Has anyone ever been contacted by Infor regarding a license audit? I received an email stating...
"The purpose of my call is to conduct a routine check of your company’s use of BaaN software. This routine check is part of Infor’s License Management compliance program, to confirm that your company is using the BaaN software within the limits of your license.

In preparation for the audit, I have attached a questionnaire relating to the servers that are currently running BaaN. Please return this to me within two business days to ensure an efficient and timely audit process. "

I completed the questionnaire and they are now asking that I install SmartAudit software on my server. The software is supposed to run for a number of weeks and I am supposed to email files periodically. I have not done anything yet as I am apprehensive about adding any software to my server. I also asked a few Baan customers and no one has ever heard of anything like this.

Has anyone ever gone through this audit?

We did. After the audit, they will send you some emails to inform you you are using some source code which is not in the contract and asking you to present the document.

"During the audit, there were indications that Baan Source Code had been in use. For the object below you will see the date that the object was loaded onto the Baan application and details of the user profile that did so. Unfortunately, we have not been able to find reference to this in our contract summary. Could you therefore please send us a copy of your latest (Source Code) license, so that we may ensure we are reporting against the most up-to-date information. "

We receive email like this 2 times, first time they send us a path of the source code which is in Windows platform, but we are in Unix. Second time they asking us on another object which is actually a session that we developed ourselves and there is no such session in the standard baan.

Finally they give us a login account to view some basic information on the server, system usage, etc.

We are going through this at the moment, it uses java and seems to run a licmon commands at hourly intervals to record licence usage and links into the database to record what objects are being loaded and I guess has a hunt for any non baan standard objects to see if you have any source code.

We did this more than a year ago. The result was as already mentioned - there were source files found and additionaly they said that there are more users than licenses - which was not true.

The question is - what are the intervalls for being asked to run the audit software? As we still have some sources on the live system which only are allowed to remain on the development environment, we should surely clean up the system before such audit must be done next time...

pet

Dear Baan Friends,

They did it in October/November 2008 on our systems. With the same result as already mentioned in this thread. They said, that we have source code of Baan standard objects, but those are own developments.
But be carefull! They will meet you before court! They don't have any understandanding of Baan application and that you need source code for any minor change on any form or report.
We are really disappointed regarding Infor after using Baan software for 12 years.
Maybe they need money. Rumours are that they will go public early 2009.

Regards,
mack56

Many customers in Hong Kong and South China also received such audit request in the past months. Infor is trying every way to make money from the install base.

But such move will be proved to be short-sighted. The tight control on development tools (term licence) and source code definitely reduce the flexibility of the system and drive customers to seek other alternatives, which implies customer will reduce the investment on additional licence on the Baan system.