uh so Shankar one of the things that comes to my mind with entitlements like anything else really with with mining data and loading data into Sam there's always a challenge there's an initial barrier to entry if you will so what's the challenge uh with entitlements how would you define that yeah so uh typically any any sound product we find that intactical creation itself is an issue and part of the reason is because of the multiple sources that you would have within an organization especially when they are moving to Sam for the first time they would find that there's a lot of information that's spread across the organization uh that that could be uh entitlements purchased using the Legacy procurement systems and those POs and po lines will be sitting there then there are contracts which could be sitting in a totally different system and you could also have contracts that are in PDF files or maybe even printed documents so those are also uh lying around the organization so you need to collate all this information in and then be able to create the entitlements in the system and with the Advent of SAS anybody can purchase a software just a credit card so you would see that individual teams or maybe even individuals goer and it's you know purchasing software on the internet and they will be charging it uh through expenses in the system which may be completely undetected by the IT department so you would see that all these are also lying around the organization so to collate all this information across all these various sources and be able to create the attachment in Sam is itself a big Challenge and that's what most of our customers face and as part of that uh you know Sam as out of the box provides a lot of tools that enables creation of the attachment tries to make the life of uh Assam admin much easier so you you could set up attachments in the system using the guided setup where specifically for those people who are new to Sam are new to servicenow they may find it easier because it takes the user through a guided set of steps it could also be useful for setting up certain entitlements where you're not sure where to start from so the Playbook would actually help you go through those steps and create data and when you are migrating from another system or from a legacy system to to Sam or if you are renewing your attachments uh every year where you need to update a lot or create new attachments in bulk then the bulk import facility that we provide using a spreadsheet actually becomes very useful the same feature is also extended to be able to import your Microsoft licensing MLS statements and Sam Auto makes a process for you you can also set up your Integrations to your procurement systems and import the PO and po lines into servicenow so that you automate the process of creation of uh entitlements within Sun uh we could also build custom Integrations to other systems and download the information and finally if nothing no other automation helps you you could just create an entitlement using a form so there are various ways in which you could do it and today we could we'll probably look at towards three ways in which you can you can create attachments inside yeah yeah let's do that and while you're bringing that up you know I'm just going to summarize what I heard you say so the biggest challenge in entitlements is gathering the the information right it's sometimes it's a very decentralized world out there with entitlements things floating all over the place but we've developed different ways that you once you've collected all that information how you can upload them so I'd like to double click on that Sean car do you have anything to show us yeah sure so let me uh share my screen here and can you see my sub trusted overview page I do I see it all right so this is the landing page when you log into Sam and if you're on the software set management workspace so you get this landing page where you have this great entitlement UI action available you can also go to the operations license operations module where you can see the entitlements list View and you can create a new attachment using the new action there so today for this demo we will do it from the software set overview page so when you click on this UI action Sam pops up a window that provides you with three options uh the first one is your guided step-by-step working or what we call as entitlement Playbook the second one is importing entitlements in bulk using the spreadsheet and the last one is what we call as the simple standard form which allows you to enter an entitlement field by field so we'll first start with the guided step-by-step walkthrough you select that option and you click on next so Sam then takes you to a page that renders with a few stages each stage specifically about how you create the attachments the first stage it collects information about the software product for which you want to create an attachment for the second would be the actual entitlement details in terms of the rights purchased third you will provide additional details that you may use that would be helpful for your reporting purposes and then your review on itself so the first stage when you get in the first question that Sam is asking you is whether you're going to set this up for compromise or SAS so you could set it up for on-premise uh and the Playbook will take you through the steps that would that would require you to do on-premise if you're too SAS then the first question that it's going to ask you is whether you've already set up the integration profile so that Sam can download the data from the SAS product Windows postal and be able to guide you to the remaining process so for this demo we'll go with the optimize and we will complete the step the next question that Sam is asking you is the publisher part number this is a very important aspect of license Management in servicenow software set management because there's some content that we publish we tie a lot of information around what we call as a publisher part number this is this queue that your publisher would provide to you when you purchase software licenses from the publisher and I am insisting on the word publisher here because you could get published you could get part numbers from your resellers as well software resellers also issue a part number but that is not the part number that we use in Sam we go with the publisher part number that the publisher issues and if you are buying your purchase licenses from your resellers then please insist on getting the publisher part number that those softwares are associated with [Applause] because that's that's really important right I mean I've dealt with customers that say hey I can't find this part number I can't find this publisher partner and bring your content and oftentimes we ask okay what's the part number and it ends up being the resellers part number for that that product not not the direct publisher part number from the actual vendor so that's important right our content is tied to the software vendors part number not the resellers part number and then you said another thing that was important Shankar you said the publisher part number is important because it generates the software model which we'll get to later but it generates a lot of Automation in the back end so I would say maybe any time you do entitlements having the publisher part number is is is extremely important it's probably one of the preferred methods of creating an entitlement would that be correct that is correct because the suggested way of creating entitlements in Sam because as you said when you use the publisher part number Sam knows all the content that is surrounding that but that particular software it is able to create the software model it is able to create the downgrade uh items it is able to specify the life cycle events so all all that information is is published in the Sam Cotton portal and the bpn is that uh you know tool that you use to pull all the data out and create your entire elements on software model so it automates the entire process you don't have to do much after you use a PPM if you don't use a VPN then you'll have to set up most of the things yourself to ensure that you use the right dmap and and a lot more things happen when you don't use the keypoint [Applause] so we'll complete this step and move to the next one which is specifying the actual publisher part number [Applause] you will see that on this card there are two Fields one is a publisher part number it's a software model both are required Fields but we will specify the publisher part number and as I said earlier this is the number that Sam uses to identify the software so when I specify the VPN Sam looks for the nearest matching software model for this particular VPN if the software model doesn't exist then Sam automatically creates a software model and populates it here so in that case you had the publisher part number and because we have it in the content it's able to identify the software model Associated to that part that is right if the publisher part number does not exist then we suggest that you create a support request with a Sam content team and get it added so that you can use the VPN to create the entertainment that's that's the preferred route that we recommend to our customers so once we have identified the software product for which we want to manage licenses we now specify the entitlement details um using the information that is provided some of the values are populated here and choose the remaining information here the reason why license type was not pre-populated is because some customers buy Visual Studio this is a visual studio PPM so they buy it as a subscription some customers buy it as Perpetual from Microsoft so since both are available we do not pre-populate it here otherwise you will see that license type and license metric also are populated based on the VPN that is provided [Applause] so once you have specified the license metric the next is to specify the number of rights that you have purchased and complete this step [Applause] now these two steps are sufficient for you to create an attachment however we also have another stage where you specify other details you could specify the company location and department for which this entitlement is associated with so if you want to restrict the attachment to be used by a specific department or for a specific location there are certain instances that we have seen where you have some legal restrictions on using certain licenses outside a country so you could specify the country as a location and restrict the entitlement usage set and you could also have multiple companies defined within the organization so you might want to restrict things such as entitlement to a specific company so you could you could restrict the usage based on these and these are all not required please if you want to use the entertainment for these you could and once you have specified these you could complete this stage and go to the next task which is to specify who is the owner of this license this is typically somebody who is actually owning the budget [Applause] and then you also specify the finance aspects from whom did you purchase what invoice was used to pay this pay for this license you can also specify the jail account or the cost center so these are various fields that are provided on the attachment that allows you to Define where their entire code is being used so all this can be used when you generate your reports you can see how your entitlements are being consumed by various cost centers and by various locations or country Etc so you could use these for your various reports and then finally we have the contract details that can be entered as well we will skip this as well and now that we have specified all the information required to create the entitlement we are actually good to go but we would first review what we had entered in the review stage and if you want to make any changes you could do that here and once you're done you click on finish so the entitlement was created in real estate and you are redirected to the entitlement from The Playbook that guided setup is really designed for someone that is maybe fresh to importing entitlements or wants a little extra guidance around how to go through the proper steps but you're saying once they've once they've done it they can actually access the entitlement uh record itself which is what you're showing now and I'm guessing they can review it one last time before they actually publish is that is that what happens next uh more than review there are also other um edits that you could do so you may want to do your user allocations here which ensures that this entitlement rights are consumed only by specified users or at least differences given to these users you can also review the expense lines which are interfaced with your GL you can verify your downgrade rights that are populated here if you have don't get that's defined and and then once you're fine you can see the state is built which means this is still not consumed by your reconciliation process so once you are comfortable with all that is here on this entire treatment you can choose to publish this so when you publish this entire element State changes from build to in use now it's active in sand yeah it is active in Samuel so if now it gets consumed by your reconciliation process so the Inu State uh also there are some conditions so if it is a Perpetual license then it becomes a news automatically if it is a SAS subscription with a start date that is in the future then this becomes on order and it automatically changes to in-use on the date when it is active so so all those aspects are handled as part of the attachment form but you created this using the Playbook so you can see that in the activity uh stream as well intact will created using guided module so you can use this information later on if you want to do an audit on any issues that you may have with your attachments so this is with how you create using the guided setup now let us go back and uh see how we can import entitlements now for the sake of a demo I am taking a taking a spreadsheet with only two rows but typically we have seen that your species may have thousands of rows as well if you are importing for the first time uh there are two types of input that you could do the standard import document is to import any kind of attachment but if you are specifically looking for your Microsoft MLS statements then you could import that as well and Sam automates a process of creating the entitlements and even the contracts behind those for you so the entire process of importing your Microsoft licenses can be automated using the MLS for this demo we'll go with the standard import document you can download the template for this from the UI action here populate the template with the entertainment details so I have two rows in this attachment as I said earlier so it's uploading it now so again uh there's a difference between what we had till Paris and maybe it was wrong and I'm in San Diego and Beyond where we change the import functionality from a synchronous process to asynchronous so you don't have to necessarily wait to upload the entire set of rows in the attachment and get them processed you could click on import and it submits a background job and you could you could come back and check for the status of that software so I will click on import here now and it has been submitted and you can actually go back to your software set overview and if you refresh this page you'll see that there is a new new alert and a new notification for the spreadsheet import job that was completed the reason why there's a new alert is because there are actually two errors and this is the completion notification which says the import was completed but with errors so let us now go into the import errors to see what import errors were identified by the import process so there are two here and we will take a look at one of these so if you see the error here you see that the publisher part number is incorrect and Sam automatically says that if you do not have the right publisher part number you might want to probably create a custom VPN and still upload this entitlement otherwise you could just delete this and choose to import without the publisher part number now what Sam does is it tries to identify the closest software model and then creates the entitlement and Associates it with that software model so this is the entire instrument that was created let's now go back to the import I got here you will see that one entitlement has been created there is one more error which you can still go and review and import that as well you'll now open this and see that this is doesn't have a publisher part number but it has identified that this is a software model that uh matches the entitlement record to the maximum action so it would actually look at publisher product printer and Edition to match this so that's the other way in which you could create entitlements by importing them in bulk using the spreadsheet and the last option is your form standard format we have already seen this when we saw those entitlements but when we go here you could see that it has all the fields that are needed you could specify the VPN here and it would automatically populate some of the fields as you can see the metric will change from common to Microsoft this change from Perpetual To None because of the reason I already mentioned earlier and then we could continue creating the entitlement like we did before so that's that's what I had as part of the demo for these three different ways of creating the attachments yeah three different three different methods right so the guided setup gives you the play-by-play so to speak the the bulk file import you know gives you the ability to include a lot of different records you might incorp you might uh you might have some issues or errors from time to time so you'll be able to troubleshoot those but that's part of the practice of uploading entitlements and then individual entry that's great thank you for sharing that Shankar um now you know you've been you've been in entitlement entitlements for quite some time here with the with the product development and things like that so if you were to summarize leading practices around entitlements um what would you say are what we call our eight leading practices so uh essentially what we have seen is uh customers who try to structure their Import in patches or in phases uh they are far more successful so you could split the you know when you're doing it for the first time you may have uh hundreds or thousands of entitlements so if you split them into batches say publisher like that so you may have one batch for Microsoft entitlements you may have another for Oracle so if you split your entitlements into different batches and do it one at a time that actually helps because some of the issues that you face when you import up for the same publisher would be very similar so it would be easier to fix as well uh you may also want to again you know experience and uh in a variety of imported SEO so you could import it in uh you know split the entitlements imported and then you could also have other import methods like importing from your purchasing systems getting the data into it essentially get the data into Sam so that the rest of the automation process is handled yourself and once you have identified the entire famous to import please have a very good plan to ensure that you are you are having a structured way of loading the information and after you load the information into Sam you have a way to verify that all the entitlements that were created the software models that are created they are all accurate because the data that is that is that is entered in the entertainments on the software models these are used by your reconstration process it would impact your license consumption it could also impact your compliance position so it's very important that you ensure that the data entered is accurate Leverage The PPN as much as possible we've already spoken about this all this Sam content data is structured around the VPN the dmap the downgrade rights the life cycles everything is structured around this so it's it's best to use the VPN because it automates the maximum extent possible uh again when you are importing attachments for your on-premise applications you would create the entitlement and using the VPN wherever possible it automates the direction of the software model and then you can start discovering your software installs to ensure that your reconciliation process can match the software installs discovered with their catalog on the other hand the SAS works in the reverse order you first configure your integration profiles you download the data from your SAS Windows portal and using that information Sam creates the software model and you define that entitlement for that software model so it's it's kind of a reverse process and we have we have seen that this actually makes it a little more accurate because the data that you get from your SAS Windows portal is far more accurate than what you get from the license documents that you have the purchase orders and other documents or contracts this works better yeah so let me let me double click on that so I in on-premise world if I have software I'm going to load my entitlements first and then it's going to generate the software model and then I'll worry about linking those to the to the um installed software if you will if it's SAS it's the other way around I'm going to link up my SAS integration first pull in all the subscription data and it's through that ingestion of data that my software model has created and then I can associate entitlements to that software model is that what you said got it yeah okay okay okay great uh we we did see about user allocations uh I mentioned that user allocations helps you prioritize who consumes uh the rights first similarly you can also do your device allocations for those attachments where you use per device or per server license metrics so you ensure that those devices can consume the rights first before other devices uh install condition this comes into use specifically for software that you want to control on where it is being used and how the rights are consumed one example that I would have is Microsoft Visual Studio which provides you access to some 400 500 different Microsoft products but with the condition that you can use those products you can install them and use them only in a development or test environment if you use them in a production environment then you are not compliant uh it is not just a production environment but even if it is on a VM or a server with two VMS where one VM has a production instance running and another VM if you install the software using visual studio it is still a violation of Microsoft storage and conditions so you would you would have to be very careful where it is consumed so use install conditions to specify exactly those software models uh those are those devices which are either development or test and test environments and you do not consume those sites for any other end yeah so shot card let's let's go into kind of the the date the data schema behind Sam and interchangeably a lot of folks talk about software models Discovery models d-maps there are differences between them I just want to learn from you directly how would you define a software model what is it and what's what are some important attributes Associated to software models let's start there first yeah software model is that entity in Sam that represents the product the software product that you are trying to manage its licenses so uh when you when you define a software model you're identifying it as you know the publisher is Adobe the product is Creative Cloud the product type is licensable uh and a version is in the because it's a SAS product it's anything if it is Office 365 it will again be anything if it is Microsoft Office you would say versus 2016. so you would specify exactly all those attributes of the software as part of this software model so Define the product essentially in addition to identifying what the software product is the software model also includes other information like your if it is a suite for example it would have all the sweet components obviously 65 would have all the other Office Products including your access database and depending on the plan if you are an E5 planning you get access to a lot of other Microsoft products as part of obviously this device subscription so those will be added as three components similarly Visual Studio will have 400 plus sweet components so those are also specified on the software model the software model also specifies what are the downgrade rights applicable what are the life cycles that have been defined by the publisher and all that information is also populated as part of the software model that is all this information is used by your reconciliation engine when it tries to uh reconcile the software installs and and consume the rights based on how the software model is defined so if you have an attachment defined for office a SQL Server 2016 and there are downgrade rights covers for 2013 and then this reconciling reconciliation engine would know that it can cover the rights for the down period rights as well so that information is all available as part of the software model so the software model contains all of the attributes Associated to that particular product title title and addition it's coming from content if you will is it something that you would you would have customers create on their own or is there is it is there a way to say you know use the one that comes out of content first and then if you need to change anything to software models then you can do that is that is that kind of the way to do it yeah it is it is recommended that you use what comes from the same content so if you use the PPN then the software model is automatically created using the VPN data and you use that software model if you do not have a VPN then you will have to define the software model using a dmap the dmap is again published by the Sam content team if you use the dmap then all the information that I just spoke about they're all auto populated if it's available let's see if you want to create a software model from scratch without using a team app then you have to Define every single component and that is more likely to lead to errors and your complex position could be errorless got it got it let's transition then to Discovery models and can you define that for us and help us understand what's that all about yeah so the attachment of the software model or on the or one end of the spectrum of your software uh license management side the other end of the spectrum is on the Discovery side where when you discover install records uh using various tools it could be Discovery it could be secm it could be Jammer so when you discover all that information it seem to be is populated the install records are are then you know processed by Sam to create what we call as Discovery models as the name suggests these are this is a model that is based on the discovered records so what you see on the right hand side on the screenshot are the values that Sam discovers from the installed request so that's why it's a discover publisher discovered product uh based on the publisher they have different ways of signing an install record so the information is populated based on that but then for us to be able to map this to a software model because we need to end of the day consume rights from the entitlement that's on the software model really normalizes data that so the normalization rules are published by the Sam content team again that normalizes the discovered value to what has been defined in the software Library so you can see here that Oracle is normalizing itself to Oracle but the database server reddish Enterprise is actually normalizing to DB product for the DB server as a product and Enterprise is actually the Edition so it actually splits the data into two different fields similarly 12.1.0 is the discovered version that is normalized to 12C so this normalization rules are all published by the sound content team and that helps the exam to normalize the values that is discovered and once this once the Discovery Model is normalized then it is able to identify the d-map that is associated with this discovery with these values of publisher product version edition language Etc and Associate itself with the software model so once that link is established then the entitlement the software model the t-map with the Discovery Model the uh install records they're all linked and the linking factor between these two external exchange of the spectrum is the dmac got it got it yeah we actually had a live event last week I believe it was where we talked about normalization and how that works so I appreciate you doing a quick summary of how that's discovered and what's used in terms of normalization this next slide that we have talks about that spectrum that you that you uh that you spoke about so on on one hand on the left hand side you have the entitlements and on the right hand side you have the software installations and in between you have the software model the Discovery Model and the discovery map so it looks like that connective tissue is the Discovery map and the two data points coming in from the left hand side you have entitlement records which you showed us today and on the right hand side you have software installation data that goes through its normalization process and eventually they connect and so that's how they're interconnected right now could you show us in the product how that how they're interconnected can you see my screen yes okay so this is an entire phone that has been defined for Windows Server 2008 R2 standard so when I open this entitlement you will find that you know this is actually defined for a software model which is for Windows Server 2008 R2 let me open this software model so from the attachment I can navigate to the software model you can see that this has a lot of Articles defined I think this is part of a CIS system so it is it has a parent as well uh let me go to more and you can see that there is a matching Discovery Model for this software model so when I click on this the related list opens and I can see the matching Discovery models typically if you have many install records across various versions uh you would see many Discovery models too so I click open the Discovery Model now and you can see that this is the Discovery Model which had these values so you can see the discovered publisher was actually Microsoft Corporation now this gets normalized to Microsoft which is the value that we have in our libraries similarly the discovered product is this it gets split across this Windows server is a product version is up to additional standards so this this is how the normalization happens and once it is normalized then all the installed records that were used to create this Discovery Model now these are associated with the software model so when the attachment when the reconciliation runs the entire phone rights are consumed against these anyways are these installations so this is how you can see that all these entities which are seemingly you know on their own but they are linked because of that dmap that is used to link all these entities that's great so the publisher part number creates the software model and the installation records create the Discovery Model and the dmap and that finds the software model and it marries those two entities together so that when you're running reconciliation you are correctly assigning the right entitlements to the right installations right as well that's fantastic [Applause]