Hi all,
We are now deploying Altiris CMS 7.1 SP2 in our corporation and we are strarting to decide how the Application Metering is going to be, as we have found that the application doesn't cover some of our specs (f.e. Dataprovider is poor and doesn't add "out of the box" values). In this way, we have seen that there are two ways to meter applications:
- Based on products: Products are SW resource logical grouping, based on some deffined rules. This is a very good option to manage SW Catalog but we have found some problems:
- You can't meter to a defined target, as it uses an internal metering policy and is Global. I think this may be a problem, as in our company there are different sites and countries, and also companies, and some applications may be locally managed, and this kind of policy doesn't allow this functionality.
- Each SW Resource discovered, is automatically added to a product if complies the rule. However, if you want to activate application metering, you have to add manually EXE files. This need a lot of work updating and reviewing all products continuously.
- A software resource can only be in a single product. This means that if you have "Microsoft Project" product, you can't have another product called "Microsoft Project 2010". This is a minor problem, but I think it could be great to have the option to have different products with the Same SW Resources. For example, have MS Access and also Office Professional.
- Based on SW Resources: This is a good option as you decide which is the target of each policy, but it erequires a lot of work to keep updated, as you have to keep updated all the rules, new versions....
So, which are your best practices on this? How many applications are you metering?
Thanks