What’s new in ServiceNow Washington DC - SAM

The ServiceNow Washington release brings useful additions to ServiceNow Software Asset Management (SAM). We will focus on...

...some of the most important changes, such as measuring the maturity of software assets, enhanced visibility into product lifecycles and more.

Measure the maturity of your SAM program

The Success Portal view in Software Asset Workspace enables you to track the progress of your Software Asset Management (SAM) application. You can track the progress of your SAM application through success goals, and track the progress of those success goals. Also, you can perform a health check on your software, keep your software up to date using Value builder tasks, and mature your SAM program with predefined maturity items. The program maturity is categorized into Crawl, Walk, and Run stages to help you improve the value return of your SAM program, including processes, features, functionalities, and capabilities within your organization. You can link these maturity items to Success goals and Value builder tasks to track and report on the improvements of your SAM application over time.

Source: Success portal view in Software Asset Workspace (servicenow.com)

Improve the readability of the License usage view

The ability to carry out phase-wise Software Asset Management implementation by focusing only on a few software products that you want to manage initially. You can gradually ramp-up the implementation journey by assessing the progress. This approach enables you to reduce clutter on the License usage view and report only on the software products that are part of the current implementation phase. You can also remove the software products from the published list when you no longer want to manage those products.

Optimize Microsoft 365 subscriptions

Users can manage Microsoft 365 subscriptions within ServiceNow. You will have a detailed overview of active, inactive and unassigned subscriptions based on latest activity dates. This feature reduces the dependency for discovery solutions and enables users to gather usage data for Microsoft 365 applications.

Manage product licensability at the edition level

You can now define your own exception rules for non-licensable products and update it to the content service library. The Software Asset Workspace allows you to create a software model to add product details used to connect software rights that you purchased, with software installations discovered on your system. You can create these software models manually. But, users can leverage the Software Asset Management Content Service Library to automate the creation of software models through their relationship to software entitlements.

Improve granularity via the enhanced License usage view

Users are able to gain in-depth information of the factors leading to unlicensed software installations, software that has been ignored during reconciliation, and instances where a software installation requires user action. You are able to receive step-by-step guidance on how to acquire insights into the indicators contributing to Oracle options activation, and obtain a thorough understanding of reconciliation results. You will need to use the License usage view as a single plane to understand the license position of all software products, remediate non-compliance, view reconciliation results, view, or add removal candidates and view Software Asset Management related reports.

Enhanced coverage and visibility into product lifecycles

This feature assists users to get better visibility into the process of selecting life-cycle dates. In the absence of vendor-provided lifecycles, use calculated lifecycles to assess and manage your risks by creating EOL and EOS lifecycles for your software products. Users are able to use approximated dates to improve lifecycle coverage. You can create EOL and EOS lifecycles based on industry averages, measured in months, from the General Availability (GA) dates.