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Asset Management – New Asset Field Requests


Frank Reay

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We would like the following new fields for Assets please.

A few new generic fields

  • Under the existing State field add an extra item in the dropdown of ‘In Stock’, Currently this only shows Current, Active and Archived. We can configure our own Substates but at a high level the the lifecycle of any equipment  includes ‘In Stock’ (whether just purchased and waiting to be deployed, being recycled to different user/location, awaiting WEEE). 
  • Last Modified By (free text) and Last Modified Date (date field) – under Computer System/Computer Information – these relate to Intune reporting from user devices such as laptops and PC’s which we want to inject into Hornbill Asset Management. These will indicate the last time an admin accessed the device and when.

We have a number of spreadsheets with our infrastructure asset info that we want to load into Asset Management. We can't always find an appropriate field and my Infrastructure colleagues know from experience that this info is actually really useful eg physical attributes for hardware planning in the racks

  • No. of Power Ports – under Computer System/Hardware Information – number of power ports.
  • No. of 10 GbE Ports – under Computer System/Hardware Information – can be 2, 4, 8, 4/2 etc so not always numeric
  • No. of 1 GbE Ports – under Computer System/Hardware Information – can be 0, 4/0, 8 etc so not always numeric.
  • No. of 1 GbE MGMT Ports – under Computer System/Hardware Information – can be 0, 1, 2 etc.

We have a requirement for a number of dates in a number of Classes which don’t currently seem to exist. We want to be able to capture these dates so that several months beforehand a Request can automatically be raised as a warning.

  • Hardware Support Expiry Date – linked to a support contract
  • (Hardware End of Life – can be different to above and we could use Scheduled Retired Date in Disposal Information).
  • Software Support Expiry Date – linked to a support contract
  • Operating System Expiry Date
  • Last Audited Date – the date that the Asset details were last reviewed internally by us

We have a number of Infrastructure Comms Contracts with BT, Virgin, IDE etc. These are not directly linked to any particular hardware/software so maybe this needs a new Asset Class? Some of the required fields are already in different sections (such as Financial Info) but we can’t find anything explicit for the following (the Software Information section has some of these but refers to ‘Licenses’).:

  • Vendor
  • Contract End Date (but we could use a suggested Expiry Date from above if under General Properties)
  • Term  - eg 1 year, 2 year, 90 day rolling (if expired then many contracts continue with 60/90 day notice period)
  • A End – one end of the comms ‘line’
  • B End – other end of comms ‘line’
  • Cost – could be monthly or Annual (but we could use Maintenance cost in Financial Info)
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18 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

Would these be things that can be put into Supplier Manager? In there you can link assets to the contracts.

@James Ainsworth - I think you are right.

We haven't looked at Supplier Manager up to now.  I have now taken a quick peek and under Supplier Contracts I can indeed see that there are start/end dates. This covers off Infrastructure Comms Contracts and also Software Support Contracts. My Asset Management project has suddenly also expanded into Supplier Management!

I have 2 questions on this: 

1. From a quick look at Supplier Manager and Asset Management I can't see how we would link these 2 sides? And can we view in both directions ie view all linked assets when viewing a contract + view the linked contract when viewing an Asset? 

2. As an end date approaches can Supplier Manager automatically raise a Service Request say 3 months ahead for the negotiations to be started? Or do we need to use the Scheduled Job API which is mentioned here 

 

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18 hours ago, James Ainsworth said:

Would substates help here?  You could add a substate under the Current state.  

 

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@James Ainsworth Yes you are correct and I did mention that as an option. However the States as they stand now are Current, Active and Archived which strikes me as a rather odd high level list. 

In-Stock actually has several substates which I mentioned before (eg just purchased and waiting to be deployed, being recycled to different user/location, awaiting WEEE). As we are not allowed sub-substates (which is fair enough!) I come back to wanting In-Stock as a high level State. 

I like the State of 'Active' as that nicely describes an asset being productively and actively used for its intended purpose. I could use translations to change 'Current' to 'In-Stock' but I am trying to avoid that as it feels a bit 'dirty'.

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Hi Frank,

I have to agree that while Active and Archived meanings and use can be clearly understood, the term Current maybe doesn't have such a clear definition.  I think that it is perfectly valid to use the translation to change this to In Stock. Translations are not there just for different languages, but also to let you change the terms that make more sense to how your business works.  Nothing dirty about that. :)

 

 

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45 minutes ago, Frank Reay said:

My Asset Management project has suddenly also expanded into Supplier Management!

I have 2 questions on this: 

I might be worth adding these questions to the Supplier Manager topic.  This way it will be seen by the Hornbill Staff that monitor that area, but also to help other customers find these questions, and hopefully an answer to go with it.  Hope that's OK.  

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15 minutes ago, James Ainsworth said:

Hi Frank,

I have to agree that while Active and Archived meanings and use can be clearly understood, the term Current maybe doesn't have such a clear definition.  I think that it is perfectly valid to use the translation to change this to In Stock. Translations are not there just for different languages, but also to let you change the terms that make more sense to how your business works.  Nothing dirty about that. :)

 

 

@James Ainsworth My hesitancy with Translations is around Reporting. If I start doing lots of translations then it makes configuring manual reports a nightmare when referencing the underlying DB field name. I could also use translations for my above new requested Asset Fields but that's even worse on the Reporting front - I would much rather have cleanly constructed field names.

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7 minutes ago, James Ainsworth said:

I might be worth adding these questions to the Supplier Manager topic.  This way it will be seen by the Hornbill Staff that monitor that area, but also to help other customers find these questions, and hopefully an answer to go with it.  Hope that's OK.  

@James Ainsworth Yes please. As I said my project has just expanded into a whole new area so only to happy for more help!

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  • 1 month later...
On 6/21/2020 at 4:14 AM, Frank Reay said:

Last Modified By (free text) and Last Modified Date (date field) – under Computer System/Computer Information – these relate to Intune reporting from user devices such as laptops and PC’s which we want to inject into Hornbill Asset Management. These will indicate the last time an admin accessed the device and when.

Frank,

When it comes to naming conventions for these two fields, I'm trying to identify the most appropriate names.  You mention Last Modified By and Last Modified Date.  Later you mention that it will indicated the last time an admin accessed the device.  We have a field for last logged on user to show who last logged into a PC.  We also have an existing Last Updated By and Last Updated Date which refers to the asset record rather than the physical device.

1. Can you provide the name of the fields in Intune that you are wanting to map to this field?

2. Do these fields represent a modification to the Intune Record or a modification to the physical device?

2. For the Last Modified By field you suggest that you would like this as free text.  For data entry I would normally suggest that this could be a User Picker to pull from Basic Users in Hornbill, or would these users not existing in Hornbill, in which case you need the free text to type in any name?

 

Many thanks,

James

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@James Ainsworth

I have had another chat with my InTune expert and I can see why you are asking the questions! There has been some confusion here. There is indeed no Last Modified By and Last Modified Date within InTune. I thought that InTune could record when an admin had accessed a device and updated it - but that is not the case. He definitely showed me something before in this respect but I can no longer see what it was!

However my chat did uncover something else related to InTune. Under Mobile Device/Mobile Device Information there is a Last Sync field which maps nicely to lastSynchDateTime in InTune. However this does not appear under Computer System/Computer Information. This is the Asset Group we plan to use for PC's and Laptops which InTune will also be discovering. This date is critical for us to identify when we need to chase up a device that has not been seen by InTune for a set period of time (irrespective of last login). Is there a reason it is missing and if it is oversight then we can have it added (instead of my 2 incorrect fields above)?!

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  • 2 months later...

As of the last Service Manager update (Build 2030) the following asset fields have been added.

 

Computer System

Computer Information

  • Last Sync

Hardware Information

  • PSU1 Serial
  • PSU2 Serial
  • Number of Power Ports
  • Number of 10 GbE Ports (can be 2, 4, 8, 4/2 etc so not always numeric)
  • Number of 1 GbE Ports – (can be 0, 4/0, 8 etc so not always numeric)
  • Number of 1 GbE MGMT Ports (can be 0, 1, 2 etc.)

Operating System Information

  • Operating System Expiry Date (Date Field)

Software

Software Information

  • License Count

Mobile Devices

Mobile Device Information

  • Data Number
  • Delivery Type
  • Tariff Code
  • Secondary Service Provider ID
  • Primary Termination

Operating System Information

  • Operating System Expiry Date (Date Field)

General Properties

General Asset Properties

  • Last Audited Date (Date Field)
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