What’s New at Snow Software: May 2023
At Snow, we love to talk with our customers. We learn how they use our products and what they need to solve their business and technical challenges. Those learnings get built into our goal of continuous innovation. Read on for this month’s slate of recent product advances.
Discover usage of AI tools such as ChatGPT
AI tools such as ChatGPT have exploded on the scene recently, and our customers are rightly concerned about the use of such tools in their organizations. A recent Snow Software blog highlighted the opportunities and risks associated with these large language model tools.
To help customers manage the risks, Snow has added a new category – artificial intelligence – to the list of application types, so that customers can quickly identify when these tools are being used in their environments. From there they can identify who is using these tools and remediate as needed.
Snow Software’s browser-based discovery of SaaS usage makes it uniquely positioned to provide data on free and trial software such as ChatGPT. Unlike other SaaS management solutions that rely primarily on expense data to determine what SaaS applications might be in use, Snow’s discovery methodology quickly and automatically identifies usage of ChatGPT and similar AI applications.
Verification for Oracle® Java™ SE
Snow is proud to announce that its on-premises datacenter management offering has been verified by the Oracle Global License Advisory Services (GLAS) program as a third-party tool vendor for Oracle Java SE. This is now the third of three possible Oracle verifications that Snow has achieved (including Oracle Fusion Middleware, plus Oracle Database and Database Options).
This new Java SE verification means Snow data is trusted by Oracle auditors. Software asset managers can be audit-ready with the click of a button and continuously optimize their license allocations. This capability is more important than ever as organizations are getting squeezed by price increases and licensing changes with the recent change for Oracle Java SE.
Watch these videos to dive deeper into Snow’s Oracle Management capabilities.
Optimized S/4HANA migration, increased privacy, and complete license visibility for Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software customers
We’ve added a variety of enhancements to Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, including:
Migration from ECC to S/4HANA – The new S/4HANA Trusted Authorization Review (STAR) feature integrates the functionality of the authorization object analyzer report into Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software. You can import and manage authorization object classifications. The reports allow you to run an authorization object classification against users or roles to show the FUE or S/4HANA user requirements or to analyze and optimize the roles. You can save and export the results of the two simulation reports.
Pseudonymization – If your organization has high privacy requirements, only certain users should be able to see sensitive user data. With this new pseudonymization feature, you can specify which users can show usernames in an encrypted format and hide selected user data fields.
License dashboards – The dashboard feature allows you to view all licensing-related information at a glance with two new tiles. The first tile shows the number of connected systems from which no data was loaded for a given number of days. This is an easy way to determine if the data you are working with is up to date. The second tile allows you to switch between different dashboard layouts. You can easily navigate to up to three different dashboard designs without having to close the current dashboard.
To see these new features in action, please view our What’s New in Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software video.
For all of the details of this release—including improvements to dashboards, rule sets, and License Intelligence — please refer to the version 3.3 release notes.
Focused views added to Snow SaaS Management
Snow SaaS Management has incorporated AG Grid to provide users new ways to configure how data is presented in tables.
- Resize, auto-size and re-order columns to customize information flow and presentation.
- Filter numeric columns by greater than, less than, equal to or by ascending/descending order.
- Filter text columns depending on the inclusion or exclusion of specific terms.
- Filter columns containing data categories using multi-select.
Customer feature request: New license administration capabilities
We listen to our customers. We track your suggestions and feature requests, and nothing makes us happier than successfully implementing a customer feature request in our products. One such request involves license administration, specifically how purchase dates relate to agreement dates.
The new enhancements to Snow License Manager provide you with benefits, such as:
- When you want to attach a license to an agreement, you can now register a license purchase date that occurs outside of the agreement period.
- When you add a license with a subscription period, you can now register a license purchase date that occurs before the subscription period begins.
- Since the license purchase date is no longer tied to the agreement period, you can now search for the agreement when you want to attach a license to an agreement.
Centrally monitor inventoried computers
Snow Atlas partners have specific needs and with our new release, they will gain visibility to their entire customer portfolio and can benchmark the status of one customer environment against another. With centralized monitoring capabilities, partners can quickly diagnose issues and offer greater value to their customers for performance areas to improve.
Partners can now easily see the inventory status updates for all their customers.
Partners are now able to quickly zoom into their customer tenants to see inventoried computers and get a view by type and OS over a time period (last 7, 30, 90 days).
Automated lifecycle recognition
A critical part of managing any software application is staying up to date on its lifecycle. Milestones such as end-of-support, end-of-extended-support or end-of-life often dictate when customers should upgrade, move sensitive data, or switch vendors altogether.
Snow’s Data Intelligence Service now automatically captures and updates lifecycle data on a daily basis for top vendors most requested by our customers – Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, VMWare and Adobe – and we’ll be continuously adding to that list.
What’s next?
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