License and Maintenance Expiry

Entries appear in this list for any of these reasons:

A non-perpetual license is expiring in your chosen time period (whether because of the dates recorded on the license itself, or the dates on Software subscription purchases linked to the license)
Maintenance coverage of a license is expiring in the same period. This includes expiry of only part of the maintenance coverage.

Because the above reasons include both license and purchases, the list includes properties for both the license and a linked purchase supplying details of either the subscription or maintenance coverage. There is a separate row for each unique combination of a license with a purchase, with the result that either item may appear multiple times in the list:

If a purchase has been split across multiple licenses, and the purchase is triggering the expiry, it appears in a separate line for each of the affected licenses.
If a license has been linked to multiple purchases, and several of those are expiring in the same time-frame, the license appears in a separate line for each of the expiring purchases.

Choosing the Time Period

In the upper-left corner of the page, under the page title, choose a value from the Expiring within the next drop-down list. After a moment, the list refreshes to show expiry dates that fall within the chosen time window. Most time periods are measured forward from today (things that have already expired are not included in these cases). The Overdue choice shows cases that have already expired.

How Can Licenses (and Subscriptions) Expire?

Licenses may expire based on settings on the license record, on a linked purchase record, or both. Consider first the case of only the license record, assuming for the moment that there is no linked purchase record.

In the Identification tab of the license properties, the Duration is set to Perpetual, Subscription, or Time limited. Any license that is not perpetual eventually reaches its Expiry date, also set on the Identification tab (any Expiry date value is ignored when the Duration is Perpetual). After that date, your enterprise is not complying with the license agreement if you continue to have installed copies of the application.

If the record appears in this License and Maintenance Expiry listing because of the license properties, the row does not include any purchase details.

In IT Asset Management, the license compliance after expiry depends upon the license type:

Oracle non-perpetual licenses are shown as over-utilized when their expiry date is passed.
Other non-perpetual licenses are only listed in the License and Maintenance Expiry view; expiry alone is not sufficient reason for the license to show as over-utilized in other license lists. If the license entitlements are being drawn from purchases of purchase type Software subscription, and the Expiry date on the purchase(s) has passed, then the entitlements from those purchases fall to zero. The license may therefore be over-utilized because there are insufficient active entitlements purchased to cover the installation count.

A subscription license can also be managed through linked records of purchases (which can operate independently of the Duration setting on the license). If a purchase (linked to the license) has a Purchase type of Software subscription on the General tab of its purchase properties, it also has an associated Expiry date. When this expiry date falls within the time period you selected for the License and Maintenance Expiry listing, a row appears showing both the affected license and the purchase for the expiring subscription.

Because these methods operate independently, if you have used the details on both the license record and a linked purchase record, and the expiry dates in both places fall within the same period, there will be two rows displayed in this listing: one with purchase details, and one without.

Remedies

For licenses that are expiring, you may wish to:

View or change the expiry details, if these need updating. To display or edit any license in the list, click (or Ctrl-click) the license name, double-click the row, or select the check box on the far left of the row, and click Open.
Purchase an upgrade to replace a Time limited license; or renew your subscription by linking another subscription purchase to the license. (Best practice is to import the appropriate purchases from your purchase order system, and then process them. However, if you wish to create a purchase record manually, you can start with the Create a purchase button on this page; and then process the purchase through the Unprocessed Purchases page (Procurement > Purchases & Vendors > Unprocessed Purchases).
Uninstall the application from all installed computers. To see all computers on which the licensed application is installed, open the license details and select the Consumption tab.

How Maintenance Expires

Automatic tracking of maintenance coverage relies on correct information being recorded in the purchases that renew the maintenance (and the purchase records being linked to the license covered).

"Correct information" here means that the Maintenance section of the General tab of the purchase properties has the following settings:

Purchase includes support, maintenance, or other service agreement for the following period must be set
Effective date shows the first date on which maintenance was provided through this purchase
Expiry date shows the last date on which maintenance was provided through this purchase (or, if the maintenance is perpetual and never expires, this field may be blank).

Tip:For Microsoft licenses, as well as the above settings, the linked purchase must not be disabled as a result of a MLS import of a later date (in this case, you expect that the record created by the MLS import similarly records your maintenance purchases). You can check for a disabled purchase in the Entitlement status column on the Licenses tab of the purchase properties.

Naturally, you may link a series of such purchases to a license, one for each time you renew maintenance/support for the associated software. In a perfect world, the Expiry date of the first linked purchase is followed immediately by the Effective date of the next linked purchase, providing continuous maintenance coverage. For some licenses, you may be required in an audit to show evidence of continuous coverage (for example, continuous Software Assurance). The series of contiguous dates on linked purchases can provide you with the appropriate documentation.

As the Expiry date of the most recent linked purchase approaches (and falls within the time period you chose for the listing, as described above), a row appears in this list showing details of both the affected license and the linked purchase on which the maintenance Expiry date is imminent.

Remedies

As maintenance expiry approaches, you may choose one of three paths:

To let all the maintenance on the license expire. If that is the plan, simply open the license properties by clicking on the license name in this list; and on the Compliance tab, select the Planned non-renewal check box, and Save the change. Setting this check box has two results:
The license/purchase pair disappears from this License and Maintenance Expiry listing immediately, even if it is not the expiry date yet, since you have made clear the plan to not renew (you may need to refresh the list)
As the expiry date passes, IT Asset Management is authorized to adjust the Product User Rights (PURs) on the license on your behalf. The most common change when maintenance expires is the loss of upgrade rights from the expiry date forward.
To renew the maintenance. Simply create the purchase record for the renewal, and link to the license. The license/ purchase pair disappears from this License and Maintenance Expiry listing (you may need to refresh the list).

Tip:If you run late, and don't get the new purchase record linked before the maintenance expires, the expiry processing occurs:

The license now appears in this list only when you choose the Overdue time period.
An alert appears on the license in all license lists, because there is now a mismatch between the number of entitlements and the maintenance quantity on the license.

When you finally link the new purchase to the license, all is restored.

To renew some maintenance, and let some expire. Since each license requires a match between the number of entitlements and the maintenance coverage, splitting the maintenance plan also requires that you split the license record. To do this, select the appropriate row from the listing, and click Move maintenance. For more details, see Moving Maintenance Between Licenses.

Tip:To allow for complete scenarios of multiple overlapping maintenance purchases on a license, you can even split maintenance that has already expired.

Properties

The following license or purchase properties are available for this list. Because the properties come from separate objects, the list header includes a blue bar identifying the source object. Some properties are displayed by default in the list, and others are available in the column chooser, which also groups the properties with the same blue headers. Similarly, the details below are in the same groups.

The Save view as feature of IT Asset Management enables you to create customized views of a page by saving the applied user interface settings. For more information, see Creating Saved Views.

Tip:Any custom properties that you have added for this object are also available through the column chooser. Like other properties, you can also use these properties for filtering and grouping records on this page.

Properties of the Expiry

The following table lists the properties of the expiry.

Properties of the Expiry (Alphabetic)

Property

Description

Days to expire

The number of days between today and the value shown under Expiry date. For Overdue items, the value is negative.

Expiry date

The source of this date depends on the value of Expiry reason:

For License expiry, the date is copied from Expiry date in the Identification tab of the license properties
For Maintenance expiry, the date is copied from the Expiry date in the Maintenance section of the General tab of the properties of the related purchase (the purchase shown in the current row of the License and Maintenance Expiry listing). Typically, this is the most recent purchase of maintenance linked to the listed license.
For Subscription expiry, the date is copied from the Expiry date in Purchase details section of the General tab of the properties of the related purchase.

Expiry reason

Displays a reason why the row appears in this listing. Values may be:

License expiry

Occurs when both these conditions are met:

1. The Duration has a value other than Perpetual in the Identification tab of the license properties, and 
2. The recorded expiry date is approaching.

As a result:

The row does not contain any details of a purchase, because this expiry is driven entirely by the license.

Tip:If, coincidentally, there is a separate purchase that also records the expiry (on a date in the same time window) of the subscription represented by this same license, a separate, additional row is displayed that contains both the license and the purchase, with a different Expiry reason.

Maintenance expiry

Occurs when all these conditions are met:

1. The purchase displayed in this row provides (some) maintenance coverage for the license entitlements, and
2. The maintenance expiry date on this purchase is approaching, and
3. So far, there are insufficient, more recent purchases of maintenance linked to the license to cover all the expiring coverage, and
4. You have not selected Planned non-renewal in the Compliance tab of the license properties.

Tip:The expiry of only part of the maintenance coverage for a license ensures that the license and related purchase(s) appear here. For example, if a license previously had coverage for all 50 of its entitlements from purchase 001 which expires shortly, and purchase 002 renews coverage for only 30 of those entitlements, then the license and purchase 001 appear together in the listing, because of the expiring maintenance coverage for 20 entitlements.

Expiry reason

(Continued)

Subscription expiry

Occurs when all these conditions are met:

1. The purchase displayed in this row has a Purchase type of Software subscription, and 
2. The expiry date listed in the purchase properties is approaching, and
3. So far, there are no more recent purchases to renew the subscription linked to the license.

This Subscription expiry value of Expiry reason is determined entirely by the purchase record (even if, on the license, the Duration is not set to Subscription). In the more common case, the license Duration is also set to Subscription; and if this is also expiring in the same period, there is a separate, second row for the license, but showing the License expiry reason.

Tip:To remove a subscription from this list, link any later subscription purchase, regardless of the entitlement count, to the subscription license. Partial renewals have the same removal effect as full renewals, because consumption may also be dropping, so that entitlements and consumption stay aligned. On the other hand, if consumption does not drop, the impact is clearly visible: if there are insufficient entitlements to cover consumption in future calculations, you see a very obvious license at risk.

Properties of the Licenses

For detailed information on the properties displayed in this list, see Licenses Listings Property Reference.

Note:Most lists in IT Asset Management only show a selection of the properties in the underlying database. Some columns are displayed by default and others can be displayed using the column chooser control, including any custom properties that you have added. For information on using the column chooser, see Managing Columns in a Table.