Importing data from Super Suite into Enterprise Server

Last updated: Tuesday, April 12, 2005

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I recently purchased the infinity version of your software (version 3.0). I notice now you no longer have this on your web site. Has this all been integrated into the Enterprise Server product? How can I import what I have setup in the network auditor to the new product or do I need to start over?

Article Details

Enterprise Server is a new product which replaces Network Auditor and Super Suite. We have created a data migration tool to help you import the information from Network Auditor and Super Suite into Enterprise Server, which you can download from:
http://www.microforge.net/download/overview.htm

You can find these tools at the bottom of the above page, under the heading ENT Server Data Migration Tools . However, you should be aware that the architecture of the two programs is quite different.

The main difference between the two applications, from the perspective of importing data, lies in the auditing technology. Network Auditor uses the Remote Registry service to detect hardware/software remotely, whereas Enterprise Server uses the WMI service (which is what Microsoft use for their SMS Server). Now, when Network Auditor detects a piece of hardware, for example, it stores where, in the Remote Registry, it found that hardware - so that it knows how to check it's status/existence on future audits. However, Enteprise Server finds the hardware somewhere completely different (using WMI), and it's rarely possible to convert these Remote Registry "keys" into WMI locations, so once you have imported all of your data from Network Auditor into Enterprise Server, the first time you scan the network, you will get a bunch of Alerts - roughly two for every piece of hardware you have... one to say that Enterprise Server can't find the old piece of hardware and another saying it's found a new one (of remarkably similar description). You can simply select all these alerts and click "Auto Handle", in which case Enterprise Server removes any hardware that it's detected as missing and adds any hardware that it's detected as new.

However, once you take a look at Enterprise Server, you may decide it's just easier to start again from scratch... using Enterprise Server you wouldn't need to (although you could) audit individual machines. Instead, you'd just say, here's the name of the network, audit all the machines and tell me when you're done. So, auditing a network of a few hundred machines shouldn't actually be a lot of effort using Enterprise Server.

The main reason for using the Data Migration tools that we provide is to retain any non-auditable information that you've entered manually into your Super Suite 3.0 databases (such as Service Logs, Tasks, Contacts etc).