[Asset Types -> Software -> Manage Vendors, Products and Versions] Enhancements to Versions

[samwoo]

Good afternoon,

In order for us to correctly manage the versions of our Software, I would like to request an enhancement to the Vendor Product Versions.

I would like to request the following additional fields to be associated with the Vendor Product Versions:

1. Support Start Date
2. Support End Date
3. Extended Support Date
4. Support Status

These fields should be optional, but for our Business-Critical Applications, this would be a great asset to Asset Management where we can identify software/business applications that are due to go out of support. These should be included as fields within the Software Details region within Software Assets, and when updated in there, it also updates the Vendor Product Versions table.

The Support Status should be a process that runs daily behind the scenes that checks the Support End Date and Extended Support Date for all the Vendor Product Versions and update accordingly.

The statuses I believe should be:

1. In Support
    
2. In Extended Support
   1. Only if the Support End Date has passed
   2. And there is an Extended Support Date supplied
       
3. Coming Out of Support
   1. Maybe there should be a parameter to control the period in months?
       
4. Coming out of Extended Support
   1. Only if the Support End Date has passed
   2. And there is an Extended Support Date supplied
   3. And maybe there should be a parameter to control the period in months?)
       
5. Out of Support

For Versions where no date is specified, Asset users can manually set the status accordingly. 

This will be a great help in reporting and dashboards. We are looking to move from our Spreadsheet driven Applications roadmap to using Hornbill, and what we have so far is great (a combination of Assets, Asset Shared Users, Asset Vendors, Products and Versions, Config Manager Item Dependencies, Suppliers and Reporting).

Thanks,

Samuel

[samwoo]

Just to clarify, I am talking about adding those extra fields to this screen:

We have an area that is used to capture Versions, so why not make use of it and expand on it.

Please note that we do not create new Assets for each new version, this would be a complete waste of time to rebuilding linked assets against Assets, Workflows, Services etc. The only time we would do that, is if we have multiple Asset versions on the estate for any reason, and as far as I know, there is only a small handful of non-business-critical apps.

[Jim]

Where is this area to manage versions? I've been looking for something like this for a while 

[Jim]

I found it, that's a hidden little gem isn't it 

[samwoo]

3 minutes ago, Jim said:

I found it, that's a hidden little gem isn't it 

It most certainly is lol! Doesn't offer much but could do with more being added to it IMO.

But it is great for capturing the versions, though make sure you add the versions in release order otherwise reporting will be fiddly. (Also a part of the reason why I requested for the extra fields)

38 minutes ago, samwoo said:

• Support Start Date
• Support End Date
• Extended Support Date
• Support Status

I think there is also a need to add:

• Release date (a future date can also be adde for approximations as well)

[Jim]

We have just had a meeting with Hornbill in regards to the software asset management, it's very sensitive to the version numbers patch and security side and we are mainly concerned with the main version, It would be nice if we could link multiple versions to one 'Software Asset Record' if that makes sense, at the moment I have to do some funky joins on a report that only checks the first 2 numbers of a version. We have ran into a problem of wanting to be able to see what software is on our estate but we still hold disposed records for 7 years for the financial data so this side of the system doesn't ignore retired assets which has grounded us on any progress with this. 

But if there is some way of linking based on this that you have shown it is a much better idea, or even a 'parent asset' maybe. I just can't make sense of creating new records for every version for a product like edge for example