Infor License Management Policy - LawsonGuru.com

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Greg Moeller	4184
David Williams	3349
JonA	3291
Kat V	2984
Woozy	1973
Jimmy Chiu	1883
Kwane McNeal	1437
Ragu Raghavan	1372
Roger French	1315
mark.cook	1244

SP

Veteran Member

Posts: 122

4/25/2012 2:59 PM

So after purchasing Lawson 5 years ago, going live 4 years ago, and having gone through a license review and true-up less than 3 years ago, now we receive notice from Infor that we must take place in yet another license review.

http://www.infor.com/company/licensemanagement/

It appears Infor is going to require all customers to install some software that will run for up to 6 weeks. The purpose of the software is to monitor and report usage stats in order to build a clear licensing picture for the benefit of the customer. Yeah right!!

http://www.infor.com/comp...ement/compliancefaq/

My favorite statement is in the last FAQ answer:
---

Q: I don't know which server has what Infor software running on it. Can you help me sort this out?
A: Yes. Generally, the audit software will log onto the target servers and check for Infor products. It will then report the results back to you and ask for permission to proceed with the audit.

---
So it reports results back to me, then asks for further permission?? Permission to contact the mothership perhaps??

Been around Lawson for long time and I've never seen anything like this. The 20 question doc asks for all company (subsidiaries, parent orgs, etc...) for which there is any data in the system. It asks for all platforms of all components, server models, server ip's, physical addresses of all physical or virtual devices, db platforms, number of cpu's and number of cores per cpu on all devices, etc...

We won't obstruct because we have nothing to hide, but I think this is so wrong on so many levels, that I don't even know where to begin, especially considering we just went through a similar licensing audit less than two years ago.

Jimmy Chiu

Veteran Member

Posts: 641

4/26/2012 2:57 PM

Went thru the license auditing just a few months ago. It was epic failure from my point of view.

They sent me a new auditing software that won't run, spent a week troubleshooting/email with infor?lawson? people and abandoned the software.

Then they sent me "another" cobol script based auditing software, spent a week or two going back and forth and it won't run.

Finally, back to the good old jxplorer extract. Sent the same file that I've been doing and case close.

SP

Veteran Member

Posts: 122

4/26/2012 7:53 PM

Did you provide them with server ip's, server make/model, number of cpu's, number of cores, company info for any company setup in the system, etc...??

Jimmy Chiu

Veteran Member

Posts: 641

4/27/2012 12:33 PM

Yes.

JimY

Veteran Member

Posts: 510

4/30/2012 11:04 AM

We have the HR/Payroll and GL modules from INFOR(Mainframe Based) and have been going through this for the last 4 years. It is a pain to say the least. Get used to it they are very aggressive. We out sourced our hardware years ago and every year INFOR ask for information such as speed, amount of memory. The vendor refuses to give them the information because they say it is proprietary. We go back and forth until INFOR finally gives up.

Jeff White

Veteran Member

Posts: 83

6/22/2012 2:30 PM

I just received an email from Infor. It explains the review process, but we have not officially been asked to do so. Does anyone happen to have the 20 questions document that I could look at?

Jeff

xrndzfdo

New Member

Posts: 1

6/25/2012 5:21 PM

For those of you going through the "audit"...do any of you outsource your IT support? If you do, are you aware that Infor charges 35% of the software "value" to allow you to do so?

Tomwise

Advanced Member

Posts: 32

6/26/2012 2:36 PM

We went throught the audit a couple of months ago. I had to trouble shoot the auditing software to get it working and installed. Infor was no help. Infor starts to get really nasty if you don't drop everything right away to complete their audit, they start threating legal action and bringing up the contract. It takes more then 20 minutes to fulfill the audit and the software instructions suck for the install. Just another fishing trip from Infor looking for more money.

Jo

New Member

Posts: 4

7/31/2012 7:01 AM

We are also going true this infor pain. We have for instance a user called 'Storeroom' which is used by a person in the morning shift and one in the afternoon shift. Infor wants to count this as 2 users. Any experience with named users?

JonA

Veteran Member

Posts: 1163

1/4/2013 3:19 PM

We went through this audit in September. No software was installed, we just supplied our account rep with the number users for each area and function.

cBreeze

Basic Member

Posts: 20

1/11/2013 8:53 PM

Has anyone received a request for license Audit this year… ? (Using their new SmartAudit program)

Apparently you enter the path and parameters to your db and ldap & it pulls data for you..
It creates an encrypted zipfile that you send back to them.
You can't edit this file.

We are concerned with giving them employee names and Employee status.
(Our employee status has information like LOA, paid/unpaid, Perdiem, Workman comp, FT, PT, etc…)

This is the data that they are pulling using the SmartAudit program.
• ‘lwsnrmdata’ object and all of its children and their attributes.
• ‘lwsnSecData’ object and all of its children and their attributes.
• ‘lwsnactivemetadata’ object and all of its children and their attributes.
• GEN.USER, GEN.R_USER, GEN.SYSTEM, GEN.R_SYSTEM, GEN.USERPROD, GEN.R_USERPROD, GEN.USERCAT, GEN.R_USERCAT tables.
• Company, Requester, name and active status from REQUESTER table.
• Company, Employee, Employee last name, Employee first name and EMP_STATUS from EMPLOYEE table.
• EMSTATUS table.

mark.cook

Veteran Member

Posts: 444

1/29/2013 5:54 PM

My only point of advise for the audit is to validate that you have cleaned out any users that no longer need access (employees terms, transfers, etc.). They are looking for record counts to compare to licensing EMSS and RQC are the places that will get you fast.

RQC as your company grows and you roll it out may not be in line with the # of licenses. If you have this situation and can remove access from any backup, back up to the back up then you will be ahead of the counts. Those are the things we had to address with Lawson/Infor after we ran our audit last year.

Cindy

Advanced Member

Posts: 29

3/20/2013 1:04 PM

We have received a request for the license audit using SmartAudit. We too are concerned with sending employee information since our employee number is the employee's ssn. Has anyone sent employee information where the employee's number is their ssn?

Thanks,
Cindy

cBreeze

Basic Member

Posts: 20

4/2/2013 2:39 PM

Cindy,
We sent the request to our 'Legal' dept.
They send no.
We didn't send them a Smart Audit file.

We sent them an LDAP dump. (.ldif) file Just as we did last year.
Then they wanted us to install some monitoring software/Patch.
We are managed services and They couldn't get the patch installed into Test/Dev. So we haven't bothered with that either.

maxpph

New Member

Posts: 2

7/10/2013 11:51 AM

hello all,

After this kind of audit, we are in contention with Infor about the number of our licenses.
They told us that we have only 60 users licenses but we have 20 generic limited use licenses more.
does anyone know what is exactly generic limited use license?
Thanks for you help.

mark.cook

Veteran Member

Posts: 444

7/10/2013 12:06 PM

What application/ modules are these related to?

It seems each application and when you purchased may effect how these were licensed. I think the audits have been a point of contention with many Lawson/Infor clients over the past two years. Lawson did not do regular audits of licensing while Infor does this annually.

We too over a year ago found ourselves with issues on EMSS and RQC licensing and had to clean up our system as well as purchase new.

maxpph

New Member

Posts: 2

7/10/2013 12:15 PM

Thanks for your answer,

It's about M3 licenses.