Once you've taken the introductory steps to setting up your account, take some time getting to know the system. Once you're ready, the following steps is a best practice method to optimizing your account further in order to facilitate cross-team collaboration, distribute responsibility, and keep track of finances.
1. Determine service owners
1. Determine service owners
Determining service owners is essential for distributing responsibility and enabling license audits. Additionally, this will is a great first step towards implementing a clear and transparent structure of your services and owners. To get started:
Navigate to Services > All Services
Select a license under Actions
Select Change Owner, and designate a new owner for the selected service
Repeat these steps for each respective service to complete your ownership audit
2. Determine users' access to services
2. Determine users' access to services
Determining users' access to services is important to creating an accurate and transparent overview. Establishing these connections can be completed through various methods, depending on what fits your situation best.
You will likely find your first optimization opportunities already in this step by discovering orphaned services and licenses that can be canceled or revoked.
If you've already integrated with you AD and invited coworkers to the Substly extension, Substly will over time show which users have access to what and you can skip this step. However, if you've defined service owners and are not using the Substly extension, we recommend conducting a license audit — allowing you to request various service owners to which users have access to their services.
Select the dropdown for a guide on completing a license audit.
License Audit
License Audit
To complete this method, follow the steps:
Navigate to Service Matrix
Select Request Update
There are two options for conducting a license audit; either an audit based on services, or an audit based on owners. Either way, each service owner is sent an email where they review and confirm users’ access to those services, depending on the selected option. Optionally, select Watch Explainer Video for a more in-depth guide. In this case, we select the audit based on owners.
Select which license owners you wish to complete the following audit. In this case, Add all, and then select Next.
Verify and confirm selected owners by selecting Send Request.
Each of the selected owners will receive an email with a link to the User update request page, requesting them to update who has access to their respective services
The license owners are then requested to fill out the following service matrix by selecting which users have access to their respective services, by selecting the different fields. Once completed, Confirm Change to finish the license audit.
3. Adding financial data
3. Adding financial data
Adding financial data to your account can provide extensive insights into your services, especially in combination with usage data.
To add financial details, such as costs, renewal dates and forecasted spend to your account, check out this article on manually adding financial data or setting up financial integrations.
If you've successfully completed the steps above, congrats! You've taken additional steps towards optimizing your account. Your account will over time gather more data and provide even more insights into how you can optimize your software portfolio, take new security measures against shadow IT, and much more.
Be sure to check in to your account regularly to view newly identified services, shadow IT, usage data, and keep track your finances and renewal dates.