I am having one hell of a time trying to track who purchased what CAL's.

I'll explain our setup:

We have one BES with about 620 users on it.
I am at the biggest Division in a multi Division company and each Division has none to several Regions.
We pay for T-Support and the Server hardware/software for the entire company BUT we require each region/division to purchase their own CALs.

I'm sure you can see what kind of problems i have when one person transfers from one area of the company to another as everyone thinks that a CAL is "attached" to a user account on the BES.
I have explained that the BES uses a "pool" of licenses to at least 4 IT people today alone!

So how do those of you who are in a similar situation as I, keep track of your CAL's?
I know i could just use an excel spreadsheet or a simple database, but I'm hoping that maybe someone has come up with a tool that can read straight from the BES database.

ANY information would help, thx.

Matt

We are a large company (Fortune 100) with subdivisions and users all over the country and when we started to grow we stated we are not tracking who buys X # of CALS and they own them .. I stated if that was the model they choose, don't look to me to manage that as I have enough to handle.

Users are just added from the pool until it gets to around 50 left and I send out the "We need more CAL's" email to the lines of business heads.

Each time we need more CAL's it rotates to the next LOB to "pony up" for the next 100. It's really all the same company and don't ask me how they work it but it goes against different budgets / cost centers. We buy CALS in lots of 100 but are looking to do more of the enterprise CAL RIM has talked about and just pay up at the end of a year to remain licensed properly.

I suppose if you wanted to manage it the other way I would do it this way. Buy is lots of 100 ($6,000) and break it down to ballpark $60 per user. I'm sure you must have some sort of charge back system that could be utilized for that method but it just seems like more work.

Thx for the reply.
Ya I won't argue it is a completly retarded system. Unfortunetly i jumped on the boat after they set this up.

How does enterprise CAL work? I've never heard of that.

I'm assuming Enterprise CAL = Service Provider CAL (all sorts of different terminology) ... Its a 10,000 user CAL, so you dont worry about your CALs but when you need to pay for licenses.

We track all CALs as an MSP with a support ticket where we generally include contact info of who we got the CAL from along with POs, etc if we get them.

I track by PO too. We are still really small, so I know who has what off the top of my head, but I keep records of the CALS with the PO that bought them in my handy dandy file cabinet.