Asset Management
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- In these next series of lectures, we are going to be talking about asset management, administrative tasks, and client management.
- Because Configuration Manager is such a complex topic, at first it may be difficult or overwhelming to understand.
To make SCCM easier to comprehend, we have broken down the features and capabilities into three task-oriented categories.
- The first is Asset Management – From an organizational standpoint, it is the assets that are purchased by your purchasing department, like printers, computers, servers, and software.
- The second category is Administrative Tasks – These are the everyday tasks that an SCCM admin would be expected to perform. Like updating SCCM, and assigning administrative roles.
- The third category is Client Management. These tasks are all oriented toward the user, for example, operating system deployment, software updates, and client health.
- ·Each of these categories has tools to help you extend the functionality of SCCM. In the next three lectures, we will touch on some of these tools. In later lectures, you will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience using each of the tools mentioned.
In this lecture, we will start with the first category, Asset Management.
With Asset Management – Your assets can be broken down into these three sub-categories.
- Hardware and software Inventory – Which consists of your Computers and software
- Asset Intelligence – Which consists of software licenses for software that you use daily.
- Software Metering – This is about how many times or how long specific software was used in your organization.
- In my organization, we had CAD software used to design and configure military vehicles that cost 10-20k per license. In this case, software metering could be used to identify those machines that were not utilizing this software. Which would save the company thousands of dollars.
Hardware and Software Inventory
- This is used to collect information about the software and hardware configuration of client computers in your organization.
To use Software and hardware inventory, we must first set up the schedule in client settings. What is shown here are the default client settings. These are the settings that will be pushed to every client on a schedule that you configure.
You can also set up custom client settings for just a collection or group of computers or users as needed.
- One tool that we can use to determine the hardware and software inventory installed on a computer is called the Resource Explorer.
- After the computer’s hardware and software policy has been pushed out to the clients and inventoried. This is what you could see in the Resource Explorer.
You can also configure the default or the custom client settings to inventory the installed applications as well.
- Tools – Another tool that you can use for Asset Management is reports. There are reports that you can use with categories like hardware or software. There are over 50 categories. To date, there are 481 default reports covering numerous topics. Probably more than you will ever need. But if you like, you can also create your own custom reports.
- The reports are either web based or in-console. Let’s take a look at the in-console reports.
- Here is a report that shows the software registered in add remove programs on a specific server.
- There is another tool called queries that you can use to gather information on computers. For example, here is a query that gives the following results for “All Systems.”
Here you have computer name, domain, IP address, and Operating System.
- Here is a Custom Query that shows any computer that has hard drive space above 40MB.
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