The Products window lists all of the products known to your KeyServer. A Product is what you purchase - or more precisely, you purchase a product licensing right. A product can consist of a single program, or it can be a suite, consisting of a group of programs. Products can be imported (e.g. by selecting Get Product Definitions from the Admin menu) or they can be added manually by creating a new Product record which specifies the component programs.
One of the main features of KeyServer has always been to control program usage - to either allow or deny program launches as appropriate, based on what a site is entitled to use. However, a launch is of an executable, whereas entitlements are purchased for a product. If a product is in fact merely a single program, then what is launched corresponds more or less directly to what was purchased. However, many products contain more than one program. We must determine what product each program belongs to, since we will configure Policies and enter Purchase information for the Product, not the Program. Once products have been configured to include the correct programs, management can focus on products.
Products Window
The right hand side shows a list of products with several of the essential properties displayed. You can customize columns to see all the single valued fields. Double-clicking a Product record will bring up its Product Details window where the list of programs that define the product can be seen as well as individual panes displaying Purchase and Policy records that reference the product.
KeyServer does not rely on any particular format for most of the product record fields. For example, unlike the version of a program, the Version field in a product record does not need to be formatted as a decimal number. Instead it can be whatever a software publisher uses to identify their product version – it could be a year (e.g. 2010), or it could be a string which is not even comprised of numbers (e.g. XP). Setting a value in the platform field is optional. It is just for convenience, for display in the Version column, and for filtering.
However, a correct reference entered in the "Upgrade From:" field can be very useful when entering an upgrade purchase or when configuring a Policy to support "backward coverage" for an old software version. In a similar vein, when a purchase includes a "forward coverage" clause – for new product versions released before a certain date – correctly entering the "Release Date:" in the product record for each new version can be very helpful when reconciling purchased entitlements against management policies.
As in other main windows, the left hand side allows the items displayed on the right to be filtered in different ways. The Status of each product is either Referenced or Unreferenced. An Unreferenced product simply means there are no purchases or policies for the product. For many purposes, unreferenced products are uninteresting. They are available to be referenced by some new purchase or policy but in the mean time, they will not appear in many reports or Reconcile windows. A Referenced product has a purchase and/or a policy so it will appear in the Reconcile window and in Audit Product reports.
Product folders can be created as a convenience in restricting the products window view or report results, but many obvious categorizations (such as platform) may be best left to filters. Each Product can belong in a single folder but Filters can be defined to match various attributes so they are more general.
Right-clicking a Product in the Products Window allows you to perform actions on that product, access information related to the product, or run reports on just that product.
Right-clicking anywhere in the filters section allows you to create a new filter (New Filter...).
Products in the Products Window can be Dragged and Dropped to the following locations, among others:
| Help Index | 2013.02.25 |