Perpetual License Reporting

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Brandon Bunnelle

• March 09, 2017 19:13

Does "PDQ Inventory" offer a way to keep track of perpetual licensing for software? Possibly email a report before expiration?

I understand that I may need to custom tailor the report to be application specific but it would be nice to have a report sent out "30/60/90" days before expiration to begin the process of renewing said software.

I don't like solely relying on my account managers to let me know something is about to expire.

God Bless,

Brandon Bunnelle

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  Colby Bouma

  • March 09, 2017 19:48
  • Edited

  You could store the license expiration date in a Custom Field and set up an Auto Report that shows you which ones are about to expire.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
  
  
  

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  Brandon Bunnelle

  • March 09, 2017 20:00

  This is good stuff! I will definitely take this into consideration and give it a try.

  Thank you for taking the time to answer my question.

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  Stephen Valdinger

  • March 09, 2017 20:37
  • Edited

  Colby's option of a Custom variable for the expiration date is spot on. You can also store actual license information inside of Inventory as well. That way when you generate your auto report, which he beat me to showing you, you could have Computer Name, Software Name, License Key, Expiration Date as fields in the Report

  Here are a couple ways to do this:

  You have a couple of options for this. If you are dealing with a License key that is the same across many machines, you could edit each of those hosts in Inventory and include that information:

  

  Create New or Import from CSV

  I clicked on New and then entered this data into the line:

  

  If you were doing this to many machines, I would create a custom tool, and use something like nirsoft's produkey.exe which has a command line interface:

  http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html (scroll down, there are a TON of command line options).

   

  With that, you could dump a copy of produkey.exe on a file share and call it with Powershell, including your command-line options

  Copy-Item \\fileserver\share\produkey.exe C:\temp
  
  Start-Process C:\temp\produkey.exe -NoNewWindow -ArgumentList '/sjson C:\keys.json , '/sort "Product Name"' , '/sort "Product Key"' ...etc
  
  $keys = Get-Content C:\keys.json | ConvertFrom-Json
  
   
  
  Foreach($key in $keys){
  
  #send the info to inventory
  
  }
  
  *EDIT*
  
  Remove-Item C:\temp\keys.json -Force
  Remove-Item C:\temp\produkey.exe -Force
  
  Should probably clean up after myself :)

   

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  Brandon Bunnelle

  • March 09, 2017 20:54

  You both just solved my issue of keeping track of Perpetual Licenses. This is gravy!

  Another reason I'll keep throwing my money at PDQ.

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  Brandon Bunnelle

  • March 10, 2017 21:20
  • Edited

  COMMENT DELETED

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  Colby Bouma

  • March 10, 2017 15:05

  Which Type did you choose for the Custom Field? In my example I used Date.

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  Brandon Bunnelle

  • March 10, 2017 21:14

  I ended up using "Date", like you suggested, for the Custom Field and the report is doing pretty close to what I wanted it to do.

  I just have to get used to every Custom Field being on the report even if the date isn't pulled when ran.

  I deleted my last comment because i had a big "ah-ha! moment!

  Thank you for your assistance.

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