In our district we have a 5 year "end of life cycle" on HP Client workstations. We need to be very diligent to keep an up to-date inventory of all hardware in order to know where this equipment is and when it is time to replace it. It can be very difficult (not to mention time consuming) to keep our inventory error free with the old "paper and pencil" method of inventory.
I work in a K-12 school district. At present time we have 7 buildings and are building 1 more to open in the spring 0f 2008. We are connected via dark fiber and ProCurve switches. We manage our switches with ProCurve Manager and our PCs with HP Client Manager and Altiris Deployment Server.
At the present time we support over 1800 PCs and several wireless laptop carts. We will be adding more PCs in the spring.
Our staff consists of 580 teachers and 5100 students. The IT staff has 3 full time members and 2 part-timers. We also support outside local colleges who rent our facility and services.
Our District uses HP Client Manger Computer Inventory to gather information on all clients. This software gives our district in-depth client inventory, health status information, and even system security settings.
It is so easy and so nice to have (at our finger tips) a wide number of reports included with HP Client Inventory. We've created reports with the information provided and even compiled inof about clients with specific interests.
Now we know -- in a matter of a click -- what a specific machine's "end of life" is. This information can be easily shared via e-mail and even web reports and printed pages.
With HP Client Manager Inventory we have been able to continually track the locations of the many thousands of assets in active use across our multiple locations. It has helps our district establish and maintain an up-to-date overview of the hardware to be replaced in the time frame our district has pre-defined.
The district no longer tracks this information via paper method, and this results in streamlined IT budget and excellent productivity.