How do you folks track CALs, if at all? When I say that I mean a situation like "This CAL is associated with this user... this 10 pack for these 10 users" type of situation.

We're essentially a hosting provider for 90 different state agencies. We provide centralized AD/Exchange/Blackberry/ActiveSync/etc... to all of them for a chargeback fee. At present we are stuck in Excel spreadsheet hell as 4.1.6 provides us with no way to associated a CAL or CAL pack to particular users on BES.

Sooo... how do you guys and gals do it? Does the mythical 5.0 we've heard about forever include this kind of functionality?

Not a hosting company but we do have remote sales staff with BBs whose CAL is billed to the remote office. They worry about the mobile tarrif, we sort out the CAL and bill them. It's a spreadsheet for me.

We never assigned a seat to a user .. it's a big bucket and they are used as needed. A year ago we moved into enterprise CAL and it's been nice but come end of year when we "tru up" might be a bit painful

It's easier to push that kind of administrator back on the business side and assign them a bunch of seats if that is how you have to operate and let them worry about who is using them.

Well, it might not be that easy for us. We have 90 agencies purchasing CALs on their own, then they open a change order ticket with us and provide us with the CAL and the user they wish to have added to BES. Down the road sometimes they ask "What CAL is so and so using?" ... and it gets mucked up. I guess I'm sort of glad to hear others are stuck in spreadsheet land as well.

It would be much easier if all those agencies budgeted for X seats and a single entity did the CAL purchases and just assigned X number per agency. Tracking who has a CAL is just a nightmare and you're just constantly running reports.

I know what it's like though as I am at a company with over 150 agencies so I can relate.

Tracking CALs is a nightmare, we have the same problems where I work. Spreadsheets seem to be the only way to go.

I know that you can pull the CALs from the BESMgmt database as I have had to do this in the past but it only gives you them as you would enter them there is nowhere on the BES that records them against the user or the device

Oh how I wish.... oh how I wish!!