Custom reports in License Statistics makes your life easier

Tracking your licenses is important; that's nothing new. Who wouldn't want to lower their costs and increase the value of software purchases?

Having an automated, easy to use tool that lets you see current and long term usage can help you optimize your license usage in the long run. It's easy to understand that if you have 30 licenses and 10% are virtually unused, that 10% of waste can have a significant impact on your budget. Many of our customers face these issues, some of whom have not just 30 licenses, but several thousand.

In addition to getting the big picture, it's also important to see the specific, detailed information that you and your management need to make budgeting and other decisions. Based on several requests, we have realized that a lot of people would benefit from custom-defined reports that let you present information in various ways and give you the option to view those reports in Microsoft Excel.

In answer to this need, we have developed the ability to let you create custom reports of License Statistics data. Essentially, a custom report is an HTML or CSV file (directly importable by Excel) that shows the data you want to see.

Custom reports let you filter all the usage information as either per-application or per-user; choose the frequency of the reporting periods to get daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly reports; specify which columns you want to see; and designate when the reports should start and end. You can also apply several other filters to be get fine-grained results that give you exactly the usage facts that interest you.



The above example of a custom report shows per-user information for two applications, Architectural Desktop and AutoCAD. The frequency of reporting has been designated as monthly. In this report, you can see the number of hours a specific user has used these applications during a month. While we selected to see the Total Used Hours column in this report, we could choose to see any other column(s) as well.

Further increasing the report's usability, you can sort the columns in the HTML pages, so you can easily see, for example, which users accessed licenses for the greatest and least hours.



In addition to the HTML page, the same custom report data is output to a CVS file, which you can open in Excel, as shown above.

We believe that these kinds of reports are an essential part of understanding your license usage so you can detect license under- or over-utilization and optimize budgets.

This functionality has been made possible with the help of our users, several of whom graciously participated in shaping, critiquing, and testing custom reporting. As always, we welcome and encourage continued feedback from our users so that we can improve License Statistics functionality even further.