Ideas for Software Management in Shotgun

Flow Production Tracking
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Hey all, I’d like to organize and track the software that we’re using at our company through Shotgun. It’s a larger company that has a lot of hoops to jump through when it comes to bringing in new software or even updating to new versions of existing software, so being able to track where those efforts are at would be nice, along with storing easy info like license details, installer links, maybe linking it to users or departments, etc.

I guess I was wondering if anyone had any insights into this. Would you set it up as a CustomEntity or a Tool Entity or something? How would you go about tracking version over version on a single piece of software? It might get confusing to utilize actual Versions to do this, but maybe there’s a way to use them without it competing with your Artist’s Versions they’re creating. Just looking for ideas! Thanks!

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I’ve done this a few times.
You can use the software entity for software.
A release entity for specific versions of your software.
Each new release gets associated with the parent software entity.
You could then have a custom entity for licenses that you associate with either a software or release entity… although I can’t rememer how I tracked usage in any meaningfull way.
I’ve been experimenting with using toolkit bundles to represent software releases and for plugins, packages, etc, actually uploading them as toolkit bundles. The great thing here is you can utilise Shotguns descriptor and caching tools for deploying software on the fly. It’s probably a total abuse of the system though and you may find something like Rez to be more suited to the task :slight_smile:

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