For those of you who may have noticed a lack of blog entries over the past month, we’ve been very busy working on some exciting product enhancements! Today we’re pleased to announce the official release of Express Software Manager for SCCM, a new asset management offering that enables IT staff to leverage their Microsoft SCCM implementations for more effective oversight of and management of their hardware and software investments.

In recent months, we’ve been hearing from a lot of prospective customers that they want to take advantage of inventory data stored in their SCCM database for their software license management efforts.  This is often the situation at companies whose network teams don’t want to deploy another client and/or can’t secure authorization to invest in a dedicated asset management solution when certain data already exists within the SCCM that has the potential to be transformed into more useful IT asset reporting.

With Express Software Manager for SCCM, inventory data is imported from SCCM and processed using our own catalog of normalized application titles, allowing not only for superior software recognition, but also a distinctly license-centric view of the desktop and server environment.  The resulting normalized software titles, along with hardware data collected by the SCCM client, can be enriched with an organization’s own purchasing data and reconciled with inventoried assets for the purpose of managing license compliance, IT budgeting and reporting, chargeback purposes, and other functions that contribute to better fiscal management.

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Happy holidays to all!  As we wrap up 2011, we have a final Report of the Month to highlight within Express Software Manager:  Software Installation by Version.  This report, while simple in conception, has a whole host of uses, from ensuring your users have successfully upgraded to the latest version of Application X to verifying the install path of your end users’ software. 

The Software Installation by Version report, depicted in the screenshot below, shows which versions of any given application title are installed across your organization, along with the specific machines upon which those versions reside.  The second screenshot zeroes in on Microsoft Office Professional 2007, revealing which of its components are installed on a particular user’s muchine, along with associated service packs. 

Screenshot #1)

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Jenny Schuchert, Content & Development Director, IAITAM

Every year around this time, asset management vendors like ourselves take to the blogs to share their opinions and takeaways from the IAITAM Annual Conference & Exhibition.  This year, however, I was interested in hearing the insights of an insider at the organization that actually hosted the event.  Specifically, I wondered how the conference has evolved over time in terms of attendee profiles, vendor participation, and topics of interest.  

I reached out to Jenny Shuchert, Content & Development Director of the International Association of IT Asset Managers (IAITAM), and she was kind enough to share her observations about this year’s conference, as well as those of years past.  Enjoy!

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The start of October marks the end of Customer Appreciation Month here at Express Metrix.  We dedicate every September to letting our customers know that we’re grateful for the opportunity to support them day after day and year after year with their IT asset management initiatives.  Between the customer referrals, great product feedback, ESID machine scans, and occasional comic relief we receive from our end-users, we want you all to know how much we appreciate your continued business and loyalty. 

In our last newsletter, we announced we’d have three challenges, the nature of which would be explained in three emails that would arrive over the course of three subsequent weeks.  Each winner would receive a Kindle 3G Wi-Fi.

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October’s report of the month makes for an abbreviated blog post, as it requires very little in the way of explanation.  But beneath all the simplicity lies a very powerful tool.  The “Machine Search” report, found under All Reports, Hardware Reports and Software Reports in the Express Reports Console, is a quick ‘n dirty way to search for computers based on machine name, user name (based on Active Directory), last name or serial number.  Customers frequently use this to figure out which employee was issued a specific computer and/or to locate and view the configuration of a machine when a user calls in with a problem. 

What’s not to love?

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