Auditing non-Windows machines manually

Perhaps not all of the computers that you manage have the Windows operating system installed. Lot's of the equipment that you manage might not come with anything that you'd call and operating system – your IT Department might be responsible for telephone equipment, switches, routers, faxes, PDAs, mobile phones and various other miscellaneous items that do not ship with a Windows operating system installed on them but, none the less, are left to the able hands of your IT department to manage.

We already have plans to add support for automatic auditing of many of these devices (we will be adding support to audit PDAs in the release of Enterprise Server 1.3, for example). However, for some of these devices (such as telephones and faxes), this simply isn't practical and the only way to keep tabs on these is by hand.

Additionally, even for items which you can audit automatically, only a certain amount of information can be obtained automatically. Other pieces of information such as the purchase price, details of the lease/purchase, contract and warranty information will have to be supplied by hand. You are not obliged to record all of this information, but fields for such details are provided for in the ENT Inventory module of Enterprise Server, if you choose to do so, so that you can keep all of the information about the equipment and software that you manage in one, central, easily accessible repository.

Keeping track of devices by hand is not something we really need to write a tutorial for – there are no complex protocols to be understood or basic technical requirements that must be met in order for you to manually record the existence of a particular device in your inventory. The only real advice that we can offer is to let you know about some things that we provided for specifically in ENT Server, to help you manually record the equipment and software that you manage, and maybe advise you on how you want to store the different kinds of information that you collect manually – for example, whether you want to record a particular piece of equipment as a spare part or as a machine.

Briefly, there are 4 areas in your ENT Inventory which we have provided for you to manually record the details of assets that your IT Department is responsible for: Machines, Spare Parts, Software Licensing and Miscellany.

1.

Machines - Basically designed to keep track of equipment that has individual component parts and/or software that you might move/uninstall or otherwise want to track individually. Typically you would use this area of the inventory to keep track of computers, but it could be used more generally to record other devices as well.

2.

Spare Parts - Lets you keep a record of any parts that you may have salvaged from machines that you no longer use, or simply parts that you have lying around, which are not installed in any particular machine.

3.

Software Licensing - Where you make a record of the software licenses and maintenance contracts that you own. You can also record the location and details of any physical media (such as DVDs, CDs and Floppy Disks) that you own for any software products here.

4.

Miscellany - Any miscellaneous equipment such as blank floppy disks, books and print cartridges can be recorded here.

You can find more details about each of these sections of your network inventory in the help files and documentation for Enterprise Server and ENT NetCenter.