Today’s Workspace ONE Intelligence and Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub app license management capabilities can provide visibility into app usage data, allow end-users to easily submit app license requests from Intelligent Hub, and initiate app license reclamations from automation workflows. Software Asset Management admins are responsible for ensuring that employees have access to all the software tools and applications employees need to succeed at their job and are expected to maintain their organization’s software license resource budget and reduce costs. They are involved in the entire software resource life cycle: identifying employees’ needs, evaluating the best solution, onboarding and managing the applications, and decommissioning the software from employees. While fulfilling these requirements, they encounter several challenges with calculating license costs and savings and maintaining end-user satisfaction with software resources.
Reduce IT spending by leveraging app usage data
Having easy access to app usage data is critical to IT admins for license consolidation purposes, audit reviews, quarterly true-ups, and future app license purchases. Today, it can be a manual effort for admins to track employee app usage. Admins may have to contact vendors directly for that information if app usage data is not available on vendor dashboards, and they may have to survey each user assigned a license asking if the user still needs the app. This results in an inability to get access to necessary data in real-time.
To address the long waiting times and lack of visibility into app usage data, you can build custom dashboards and reports on Workspace ONE Intelligence through the Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) App Activity data category to view desktop app usage data.
Using reports, admins can identify users’ app usage by filtering when a specific app was last foregrounded by a user. For example, the following report filters for devices or users who have not used Adobe Acrobat DC in the past 30 days.
This will surface a list of records that include the date that the app was last foregrounded, the device-friendly name, user email address, platform, and more. This list shows the potential number of licenses that are not actively being used, as well as the users for admins to reach out to and confirm whether the user needs the app or not.
Additionally, you can also use the Workspace ONE UEM App data category to determine the number devices that have been assigned the app and the number of devices that have the managed app installed.
To learn how to configure reports, dashboards, and workflows in Intelligence for an app license management example use case, follow the steps outlined in this documentation. You can also download and import this app usage and inactive users dashboard template for a quick start. Report previews can be saved and exported, and the data can also be used to configure dashboards widgets to maintain a visual overview of app installation and app usage. You can group devices by OS version, Organization Group, or other defined device attributes. Using both the UEM App and Intelligence App Activity data can give you a holistic picture of user engagement with native desktop apps.
Achieve a seamless end-user app request experience on Intelligent Hub for Windows 10 apps
A core part of a great digital employee experience (DEX) is ensuring that employees have the tools and resources they need to be productive. Employees are often already granted access to apps they need for their role. However, employees can switch roles or encounter new tasks that require access to new apps. In these situations, it can be difficult for employees to know where and how to request access to an app. To improve end-user experience with discovering and submitting app requests, you can configure app request flows within the Intelligent Hub app catalog for employees to easily request access to apps.
To enable users to request Windows 10 apps from Intelligent Hub, you can add licensed apps to the Hub app catalog from Workspace ONE UEM and route app requests and approvals to ServiceNow by configuring the ServiceNow integration in Workspace ONE Intelligence. If an end-user needs access to a licensed app, the user can click on the “Request” button of an app in the Hub app catalog, which will create a ticket in ServiceNow. If that ticket is approved, the app will automatically install on the user’s device. The following video demonstrates a walkthrough of the set up and end-user experience with app requests in Intelligent Hub.
Using app requests and approvals in Intelligent Hub apps will save employees’ time from having to search and fill out app approval tickets while allowing admins to integrate this flow into their existing ServiceNow app approval process.
Save on license costs by reclaiming licenses from users who are not using licensed applications
Given that there will be users who have been granted an app license but are not using that application, it is in IT’s interest to reclaim that license to save costs and another user can be assigned that license. Before reclaiming a license, admins may want to ask if the employee still needs that application because rescinding that license without confirmation may result in frustrated employees who needed that app.
Surveys in Workspace ONE Intelligence DEEM enable you to target and send custom survey notifications to users who have not used an app in the past 90 days by leveraging the app’s last foreground data in Intelligence App Activity. The following is an example of the automation workflow and survey content that can be sent.
You can configure an automation workflow to act on a user’s response. If a user sends a “no” response, you can have the workflow initiate a UEM Action to uninstall that purchased application from their device.
Learn more
Workspace ONE Intelligence and Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub aim to provide admins an accurate understanding of true licensed apps usage in real time and deliver simple, easy end-user experiences. To learn more about the ServiceNow integration for app requests in Intelligent Hub, read this blog. To learn more about how to configure and use DEEM surveys, read this blog. Customers who have access to the DEEM solution as a part of Workspace ONE Intelligence can leverage these app license management capabilities today by navigating to their Workspace ONE Intelligence console.
