Client Management Suite

Hi All,

I'm pretty open about this. As we wait for Version 7 of the Asset Management Solution, I was wondering if there is ANY way to just add a date to a PC resource, i.e another field in the a table or something..somewhere..anything??

I'm trying to think of a simple way to do this.

At the moment we can grab a good list containing PC names, service tags, model/brand - if i can somehow put a date to that and have the report bring it out..thats all I really need.

Interested to hear thoughts/suggestions

Thanks

Aaron,
What is the source of this date?  if you need the "current" date on the PC, just use the [Client Date] column in Inv_AeX_AC_Identification table.  If you stamp in a "build date" or something on the machine when you build it, then you can gather that with Custom Inventory.  Are you using NS6 or NS7 at this point?  You can see AKB 4237 for example custom inventories.  If you want the date to be stored in the Altiris DB as a "real" date-time format, you may need to do some adjustments to the format before capturing it.

Hi Kyle thanks for the response.

The source date for example could be a simple text file. I was also wondering what other ways we could set a date somewhere which Altiris could grab from.

Basically I just want to easily set a lease expiry date or information somewhere so we can retreive that in a report.

Its NS7, will have a look at that article and see what I can gather.

OK After looking at Custom inventory...that Kb article didn't give much info on doing what I want, but it was a start.

Is it possible to make a custom inventory read a string value from the registry ie 2009-12-31 (it does not have to be in a date format in Altiris) and then populate that against a machine name?

That's all I need to do..

I'd then run a script on each pc to insert into HKLM/Software/LeaseExpire and have a String value ExpiryDate that contained 2009-12-31
I'm not asking Altiris to run the script, that part will be a manual process (Which im willing to put up with at the moment)

Yes, this would be very doable.  As you say the tricky part is populating the "LeaseExpire" value into the registry.  Actually if you have a spreadsheet with the serial number and lease expiration dates, you could automate that part as well.  The script would run, capture the serial number from WMI, then look that up in the spreadsheet file.  Optionally if the SN was not found in WMI or the spreadhsheet, possibly it could prompt the user to enter the value in a text box manually (which would then be written to the registry) or to call the Helpdesk for the information.  Then the LeaseExpiration date could be written to the registry, where it would then be captured by a simple custom inventory.

When the custom inventory runs, it generates an NSI (Notification Server Inventory) file.  That file gets wrapped up with other Inventory .NSI files and sent to the NS where it is loaded into the DB.  So your custom inventory would result in a table (maybe Inv_AeX_Lease_Expiration) which would have two columns:  _ResourceGuid (which is the Altiris-assigned identifier for each computer and is unique) and the LeaseExpire value.  The resulting report then would use SQL statements to JOIN that table to other tables which have "meaningful" information, like the vComputer view in the database, which has computer name, primary user, OS info, etc.