Dans sa grande sagesse, patben a écrit, le 29/06/2006 19:03 :
Dnia 29-06-2006, czw o godzinie 18:00 +0200, Oliver Henriot napisał(a):
Bonjour,
Could you write in english? From the picture in your post i assume it
might be interesting but unfortunately i don't know french...
Hi,
Yeah, sorry about that, I read your post shortly before sending my email
and wondered whether I should do an English version. I was a bit pushed
for time so I sent the French version off first, but I had planned to do
an English version anyway, so here goes the English version ;-)
I've been using GLPI for some time now, coupled with OCSInventory and
one of the problems I've been coming across is the way licences are
managed in GLPI.
**************************************************
Reasons behind the development of this plugin.
GLPI gets the list of installed software from OCSInventory. The
advantage of this method is that the state of the software park is know
in “almost” real time. However, this inventory is not easily linked to
the licence park. There are several reasons to this.
First of all, OCSInventory sends different entries for each
"sub-version" of a software to GLPI. Lets use an example : Office XP is
version 10 of Office. However, OCSInventory reports several versions of
Office XP : Office 10.0.3,10.0.6, 10.0.9 etc. These numbers are
simplified but are not very far from truth. Thus, from GLPI they are
seen as so many different software. The addition, in the 1.0 RC2 release
of OCSInventory, of a software dictionary, does not allow to solve the
problem elegantly. All the information concerning the different versions
installed, which can otherwise be interesting, disappears with the
grouping of different "sub-versions" via the software dictionary.
On the other hand, licence management in GLPI is done by associating a
software installed on a computer with a licence. In addition to the fact
the a licence has to be associated with each software installation
found, which is rather rebarbative when the computer park is sizeable,
when software is often un-installed or re-installed or even when there
are many free software installed which it would be more suitable to
treat globally, the change, on one computer from one software
"sub-version" to another breaks the software-licence association, which
is wasteful of precious system administrator time ;-)
Moreover, when a licence is an upgrade, it must be specified which
software it is an upgrade of in manner which is rather rigid. In
addition, a software can have several different software as potential
basis for an upgrade. This association must therefore be carried out
dynamically.
Another point is that GLPI's interface does not currently offer a
synthetic display of the installed software park and its' correlation
with the licence park, for instance when one wishes to display the
different versions of software from one single editor.
The aim of this plugin is to add licence management on par with the
other components of the excellent solution which OCSInventory and GLPI
represent.
**************************************************
**************************************************
Goals of the plugin.
The plugin has the following goals:
Correlate precisely installed software and licences owned.
Carry out this correlation automatically.
Manage software "sub-versions".
Manage software upgrades.
Allow in-depth searches and detailed report generation.
On the GLPI side, the plugin must allow to re-group the different
"sub-versions" of a software. An interface allowing to associate the IDs
n, n', n'', n''' ... found in GLPI for a same software's sub-versions to
a single software entry.
On the licence side, the plugin must allow to add all relevant info
concerning the licences acquired : software name, acquisition date,
order number, number of licences acquired, licence type
(full/upgrade...), validity deadline, supplier. It must also give a
synthetic view of the software licences owned for each software /
software family, taking into account the upgrades and the fact that a
software licence allows for versions up to the one it represents to be
installed. A licence for version n of a software allows versions n, n-1,
n-2 etc. to be installed.
Between these two aspects, the plugin must provide a view of the
correlation between the number of installed software and the licences
which these call upon in order to see whether there are any
discrepancies, in one way or the other. It must also provide a view of
how many upgrade licences it is still possible to buy for a software.
**************************************************
I am still very much in the first phases of development of this plugin.
I'd like your point of view on the following aspects:
1) Am I right in spending time on this or are these features planned in
a future GLPI release? Or even are they available in the current version
and I've missed them completely?
2) Is my analysis of the problem correct or should I bring modifications
to my plan?
I can give further details to people interested, functional diagram,
database tables structure ...
I know it's not the best time to launch into this as many people will
soon be on holiday (including myself at the end of this week) but I've
reached a stage in my work where your opinion really matters to me.
Thanks for your replies and thanks again to the GLPI development team :-)
Cheers,
--
Oliver Henriot, Fédération IMAG, http://www.imag.fr/
Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble
Direction des Moyens Informatiques
Domaine universitaire BP53 / 38041 Grenoble cedex 9 / France
tel.: +33 4 76 51 43 48 fax: +33 4 76 51 47 15
Trust in CNRS's certificates: http://igc.services.cnrs.fr/Doc/General/trust.html
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