For IT departments, is has always been an important and at the same time difficult task to inventory all IT assets. Servers, desktop computers, and laptops are standard devices, but there are other challenges: For instance, the trend towards BYOD “Bring your own Device” makes management increasingly difficult. IT specialists are supposed to manage their departments in a way to save money while continuing to improve their service. And all this with a background of shrinking budgets. Therefore a working IT asset management system is vital to the success of all of these requirements.
Professional software helps with IT asset management
The best and most reliable way to perform IT asset management is to use professional software such as Docusnap. In particular and with respect to system upgrades and roll-outs of new technology, the decisions must be based on current and reliable information. Detailed data of all PCs, from CPU and BIOS types to RAM sizes and the memory slots used or available, is indeed very helpful here. The software should provide the following features:
- Possibility to display the information on the hardware inventory by computer and by department, for dynamically defined groups, and for the entire company.
- Correct configuration of hardware inventory updates in order for them to be performed at different time intervals. Specific and individual settings for a company or for different departments are a plus.
- As accurate Information as possible regarding the assets. An optimal software solution provides a feature to manually enter information on linked objects such as PDAs or mobile phones.
- Support for multiple operating systems across Windows and Linux systems and for mobile consoles.
IT asset management also includes installed software
An inventory of the software installed in the network is equally important. Accurate analyses of PCs and the programs installed on them enable you to identify software and applications that are not or only rarely used. In addition, you can keep track of the licensing situation. Important requirements with respect to software are:
- It must be possible to display inventory reports either for a single PC, a department, a dynamic group, or for the entire company.
- Support for multiple operating systems across Windows and Linux systems must be provided.
- A software inventory must include installed programs (such as MS Office Professional) and installed applications (e.g. MS Word, Excel, and so on).
- It must be possible for the users to scan files to find the indicated file types on the PCs. This enables them to detect files that are not company-relevant, such as private music or video data.
In addition to a list of all available systems and components, the installation history of each application is relevant. It should provide a complete overview of the current software assets and of all detected changes within a certain period of time, sorted by PCs or components. An efficient asset management tool also includes a software history for all PCs including an overview of all programs and applications that have been installed, removed, or updated within a certain period of time.
For more on this topic: IT Asset Management based on a Docusnap Inventory
