TN 9179: Migration to Family Policies

In version 7.6 we introduced an Automatic Policy Wizard using Family Products. This article offers advice for long term customers to manually convert to using these concepts.

2019.07.10

Overview

For new customers/ installations, the Automatic Policy Wizard greatly simplifies implementation, management, and maintenance by facilitating creation of Policies to track usage. This system leverages Family Products via the Product Recognition Service (PRS). However, for existing customers who already have a large number of Policies set up to track usage, there is the potential for confusion and clutter. Because it would be hard to automate conversion of existing policies, we have created this tech note to help guide a manual transition, and detail what will happen in various scenarios.

Using the Wizard

While the Auto Policy Wizard makes things really easy, established sites will likely already have many policies. The wizard will not update those policies, it will make new ones. In this case, leveraging the Auto Policy wizard can result in doubling the number of policies, leading to redundancy in both the Policies window and in any Policy based reports. The new family based policy will capture more potential product versions, but it will be a new set of recorded usage data. The old policy will have your historic usage data which you likely do not want to lose by deleting it. Switching between old and new policies for reporting, and considering what each is tracking is messy and confusing. For these reasons, if you have a large number of policies already in place we recommend performing some initial housekeeping, prior to creating new policies with the wizard.

If you went through the wizard and it made new policies and are now looking for the best way to clean up, it's recommended you open the two policies and drag the Family Product from the new Policy to the old Policy. Then, delete the old Products from the old Policy, and finally delete the new policy. This preserves the data in the old policy while converting over to using the family moving forward. In effect, this is like the Manual process discussed in detail below, you just need to also remove the wizard created policies in the end.

Assuming a clean start however, when the wizard comes up simply cancel it instead of stepping through it. You can then modify your existing policies as outlined below, and then later leverage the wizard. When it pops up again you can use it as reference. Once you're done with initial cleanup, you can certainly use the wizard for easy policy creation moving forward (i.e. for products you were not previously tracking).

Manual Updating

Because you want to leverage the power of our new Family products while still retaining the historic usage data of your existing policies, we recommend this process:

• Open a policy of your choosing. You'll repeat this process for each Policy to update, so going alphabetically makes sense to keep track. Consider the intent of the policy, as well as how you have purchased licenses for the product. If you simply want to be able to report on usage of the product, regardless of version, you should use a family product. Likewise, if the product is licensed as a subscription, and you are always eligible to use any and all versions of the product, you should use a family product. If on the other hand you have purchased a license for a specific version of the product (even if you have since upgraded to another specific version), then it is probably better to leave the specific versions in the policy.
• Find the new Family Product that relates to the Product(s) you had in the old Policy. You can use the Find function in the Product window to make this easier, and there is a Filter for Family that will trim the list as well. You can also double click a specific version product and look in the (new) “Families” pane to see if it now belongs in a family. Family Products have a 4 square grid icon instead of the briefcase icon, and opening them shows all individual Products they contain. Note of course that you will only immediately see family products for definitions from Sassafras. If you created a manual product for something not in our catalogue, you will not automatically get a corresponding Family product.
• Having located the family, add the Family Product to the Policy, and delete the old individual Products from the policy. Because the Family has all current versions of the Product and PRS updates will automatically add new ones, there will never again be a need to update policies to capture usage of new Program versions. If you were tracking multiple products in one Policy you can add multiple Families, but keep in mind your policy reports become less useful so you may want to break these out. The wizard will make this easy going forward.
• If you have a Manage policy with no limit or enforcement (and with no corresponding purchase recorded), you can change the policy to an Observe action. In 7.5 you might have chosen a Manage policy simply to be able to see a live In Use count, or to improve reporting of multi-launch or suite programs. In 7.6, the only difference between an Observe policy and a Manage policy with the Site metric is that the Reconcile UI only applies to Manage policies.

Following these steps achieves several things:

• You get to clean out any old policies you're no longer using!
• You will retain all the usage recorded in the policy from the old products, in addition to gathering new data using the Family. This means you can continue to report past and future data on the same policy.
• Retention of this old usage at the policy level is important because other changes in 7.6 mean that historical usage at the Product level is lost when you upgrade. It was not accurate in suite situations hence this change, but drilling down to the Program level for historic reports can be tedious.
• Once you have updated all your old policies, the Wizard will serve as a guide to any you missed updating. It will also show you things in your environment you have no policies for and give you a quick way to start logging them.