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Asset management |
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Managing your assets can be less of a chore and
more of an opportunity, as Mary Branscombe finds out. |
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Do you know how many PCs your business has? Or where all the printers you’ve bought have ended up? When it’s time to renew software licences, will it take so long to check what you’ve got that you’ll give up and pay more just in case? If you’re planning upgrades to Windows 7, do you know which of your PCs are actually capable of running it? IT is the third largest expense for most companies, but many spend their IT budget without collecting a fraction of the information they would gather for other business expenditures.
Asset management isn’t just about making sure you’re not running more copies of key software than you have licences for, although every business needs to do that and manual audits do take time. It’s about being in control of your IT assets so you can make the most of them, manage them efficiently, dispose of them securely and stop wasting money on unnecessary licences.
Grey Matter assetVault is a hosted asset management service that provides
just
the facilities that you need to manage your assets through an easy-to-use
interface.
While any asset management system will give you the tools to do that, enterprise features mean they can be over-powered for the average business, says Grey Matter’s Managing Director, Andrew King: “We’ve been finding that customers who bought more full-featured solutions with all the bells and whistles have never been able to get to grips with them. They bought what they thought was a good solution but they don’t use it.”
Grey Matter assetVault, powered by Parago, is a new service that sets out to be simpler, cheaper and more straightforward. At around £5 per seat it’s a quarter of the price of many comparable tools but does all most small and medium-sized businesses need. It’s a hosted service, so you don’t need to budget for a server to run it on, or for the time to set it up: you can sign up, deploy the discovery agent (usually through Active Directory) and start dealing with assets straight away.
It also tracks all your assets, including hardware like printers, projectors and PCs, the software installed on them, the desks they’re sitting on, the telephones next to the PC, and the PABX they connect to. Having all your electrical items in the same database is far more convenient when it comes to PAT Testing (Portable Appliance Testing) and you could save on staffing costs too: “A lot of companies have had to assign someone specifically to look after IT assets,” points out Andrew King; this is at best a duplication of effort and at worst takes your IT team away from their real work. “The same people that manage other assets should be able to manage IT assets and they shouldn’t need to be experts in IT.”
Voyages of discovery
The discovery tool finds all PCs and laptops on your network and builds a catalogue on the hosted service, so you can access it from anywhere. This information includes the full PC specification as well as the software inventory and details of any attached devices. You can set the agents to send back information at regular intervals and compile regular reports, or only have notifications when something changes. Agents on computers that are out of the office send back data across the Internet, so you don’t have to wait until mobile workers are back in the building. That way, if unlicensed software gets installed you find out about it straight away.
If you want, Grey Matter can manage your licences for you, matching software discovered to the licences you’ve bought and advising you more accurately how many licences you actually need when it’s time for renewal or upgrades.
In January, assetVault will add a simple software metering solution that tells you how often installed software has been used and when it was last run. Applications that no-one uses are just as much a waste of money as copies that aren’t installed. That’s another advantage of being a hosted service, as new features like software metering will be included in the price you already pay.
The visual interface makes it easy to enter physical assets and assign them to a site, a building and a specific room. Add on the optional ParagoMobile and you can use a PDA equipped with a barcode or RFID scanner to add assets by choosing the room you’re in and scanning all the barcodes, whether they’re the original UPC codes or barcodes you’ve issued yourself. Again, that’s a big timesaver for audits and PAT Testing.
You can get a list of everything that should be in a room for audit, or to check the assets you haven’t yet placed. At the other end of the lifecycle, assetVault handles depreciation and you can mark assets for disposal and track them through the process, generating a report for your accountant.
The helpdesk facility works with all the assets in the system, so users can raise a ticket for a broken chair or a faulty monitor through the same Web interface. As with the other assetVault features, the emphasis is on simplicity; you may not get all the options of a dedicated helpdesk package but you get the tools that businesses have actually requested in an interface that makes them easy to use.
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MARY BRANSCOMBE
Mary is a freelance IT writer who’s worked on both sides of the fence, from writing manuals to developing a technology area for major online service. Mostly you’ll find her tinkering with gadgets that let her take the technology with her when she escapes from her desk
www.marybranscombe.com
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Copyright © 1983-2010 Grey Matter Ltd. All rights reserved. |
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