Date: 12/1/2009

The session at Holy Cross put on by John Tomeny from Sassafras was great.  The format was a presentation, but with frequent questions and side paths to answer the questions in the room.

A couple key learnings from the day include:

• Sassafras is a small company with only 6 employees, but with an install base of over 2 million systems
• KeyServer in the 1990s was a concurrent licensing management tool, now KeyServer (K2) is an assets tracking tool that can also control behavior and manage all types of licensing from node-locked to site including concurrent.
• Licensing in the industry with pressures from virtualization and cloud computing is moving towards a leased license model.  A leased license is one that you use for a period of time (say 90 days), after that time the license becomes available for others to use.  This more accurating follows the demand for software and can be independent of where the software is run.  Most vendors are not there today.
• Deputizing function was removed from the Macintosh side because repacking was easy enough and the tools used stopped working with Mac OS X.
• Most folks are not running version 6.2 yet, but it has some nice features so I'm glad we are.
• Computer filters are really cool.
• K2 logs a plethora of computer hardware information that may be very helpful data in the future
• Divisions are grouping of computers that we may want to explore as a tool for giving extra rights to certain machines (higher privilege)
• Preferred group function has been changed over to managing on a lab schedule.  We will need to implement this for the IS&T Training Lab classes using our licenses.
• We are managing the CS4 suite as we should be.

Towards the end of the day, the founder of Sassafras showed up and sat in the back of the room next to me.  He is an interesting guy.