SMS 2003 Asset Management
As hardware and software assets constitute an increasing portion of the IT budget, corporations are becoming more focused on finding ways to reduce costs while remaining compliant with their vendors' licensing policies. Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 delivers the necessary tools to reduce hardware and software costs while enabling IT organizations to make informed and cost-effective business decisions about infrastructure.
Asset Management Datasheet
Read how SMS 2003 can provide flexible and granular inventory logs, usage statistics, and customizable Web reports.
Asset Management Demo
Watch how asset management works in SMS 2003. Note: if you have a popup blocker installed, you will need to disable it to allow the demo to run.
Webcast: Asset Management in SMS 2003
This TechNet webcast describes how SMS 2003 works with the asset management discipline, covering inventory, software metering, and Web-enabled reporting.
SMS 2003 Product Overview
Get a review of the new features and capabilities included in SMS 2003.
Standards-based Hardware Inventory
By utilizing Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), SMS 2003 provides improved client-side performance during inventory scans and a richer set of inventory data, including BIOS and chassis enclosure data.
Flexible Granular Inventory Discovery
Although SMS 2003 allows enterprises to track almost all the software assets on their systems, typically there are a core set of applications and files that are of particular importance and interest. SMS 2003 enables enterprises to focus on the information they need by providing the capability to implement intelligent inventory searches through the use of functionality such as wildcards, environment variables, and file properties. Systems resource overhead can also be reduced by enabling the skipping of compressed and encrypted files.
Usage Tracking
Inventory is only the first step in understanding the software assets within an enterprise. To fully comprehend and support business requirements, SMS 2003 integrates inventory with rich and robust software metering, enabling enterprises to not only know what is installed, but more importantly, what is used. By understanding application usage, enterprises can save money on potential new application purchases, stay compliant, and effectively phase out unused applications.
Reduce Purchasing Needs
The rich inventory and usage tracking capabilities of SMS 2003 provide an excellent planning tool in the application deployment process. Equipped with information such as the number of Microsoft Office XP installations and usage metrics in the sales and marketing department, enterprises can make informed decisions on issues such as "how many copies of Office 2003 are needed in sales and marketing," potentially decreasing purchasing costs.
| • | Stay compliant. With the wide range of applications in the enterprise, staying compliant with licensing requirements is a complicated task. SMS 2003 enables simplified license compliance tracking by monitoring concurrent application usage, arming enterprises with the information they need to make licensing decisions. |
| • | Reduce support costs. As new applications are deployed, legacy applications are often left installed but unused. Usage tracking allows enterprises to reduce cost by identifying and discontinuing support for these unused applications. |
Integrated Customizable Web Reporting
To ensure that the rich inventory and usage tracking information is easily accessible and relevant to the business, SMS 2003 includes a robust, highly flexible, and fully extensible Web reporting engine, with over 120 pre-built reports available out of the box. Reports can be customized or created, and an import and export capability is available for transferring these to other SMS 2003 environments.