10.0.5 Contracts management

Advantages over old contracts

In previous BigFix Inventory versions, contracts supported only Seats and ELA metrics. Views of contract data is available only for software instances and not for current products and metrics. To improve product function, with contract management in BigFix Inventory version 10.0.5, you can define contracts according to all metrics. This ability helps you track contracts.

Note: IBM Flexpoint bundles are not available for contracts as license usage is covered by IBM License Service Reporter. See also, Tracking license usage in multicluster environment with License Service Reporter.

The purposes of improved contracts management are as follows:

Managing contracts from one report
Using contract metric calculation for products presented by computer groups
Managing contracts that are not limited to predefined metrics
Using the current measured metric value or software instances to drill down and view contract details

Deprecation

Starting from version 10.0.9, the old contracts and other deprecated features are removed, and migration is not possible. The customer must upgrade the deprecated contracts before the upgrade. The custom saved reports that relate to the deprecated report will not work as well. The customer must redefine the deprecated reports before the upgrade. See also, Migrating contracts.

Actions

With the contracts management feature, you can perform the following actions:

Search for specific contract to complete outstanding actions
Use predefined reports from dashboard to access saved reports.
Define custom reports or email notification to access the contract status

The reports are categorized into the following types:

Refer to the respective report type to know more about the actions you can perform on individual report type.

Contract fields and values

The following table includes the fields and their values
Field name	Description	Importance
Name	Contract name. Two or more contracts can have the same name only if their types are different.	Mandatory
Contract ID	Unique identifier of a contract.	Mandatory
Metric	Metric value of the contract.	Optional
Software Product	Any number of software products. If any metric is selected, it must be assigned to the selected software products.	Optional
Type	Type of the contract.	Mandatory
Computer Group	Computer group that the contract belongs to.	Mandatory
Threshold	Threshold for the contract measured value.	Optional
Purchase Orders	Any number of purchase orders assigned to the contract. Each purchase order consists of the following values: Purchase Number - Identifier of the purchase order. All purchase orders in the contract must have different purchase numbers. Mandatory. Document Link - Link to a document related to the purchase order. Optional. Vendor - Optional. Value - Value of the purchase order. Can be set to non-negative number or ELA. To change the value type use the “Convert to ELA” / “Convert to number” button. Mandatory. Entitlement Start - Entitlement start date of the purchase order. Mandatory. Entitlement End - Entitlement end date of the purchase order. If not specified, the purchase order is considered to have no entitlement end date. Optional. Based on the provided purchase order values, Current Contract Value, Next Entitlement Change Date, Next Entitlement Value and Entitlement End Date values are calculated. When a contract has no purchase orders, the values show ‘<no data>’.	Optional

Note: The Current Contract Value, Current Measured Value and Next Entitlement Value are calculated based on UTC time zone.

Add, modify, and delete contracts in the All Contracts report

With All Contracts report, you can add, modify, and delete contracts.

Add contracts

Open the All Contracts reports.
Click Edit and select Add Contract. A New Contract window appears.
Enter the field values and click Save.
Result: A new contract is created.

Modify contracts

Open the All Contracts reports.
Select a contract, click Edit, and select Modify Contract. An Edit Contract window appears.
Update the field values.
Click Save.
Result: The contract is updated.

Delete contracts

Go to All Contracts reports.
Select a contract, and click on Edit and select Delete Contract. A confirmation dialog box appears.
Click Delete Contract.
Result: The report is updated.

Apply filters in the contracts: From BigFix Inventory version 10.0.12, you can filter the contracts by Publisher Name and/or Software Product Name. For example, you can use this functionality to filter out all Microsoft specific contracts.
Note: The Publisher Name and Software Product Name parameters are available only as an option in the report filter, it's not available as report column.

Restriction: The add and edit contract window has the following constraints:

The date format is always in MM/DD/YYYY format.
The Select Year and Select Month labels in the date selector widget are not translated. They are always in English.
Software products with names containing non-ASCII characters cannot be assigned to a contract (applicable to BigFix Inventory versions before 10.0.7).

Import contracts: Import contracts using the UI and the API. For more information, see also Importing contracts.

From version 10.0.11, the All Contracts panel includes more options, such as Recalculation of metrics and a link to access the Product Metrics per Contract report. For more information, refer to Using the Product Metrics per Contract panel and Recalculating contracts.

Saved reports

The following contracts reports are included in the Saved reports list:

Contracts: All
Contracts: License Utilization Exceeded
Contracts: License Ended
Contracts License Ends in 30 Days
Contracts: License Ends in 90 Days
Contracts: Threshold Exceeded
Contracts: Support Ended
Contracts: Support Ends in 30 Days
Contracts: Support Ends in 90 Days

You can access saved reports from the predefined reports dashboard. For more information, see saved reports.