IMHO the best way is a WTO that is easy to catch in the customer's automation software. Getting the administrative staff to pony up in a timely fashion is a much harder problem )-:
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Charles Mills <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2019 6:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Best way to alert customer to pending license expiration? Okay, I am "dropping up one level" from my question about persistent WTO messages. The REAL question is "what would be the best way to tell a customer that their license is fairly close to expiration?" Please, may I ask that we not digress into whether license enforcement is a good idea. That's a valid discussion but it's not this thread. I'm a contractor on this and it's not my decision. I also happen to think that software vendors need to get paid and not every customer ponies up spontaneously. FWIW, there is no CPUID checking in the product, just certain usage restrictions and an expiration date. It's a batch product. It's not a huge big deal product, so there is no "CA-1" that is devoted to license management. What would be the best way to get the right peoples' attention to let them know that the license is fairly close to expiration? Let me tell you from experience three things that do not work well: - An I message in SYSPRINT with no elevated return code. Put simply, nobody notices or cares. (Until the product expires, and then all heck breaks loose.) - A W message in SYSPRINT with a return code of 4. All heck breaks loose at that point, because everyone seems to use JCL that checks for a zero return code, and you break their batch processes with a 4. You might as well return 16 as return 4. - Having vendor sales management keep track of whether a new license has been sent, and managing it that way. (1) "A license has been sent" is not the same thing as "someone actually installed the license"; and (2) not every sales person is a genius at getting paperwork right. I was considering some sort of WTO that would require manual attention -- or at least console automation simulated attention -- but that may not be a great possibility. So ... what have you seen that has worked well in your opinion? Thanks, Charles ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
