ISO19770-2 (ISO/IEC 19770-2) SAM Part 2 - Software Identification Tag

Description

ISO/IEC 19770-2:2009 establishes specifications for tagging software to optimise its identification and management. A software identification tag is an XML file containing authoritative identification and management information about a software product.

ISO19770-2 supports software asset management processes as defined in ISO19770-1, and is also designed to work together with the future ISO19770-3, which will provide a standard for software entitlement tags.

Software identification tags will benefit all stakeholders involved in the creation, licensing, distribution, releasing, installation, and ongoing management of software.

Benefits associated with software identification tags include:

• The ability consistently and authoritatively to identify software products that need to be managed for any purpose, such as for licensing, upgrading, packaging or for the specification of dependencies. Software identification tags provide the metadata necessary to support more accurate identification which differentiates this approach from traditional file-oriented identification techniques.
• The ability to identify groups or suites of software products in the same way as for individual software products, enabling entire groups or suites of software products to be managed with the same flexibility as individual products.
• Facilitation of de facto standardisation between different software creators and software creator organisations of how different versions of software are identified, allowing for better identification and management by software consumers of those different versions, for example being able to distinguish between free-standing versions and versions which are components of suites, upgrade paths, etc.
• Facilitation of automated approaches to licence compliance.
• The ability to provide comprehensive information about the structural footprint of packages, i.e. the list of components such as files and system settings associated with that package in order to link package-level management with file-level management.
• The ability to provide information about how to identify if a particular software package is being actively used or not.
• The ability to deal with the complexities of software installed on removable or shared storage, or in virtual environments (subject to the evolving ability of platforms and installers to identify devices and environments).
• The ability to reflect within the software identification tag the identities and requirements of different entities, including software creators, software licensors, packagers, distributors external to the software consumer, release managers within the software consumer, and those responsible for installing and managing software on an ongoing basis.
• The ability to allow for the validation of any of this information through the optional use of digital signatures by anyone creating or modifying information in the software identification tag.
• The ability for entities besides the software creators (e.g. independent providers or in-house personnel) to create software identification tags for legacy software, and also for software from software creators who do not provide software identification tags themselves.
• The ability of this International Standard to evolve in informal and formal ways as common approaches become accepted throughout industry for dealing with additional types of information not currently covered by this part of ISO19770, such as for product activation.

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