Development request - connect assets to external customers

[HHH]

Are there any plans to be able to connect external customers and/or organisations to assets?

If yes it is in the nearby future?

[ArmandoDM]

Hi @HHH

we do have a planned change in our backlog to allow for multiple people being added as Owners and Used By for an asset.

See also this thread

 

Regards

Armando

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @HHH

Thanks for your post.  As Armando mentions, we do have some plans to extend how the Owners and Used By are options are populated and used.

I would be interested to know more about your requirement for assigning assets to external customers and external organizations.   There are a few scenarios that I come across with assets.

1 - The first is that of internal assets.  This is where someone wants to manage, track, and report on assets that are owned and used by internal staff.  This is the current focus of the Asset Management.  For this we are continuing to extend areas such as relationships between assets, who uses the assets, and how the impact of a broken asset may affect users.

2 - Next, we start to move into external customers.  One scenario with external support is the supporting of customers that you provide a service to.  One might provide a service to the customer, but the assets that support the service are still assets that are held internally.  For example a cloud service or hosting a website where you still own and manage the equipment and customers can subscribe to one or more services.  Here, the link between customer and asset is the service that they are subscribed to.  In this case, the assets can currently be linked to the service record and managed in that way.  As customers raise requests against the service you can select the asset associated to that service which is the cause of the issue.

3 - Another external support scenario is supporting a product that you have sold to a customer.  More often than not, this is a physical item or maybe a software package.   The current Asset Management may actually be too much for this as there is no need to track costs, depreciation, relationships and impact to other internal assets.  For this we considering an option for adding and managing "products" rather than using Asset Management.

4 - The other area is more toward Managed Services where a company is managing all of the IT equipment for external customers.   For this the Asset Management might only need to start with the ability to assign external organizations and customers to an asset, but there would be a need for separation of the assets between the different organisations.   

5 - The last scenario is for a company that uses Hornbill Asset Management for internal purposes, but also have a requirement to also support one or more of the other 3 options at the same time.  Similar to number 4, the separation of data and reporting can become particularly important.

Regards,

James

 

[HHH]

@James Ainsworth

Bullet number 2 i your list would be closest to what is our case although the customer themselves don't know on which server they reside. They all use the same service but it's installed per server (not cloud service) so connecting the asset to the server won't be an option.

We host a number of customer's websites and databases in our hosting centre. In order to be able to make quicker support we would like to automatically get server, os, DB, software versions etc. fetched when the customer places a support ticket. That way our analysts will save a lot of time and we can also see if that customer's server has any special settings applied which we need to consider.

We can of course have that information in the organisation but that would be a waste of a good asset management system :).

[Martyn Houghton]

@James Ainsworth

As per @HHH request, we too also have hosted services for external customers, where we would like the ability to link assets to the the organisation and service in combination. i.e. we have services relating to hosted products which is subscribed to multiple organisations, each organisation would normally have their own asset (server etc) related to the external organisation and the service, though the asset may be used for multiple services for the same organisation. 

Though not as common in our setup, there is also the chance that an asset would be shared between organisations as well, so in essence an asset needs the options to be able to be linked to one of more organisations and one and more services.

Cheers

Martyn

 

[James Ainsworth]

Thanks for your feedback.  It sounds like the change mentioned in the original post by Armando might help here.  As with these two scenarios, the assets are still internal to the business and the owners would be internal users, we just need to look at the ''Used By'' to include more than just an internal user and allow Groups, Contacts, and Organisations (external) 

Thanks,

James

[HHH]

On 2017-06-02 at 5:31 PM, James Ainsworth said:

Thanks for your feedback.  It sounds like the change mentioned in the original post by Armando might help here.  As with these two scenarios, the assets are still internal to the business and the owners would be internal users, we just need to look at the ''Used By'' to include more than just an internal user and allow Groups, Contacts, and Organisations (external) 

Thanks,

James

That looks like it would be a working solution for our needs. Basically the asset is owned by an internal entity and used by one or more external customers or organisations.

Thanks for the quick reply.

[Cizzling]

On 2017-06-02 at 5:31 PM, James Ainsworth said:

Thanks for your feedback.  It sounds like the change mentioned in the original post by Armando might help here.  As with these two scenarios, the assets are still internal to the business and the owners would be internal users, we just need to look at the ''Used By'' to include more than just an internal user and allow Groups, Contacts, and Organisations (external) 

Thanks,

James

This would solve our problem nicely. Could you indicate if this is currently in the development backlog or if we need to figure out a longterm workaround?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Cizzling

This change is in our development backlog but it has not yet been scheduled for work to start.  I have added you to the change so that we can post updates as it progresses.  

Regards,

James

[Martyn Houghton]

@James Ainsworth

Would you be able to provide some more details on the planned changes relating to Assest and External Contact/Organisations which is in the development backlog, so that we can determine if we need to raise further related enhancement request.

Cheers

Martyn

[samwoo]

Hello,

Here is a use case for this query:

I couldn't find this thread so will continue any further conversations I was going to have in my thread on here instead.

Thanks,

Samuel

[HHH]

Any updates regarding being able to connect assets to customers or organisations?

[James Ainsworth]

I'm pleased to let you know that we now have a feature that allows you to add multiple users against an asset.  On each asset next to the Used By field, you can mark it as a Shared asset.  Once enabled, you can add multiple users, or Groups, Contacts, or external Organisations that use this asset.  

I hope this helps.

Regards,

James

[HHH]

15 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

I'm pleased to let you know that we now have a feature that allows you to add multiple users against an asset.  On each asset next to the Used By field, you can mark it as a Shared asset.  Once enabled, you can add multiple users, or Groups, Contacts, or external Organisations that use this asset.  

I hope this helps.

Regards,

James

Today is a day for celebration!

[HHH]

Hi @James Ainsworth

A follow up question. Once shared, is there a way to automatically , through BPM link them to a request? Assuming all of a customer's assets should be visible in the request.

 

[samwoo]

22 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

I'm pleased to let you know that we now have a feature that allows you to add multiple users against an asset.  On each asset next to the Used By field, you can mark it as a Shared asset.  Once enabled, you can add multiple users, or Groups, Contacts, or external Organisations that use this asset.  

I hope this helps.

Regards,

James

Thanks for this - will the customers correctly show up in Configuration Manager?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @samwoo

Yes, the shared users and groups should show up in the CI Explorer in Configuration Manager.

 

[James Ainsworth]

4 hours ago, HHH said:

Once shared, is there a way to automatically , through BPM link them to a request? Assuming all of a customer's assets should be visible in the request.

Hi @HHH

On a request you will see an option for SHARED ASSETS if the customer is associated to a shared asset.  Not sure about the BPM.  There are no BPM operations for managing assets as of yet. It might be worth starting a new post/topic if you need something particular within the BPM for managing assets. 

[samwoo]

3 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

Hi @samwoo

Yes, the shared users and groups should show up in the CI Explorer in Configuration Manager.

 

That is fab - thanks so much

[Martyn Houghton]

That will be a great help.

Cheers

Martyn