Featured Article from Software Licensing

The world of software is a changing one as vendors embrace the opportunities afforded in the cloud and continue to adjust their strategies to ensure viable revenue opportunities. At the same time, they have to be agile and nimble enough to make changes where necessary, including the migration of data when resources can’t support growth.

Software licensing solution provider, Flexera Software recently posted a blog on the topic of migration and the importance of taking a closer look at the data that needs to be moved from one system to another. When migrating your entitlement management system, not all data is the same and treating it as such could get you in trouble.

The risks inherent in migrating data aren’t exclusive to software licensing alone, but the challenges are very real. Fortunately, there are ways to make it easier. First, acknowledge where the major challenges exist, such as in previously generated licenses or activations. The two main challenges you’re likely to face are the new system can’t handle the format of the old system and the old system doesn’t have copies of generated licenses.

There are workarounds to these challenges, including the migration of the activation transactions and not the keys. You can then tie old license keys to a process that requires the customer to send an email to the licensing center to receive a new key once it has been generated. Another option is to create a migration or host device and activate all quantities to it. Both options will ensure your software licensing is firmly in place and customers still have access to what they need.

In the migration process, you still have to deal with passwords. Users accustomed to certain logins on the old system to view their entitlements and licenses won’t be able to simply access the new system with the old method. It’s a difficult challenge to migrate old passwords. Therefore, you must have user interaction to make this transition work.

One option is upon go-live, send the user an email and ask all users on the system to reset their passwords. This not only ensures seamless use, it also helps you identify real users and clean up the database. If users don’t reset their passwords after a certain period of time, a disabling inactive users function can continue the process. Your other option is to move to a single sign-on process where users must re-stablish their login credentials but will benefit from the single sign-on in the future.

As the migration of data is never easy, it doesn’t have to hurt software licensing processes or leave customers unhappy. Just be sure to have a strategy in place that makes sense and follow it through to completion.