Creating Purchasing Contracts

Purchasing contracts provide the "binding" between installations, purchases, and channels and the product use rights (PURs) that apply as a result.

Create contracts within Purchasing for each Microsoft contract you have in place. Use Purchasing’s Contracts tab, where you can create Microsoft contracts using a template that defines the PURs used to analyze titles installed and purchased under that contract.

General guidelines:

• Purchasing includes built-in contracts for Microsoft retail and OEM channels, so you do not need to create these.
• An enterprise contract normally covers all machines in your environment, so you typically do not need a group associated with this type of contract.
• Select-type contracts require one or more machine groups to define the set of machines they cover.
• If you have machines running software obtained through an MSDN subscription, you need to create a separate contract based on the MSDN template covering those machines.

License Analytics relies on inventory or discovery information that includes the license channel under which each installed LA title was purchased.

If you already have contracts in place that cover line items where the vendor has changed licensing terms (such as some versions of Microsoft Windows Server), you may have to migrate these line items to use core-based licensing. You'll see a Contracts hyperlink in the Purchasing panel's task list, under Migrate, if you need to perform this task. See How to Migrate Line Items to Core-based Licensing.