System Settings: Purchases Tab

FlexNet Manager Suite 2021 R1 (On-Premises)

The Purchases tab on the System Settings page enables you to specify global settings for processing purchases of software, upgrades, and maintenance. You can set preferences that determine if these settings can be accepted automatically. This page divides the purchase settings into the following sections:

Automation

This section contains a global switch to override all other license automation options. This section has the following options:

• Do not automatically link purchases to licenses — Select this when you want to link purchases to licenses manually. For more information, see Linking a License to This Purchase
• Automatically process purchases (selecting this option will display automation settings) — Select this option to automatically link purchases to licenses based on the recommendations. This displays the Licenses, Enterprise and Vendors sections on the Purchases tab that allow you to manage automation settings.

Licenses

This section appears when you select Automatically process purchases (selecting this option will display automation settings) under Automation. This section enables you to select preferences for automatically linking purchases to licenses, and to define the type of purchases for automatic processing. The following options are available:

• Link when there is only one candidate license — When automatic purchase processing is permitted and this option is selected, FlexNet Manager Suite checks all recommendations to find a recommendation that identifies exactly one candidate license for the purchase. When this option is not selected, FlexNet Manager Suite may accept the recommendations that identify multiple candidate licenses. In this case, multiple candidate licenses are equivalently matched for any scoping applied to the purchase.
• Create a new license when no candidate license can be found: When automatic purchase processing is permitted and this option is selected, FlexNet Manager Suite automatically accepts the recommendations that require creating a new license. When no SKU is available, a default device license is created with a name matching to the description of purchase item.

Automatically process purchases for these types of purchases:

Select which of the following purchase types should be processed automatically by FlexNet Manager Suite.

• Software license entitlements
• Software upgrade
• Software maintenance.

Enterprise

This section appears when you select Automatically process purchases (selecting this option will display automation settings) under Automation. The settings in this section enable you to determine how licenses can be scoped or linked to enterprise groups to restrict entitlement consumption within that group. The following settings affect all operators:

• Always, disregarding scope — When you select this option, FlexNet Manager Suite processes the recommendations based on the options in the Automation and Vendors tabs.
• Only for identical scope — When you select this option, FlexNet Manager Suite processes the recommendations as transactions when the scope setting for the license and the purchase are identical across all of cost centers, corporate units, and locations.
• When license scope is no deeper in the enterprise structure than — When you select this option, FlexNet Manager Suite ignores scoping on the purchase and links the license to enterprise groups that meet the criteria in the next three settings. For Corporate units, Locations, and Cost centers select the associated check box for each of these kinds of enterprise groups that you wish to examine (a cleared check box excludes that group type from the checking process). Then dial up the lowest level within your enterprise structure where a linked license can be automatically processed. For example, if you selected Locations with a level count of two, then recommendations can only be automatically accepted when they involve licenses scoped to locations at the top level or second level of your enterprise.
  Note: A license that is not linked to a particular type of enterprise group is assumed to be ‘global’, as if linked to the highest level of the enterprise for that group type. Thus a license that is linked only to the North America location is considered to be at the top level for cost centers. If, in these preference settings, you selected level two for both locations and cost centers, such a license would match the test and could be automatically processed.

Vendors

This section appears when you select Automatically process purchases (selecting this option will display automation settings) under Automation. This section lists Vendors that allow automatic processing of purchases. To block automatic purchase processing for a vendor, deselect the Allow check box. For more information on searching a vendor, see the topics under Using Lists in FlexNet Manager Suite.

Contracts

When you select the When SKU requires a contract, automatically attach new licenses to the contract linked to the purchase option, and there is a SKU referenced in the purchase that requires a related contract and that contract is already linked to the purchase, FlexNet Manager Suite automatically links the related contract to the license.

Note: This setting has no effect for any recommendations other than creating a new license when there is a SKU referenced in the purchase.