Software License Key Management Question

taternuts666

I'm curious what people here might use to manage all their software license keys. I'm trying to find the best way to store them all on my PC and would like the list to be searchable and secure. I'm mostly interested in what I could use for my personal keys but also curious to know what you guys (and gals) use at work as well.

CodeBlox

We use sharepoint at work.

emerald_octane

I've been racking my brain over SAM (Software Asset Management). Sometimes I wanna print up all the software invoices we've gotten and just have a massive bon fire.

I've been trying to use CDWs SAM tool. Should be perfect, right? We get all of our MS, Adobe, pretty much all of our software except the really random stuff from CDW. For a few products, they automatically import all of the information from a software purchase on your account, but for a lot of it it just doesn't work that way. You do have a lot of flexibility in terms of attaching PO and vendor docs to the actual line item. I also like that you can have the price there as well and show exactly how much is being spent. However since it's so manual, I have unfortunately been thoroughly neglectful in my reporting. We have more than enough licenses but I have to manually pull together reports.

From my day to day dealings, the ideal SAM package would be locally hosted on some sort of lightweight CentOS VM, could authenticate against LDAP, would automatically pull pricing from CDW, would allow end users to request access to a software set and e-mail their superior for authorization, would automatically distribute keys (after they're put in) and last but not least, automatically unlock a download for the IMG/ISO from the server. I'd pay money for that.

taternuts666

I really like the idea about having a link readily available to download in the image from the server that would be awesome.

Here at work we get the majority of our software from CDW as well but I didn't even know they had a SAM tool like that. From the sound of it though it may not even be worth it.

I guess for my personal keys I can just enter them manually into an excel worksheet and encrypt it. I'm really looking for something that was a little more user friendly and had a nice search feature or something but I'm really not looking to pay for anything. Just looking for some ideas on how users on here manage their keys.

Qord

This has been kicking my butt for a couple years now too. Most of my info is stored in a very complex and ugly spreadsheet. The upside to this is being able to keep all the licensing agreements in different linked sheets in one workbook. We use Lansweeper for hardware/software inventory, but it's not quite what I'd like it to be for license management. We also use Keyserver/KeyConfigure for concurrent licenses (because we have to), but that's not ideal either.

When I took over licensing, I was given logins to the various sites (MS, Adobe, Computrace, McAffee, etc.) and nothing else. "Go play, figure it out." Since then I've made some good progress in counting and tracking, but it's been all by hand. Reading agreements, terms, and purchase orders.

My real problem is Adobe. We have had so many standalone licenses, upgrades, moves, and unsanctioned purchases that I don't know where we stand. There is no way (other than manually) to figure out how many effective installs we have of (for example) Acrobat Pro X compared to 9. I have a good idea, but no way to be 100% sure.

EDIT: I had gotten some pretty good spreadsheet templates from SamSource at one point, but it seems the site is now down. Bummer. They had some great info there.

N2IT

Last time I checked we were using Altiris

Other enterprises I have worked in used HP Asset Management Open View.