As we turn our sights toward 2012, I wanted to take a brief moment to thank all our customers, both new and old, for their trust and loyalty. Those who’ve used our software for an extended period of time know we are deeply committed to listening to our customers and evolving our IT asset management offerings in ways that help make their jobs easier. We also take enormous pride in the quality of our customer service, both within the sales and technical support departments. Where else can you speak directly to a developer about a custom report you need or have more than a reasonably good chance of speaking to a live person when you run into technical issues?

While these are areas our customers experience on a day-to-day basis, I thought it would be fun to highlight a few other aspects of our corporate culture that you’re probably not aware of that will make you feel additionally good about doing business with Express Metrix!

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From time to time, customers ask whether we have an API to import data into Express Software Manager from their enterprise purchasing systems.  Although it’s not something we promote directly on our web site (perhaps we should?), the answer is “yes.”  Our API provides for two-way data flow; you can pull data either from Express Software Manager for integration into an external purchasing system, or vice versa.  The API does not currently have connectors for specific purchasing systems, but with a little development expertise, you can have it up and running in no time. 

If you’re interested in knowing more about our API, please contact your account representative. 

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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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Do you ever find yourself wishing for a dynamic view of what’s changing within your environment, versus an inventory snapshot representing a single point in time?  One supremely useful report that satisfies this need is the “What’s Changed” report.   Its purpose is to help you determine what has changed from a hardware and/or software perspective in your environment between two specified dates.  From a hardware perspective, the “What’s Changed” report shows when hardware attributes such as RAM have changed.  For software, the “What’s Changed” report shows machines on which applications have been installed and/or removed.  As you can imagine, there are countless situations in which this information could be useful. 

For example, let’s say you roll out 200 new computers to your sales department in November, and everything was working beautifully.  But in January you begin fielding calls from the users saying their machines are running slowly.  You look at the “What’s Changed” report and discover that nearly every sales rep has installed both iTunes and Plaxo on their new machines, causing performance issues. 

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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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