August 1, 2017 at 12:42 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Who's Licensed?
August 1, 2017 at 5:41 am
Great point--this isn't just about being able to track licenses, but about using role based e-mail across the board. One trick I've used with Google based company e-mail is to leverage their group system, so you can create a group for say "licensing". You can set this as a private group, and it forwards all correspondence to members of the group. This has several benefits:
1. All mail to the group is archived, for historical records;
2. You can change the members of the group at any time;
3. Unlike adding a new user account, it doesn't charge you as a new user.
This allows you to have many different roles configured for external facing communication, and you can route it as needed.
Erik Brandsberg
CTO, Heimdall Data
August 1, 2017 at 5:48 am
This goes along with one of my pet peeves about contact management including Outlook. I can store all sorts of information about an individual, but little about a company causing contact management to be rather one dimensional. If I were able to have a contact for a company then link one or more individual contacts, then I would not have to replicate company information in each individual contact. This also applies to families allowing me to group multiple individuals together. I think that having a relationship in contact management would greatly simplify the task without having to invest in a CRM system to do so.
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sqlrv
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/sqlrv
Website: http://sqlrv.com
August 1, 2017 at 6:20 am
Aaron N. Cutshall - Tuesday, August 1, 2017 5:48 AMThis goes along with one of my pet peeves about contact management including Outlook. I can store all sorts of information about an individual, but little about a company causing contact management to be rather one dimensional. If I were able to have a contact for a company then link one or more individual contacts, then I would not have to replicate company information in each individual contact. This also applies to families allowing me to group multiple individuals together. I think that having a relationship in contact management would greatly simplify the task without having to invest in a CRM system to do so.
Your last sentence is precisely *why* you can't do it, especially not at the scale a business would want. By not providing the ability to link records in contact lists (essentially parent-child type relationships,) you either have to "muddle along," or spring for someone's fancy-schmancy CRM system that probably has more bells and whistles than you need.
August 1, 2017 at 7:18 am
I used to handle all the software licenses for a decently large company - in my spare time. These were Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, and Veritas mostly so they were large vendors and large installations.
One of the very first thing I did and continued to do was make sure all licensing was done at the corporate level. Too many of the licenses were listed at the affiliate level and I spent a lot of time getting them moved to the corporate header. This was important when it came to leveraging volume as well as transferring licenses as needed.
The generic email account is always a good idea as long as more than two people know about it. Document, document, document. Tracking who actually owned the licenses within the company was also a challenge and I set up a system to link the license purchase to the original purchase order. That way at least we had a starting point for where it belonged.
It's a slog to get this going, it's a slog to keep it current, it's a slog to dig out all the licenses departments purchased through expense accounts rather than central purchasing, and it's a slog to handle new licensing. But it's a very necessary slog so you know what you own, where it belongs, and how to confirm you're both in compliance and not over purchased.
August 1, 2017 at 8:46 am
How did you make such publication?
August 1, 2017 at 9:22 am
Aaron N. Cutshall - Tuesday, August 1, 2017 5:48 AMThis goes along with one of my pet peeves about contact management including Outlook. I can store all sorts of information about an individual, but little about a company causing contact management to be rather one dimensional. If I were able to have a contact for a company then link one or more individual contacts, then I would not have to replicate company information in each individual contact. This also applies to families allowing me to group multiple individuals together. I think that having a relationship in contact management would greatly simplify the task without having to invest in a CRM system to do so.
Families are another area many of our applications are weak at. I think some (NEtflix, Spotify) are getting better, but there is a lot of work to be done.
August 2, 2017 at 5:58 am
We have exactly the same problem so I am glad to hear that we are not alone!
Every company should have some 'generic' email accounts like 'support', 'info' and as you suggested 'licensing'.
To move licenses over from individual email accounts to a company account can be quite cumbersome, especially if the employee has left.
But there should also be more than one individual to manage such accounts, otherwise you sit in the same boat again...
Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply