of the suite to prevent double-counting: if the applications are not added, the suite would consume the entitlement for the suite license while individual applications would still consume entitlements for application-level licenses.
  • Recognition. In rare cases, a suite of applications does not leave any distinct installation evidence. If so, the member applications function as evidence to determine whether that suite has been installed. After the suite is recognized, the individual application's installation evidence is subsumed, or replaced accordingly (as described in the previous paragraph), and individual applications will no longer consume individual license entitlements.

FlexNet Manager Suite (On-Premises)

2020 R1

Special Counting for Products

FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R1 (On-Premises)
If you add to a suite multiple instances of the same product, special logic will apply:
  • If all the instances of the product are marked as Required, the presence of any one of those applications satisfies the mandatory requirement for all instances of the product.
  • If multiple applications which are instances of one product are found on the same computer, the entire product set will count as a single recognition towards a value you typed into the Minimum installations for suite recognition field.

FlexNet Manager Suite (On-Premises)

2020 R1

Suite Recognition: Installer Evidence or Application Evidence?

FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R1 (On-Premises)

Whenever possible, it is best practice to use the suite’s installer evidence for suite recognition purposes. When that is impossible, you can set up suite recognition by application evidence. However, you must be able to clearly distinguish between different editions of the same suite. For example, SuperSuite is available as Standard and Premium editions. You should differentiate between these two suites based on applications available in one edition and not in the other.

If your application evidence returns an ambiguous result, and FlexNet Manager Suite has to choose the best fit, it chooses (in order of precedence):
  1. A suite for which the highest number of member applications has been installed.
  2. A suite with the fewest member applications.

FlexNet Manager Suite (On-Premises)

2020 R1