Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Auditing and tracking software licenses

K2’s KeyAuditor/Keyserver software allows for cross-platform, unattended software license monitoring including auto-discovery of newly installed applications. Most variants of Windows, Macintosh and thin-client computers are supported. Pricing is dependent on the number of client computers to be managed, regardless of OS.

In addition to seeing what you have running on computers on your network, it also permits license sharing. That means if you have purchased a certain number of software licenses for certain programs, like Adobe Acrobat for instance, the Keyserver software can be configured to permit the legal number of simultaneous users for that software title. This can be a flexible way to legally permit more folks to use purchased software, in contexts where everyone is not using all the software programs simultaneously. If insufficient licenses are available this can lead to some frustration, but at least network administrators can have accurate metrics about the number of users and frequency of use for specific software programs that are not or cannot be site licensed. This can help inform purchasing decisions, training decisions, etc.

While K2 doesn’t appear to support actual client management like other programs like NetOctupus, it might be more cost effective for network administrators mainly interested in software license monitoring and auditing.

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