Identify Under-Licensed Products
The monthly compliance review boils down to one question: which products are under-licensed right now? This page covers the workflow for finding them, understanding why, and deciding what to do.
The Quick Answer
Open Licensing → Licensing Position. Sort by Outstanding Requirement descending. Anything non-zero is under-licensed.
That is the entire workflow — the rest of this page is what to do with what you find.
Make Sure the Position Is Current
Before relying on the numbers:
- Check the Last Calculation Run timestamp on the Licenses query.
- If it is more than a day stale, run Calculate Licensing Position. See Running the Calculation.
- Wait for the batch job to complete.
If you have automated scheduling in place (see Operations: Scheduling and Monitoring), this should already be current.
Triage the List
Order the under-licensed list by severity. A useful triage:
| Priority | Criteria |
|---|---|
| P1 — Immediate | Vendors known for aggressive auditing (Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle), large gap |
| P2 — This month | Mid-tier vendors, moderate gap, products with no recent purchase planned |
| P3 — This quarter | Small gaps, less-audited vendors, products approaching renewal |
| P4 — Next renewal | Tiny gaps that will reset at renewal |
Process P1 immediately; batch the rest.
For Each Under-Licensed Product
Drill into the product and ask three questions:
1. Is the Number Real?
Sometimes Outstanding Requirement is a false positive. Check:
| Check | What to Verify |
|---|---|
| The catalog entry's License Type is correct (per-user vs per-device etc.) | A wrong type produces wrong demand counts |
| All consuming machines actually need the software | Test, dev, and decommissioned machines may be inflating the count |
| Any open license records you have not yet entered | A purchase that procurement made but you have not loaded yet |
If any of these reveals a data fix, fix it and recalculate before treating the gap as real.
2. Buy or Reclaim?
If the gap is real, the choice is:
- Buy more capacity. Add license records (manually or via import), recalculate.
- Remove the software. From the per-product machine list, identify machines that can have the software uninstalled. Remove. On the next discovery, consumption decreases.
- Reassign existing licenses. If you have related products with surplus, sometimes a reallocation closes the gap (e.g., reassigning unused Adobe Acrobat to a project that needs it).
For products with renewal coming up, reclaim now and reduce the renewal quantity.
3. Document the Decision
For each product you address:
- Note what you decided (buy / reclaim / reassign)
- When you took action
- What the expected new compliance position is
A simple spreadsheet or a shared note works. The audit trail is useful when the same product comes back as red later — was it incorrectly closed last time, or has new consumption appeared?
A Working Cadence
A practical monthly review:
- Start of month. Confirm the scheduled calculation ran overnight. Open the Licensing Position, filter to Outstanding > 0, triage results into P1 / P2 / P3 / P4.
- First week. P1 items: investigate, decide on action, act. For purchases, forward to procurement; for reclaims, open tickets for the desktop or server team.
- Second week. Confirm P1 actions completed and recalculate to verify the resolution. P2 items in flight.
- End of month. Resolution check — P1 closed, P2 in progress. Note any items rolling into next month's review.
This is a 5-10 hour task per month for a typical mid-sized organization, plus ad-hoc time for vendor audit response and renewal evaluations.
Tools That Help
The License Dashboard has dedicated KPI tiles for under-licensed counts — useful as the first-glance metric without having to filter the position.
The License Dashboard → Licensing Calculation Steps tab includes:
- Software Products with Consumptions but no Licenses — the extreme case (no licenses at all)
- Products in Deficit (Computers without allocation) — the count of unallocated installs
These are summary counts; the Licensing Position grid is where the per-product detail lives.
Related Reading
- Licensing Position — the data
- Compliance Status Meanings — what red actually means
- License Reclaim — the reverse task: finding spare capacity
- Audit Preparation — when this work matters most