Software maintenance additions

[michmela44]

It would be nice to be able to keep up with maintenance contracts for licenses as well.

The common model for licensing, especially for development components, is that you buy a license up front, then pay yearly maintenance to get access to support and upgrades.

It would be nice to be able to:

• mark a license as being maintained or not, duration of maintenance, and cost
• get notifications when payments are nearly due
• view a report that shows when all currently maintained licenses need to be renewed for budgeting

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[RCTITsupport]

Can I add a renewal termination date or something like that. for example, a yearly renewal license needs to be cancelled 3 months before the end of the contract or you have to pay another years worth of license.

[svpernova09]

I've started working on this with #415 It's currently functional and could be merged as is.

This issue is asking for a few different things so I figured I'd break up some of it to make sure the features are as desired.

I've added a migration to add a maintained option and a renewal termination date field to Licenses. This will allow you to toggle yes/no on whether or not a license is maintained and also give a date where this licenses renewal is terminated.

I want to make sure I'm on the right track with what @mpmel and @RCTITsupport are wanting.

To be done:

• Add duration field. Should this be preset durations of months? years? in a dropdown?
• Add maintenance cost field
• Add report to show maintained licenses & related information

The last thing:

• Get notifications when payments are nearly due

May require some discussion. I've raised the question in another issue about a default queue that snipe-it doesn't currently have any support for queueing. Laravel's queue system is great and will allow the end user to pick whatever queue system they want. However I'm hesitant to just jump into using queues without some feedback from project managers/leaders/devs on this. I'm also unsure of the practicality of adding a job to a queue that will just sit there for months. I think it would be better to have a command that gets run everyday (via cron) to run checks on these kinds of things and send emails when events are upcoming.

[snipe]

A queuing system seems overkill (and will add a level of complexity with respect to supporting this application for me, as lots of our users don't know what any of that means), since it's something that needs to run once daily or weekly. I think a nightly cron would be fine. I have a rough notification email option for warrantees on develop right now.

To set up the cron to run every day, set up your crontab as:

@daily /path/to/php /path/to/your/snipe-it/artisan alerts:expiring

To set it to run every week, use:

@weekly /path/to/php /path/to/your/snipe-it/artisan alerts:expiring