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I’ve recently been working intensively with Microsoft CLARET reports, so I thought I’d outline some of the lessons I’ve learned – often the hard way!

But please don’t consider this a definitive guide.

Microsoft CLARET reports are a tool that Microsoft has designed to display an organisation’s entitlement, including software assurance. The information in CLARET Reports is generally used to compile an Effective License Position (ELP) during an audit or review.  They are useful because as long as entitlement is listed in the CLARET, no more evidence is generally required to demonstrate entitlement of the licenses in question.

But they’re not a complete picture of entitlement by any means, and you should always carefully verify their accuracy, particularly if you are in a review situation or being audited.

The other thing to remember about CLARET Reports is that what’s NOT in them can sometimes be as significant as what IS in them.

Things to watch our for in a CLARET Report:

Organisation Names

Microsoft runs the CLARET reports based on the names the organisation may have purchased licenses in – whether the legal name or not. But many organisation names change over time, particularly if the organisation is dynamic or participates in lots of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. Make sure you give Microsoft the complete list of all names that your company may have purchased software in, otherwise you may find you are missing potential licenses.

Validate company names on the agreements tab

The CLARET report produces a list of agreements that have been made between the organisation and Microsoft. In general, agreements come in three flavours – open, which is one off transactions conducted through a reseller, Select Agreements, which may or may not have Software Assurance, and Enterprise Agreements, which always have software assurance.  It is perfectly possible for companies to make genuine license purchases  under all three types of agreement at any point in time, although they should probably be avoiding Open agreement purchases if possible.

Microsoft bases the list of agreements on the list of entity names you gave it, but also searches for spelling mistakes and typing errors to make sure it picks up as many agreements as possible.

The way Microsoft identifies company names that contain spelling mistakes is inconsistent, so if you have old CLARET Reports, cross-reference the two sets of agreements and company names and make sure they are all there. If you don’t have old CLARET reports to cross-reference against, request two or three independent CLARET reports so you can check how consistent they are with each other.

You may also find that there are agreements from organisations with a similar name to yours that don’t belong to your organisation and which need to be removed from the CLARET Report.

Unresolved Licenses

Once you are happy that the list of agreements is accurate, you can turn your attention to the pivot tables and purchase detail tabs. The first thing to do is identified any ‘unresolved’ licenses in the pivot tables. These are purchases of software assurance where the macros in the CLARET report have been unable to identify a base license. There are many legitimate reasons a base license may not be identified, but the most common is that the base licenses were acquired as part of an acquisition or merger. In order to claim these licenses as legitimate entitlement, you will need to find the license transfer certificate and provide evidence in the form of invoices that all required payments were made. If you can’t find the actual license transfer certificate, but have all the other paperwork to hand, you can retrospectively lodge a request for the certificate as long as the party you bought the licenses from is still in existence.

So that’s my advice with regards to what is IN a CLARET report, but to be honest, what isn’t in the CLARET report is just as important – I’ll talk about that next week.