Altiris™ Inventory Solution 7.0 SP1 Release Notes

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Enhanced Inventory policies

Most inventory functions are now performed using policies rather than tasks. In an effort to make inventory gathering easier, the following predefined policies are installed:

• Collect Full Inventory (enabled by default to run weekly)
• Collect Delta Hardware Inventory
• Collect Delta Software Inventory

These are similar to the default policies of 7.0, but the new policies are no longer based on Inventory tasks. The settings that you used to configure in an Inventory task are now set in the policy. For example, the types of data classes that you gather, the schedule, and the advanced options of scan settings and run options are now set in the policy.

Inventory policies have the following changes:

• You can easily schedule a policy to gather inventory daily, weekly, monthly, or on a custom schedule.
• In the Advanced settings, the Software Scan Settings tab has been renamed to File Properties Scan Settings.
• In the Advanced settings Run Options tab, there is a new option to “Report detailed file inventory immediately”. This option is selected by default. This option will gather detailed file inventory when this policy is run. If you unselect this option, only basic file information is gathered at first, and then a second task, the Detailed File Inventory Task will be gather detailed file inventory.
• In the Advanced setting File Properties Scan Settings tab, additional folders are excluded by default. You should review this to make sure that you gather the information that you are expecting.

Inventory policies now have the following settings that were in 7.0 inventory tasks:

• You select the kind of inventory that you want to gather: Hardware and operating system, Software, File Properties
• Advanced options
• The Advanced options now has a Data Classes tab for selecting the inventory that you want to gather.

You can still create and use Inventory tasks, but in most cases, you will want to limit them to automated tasks used in a workflow. You will want to phase out custom tasks over time.

Because you will primarily use Inventory policies rather than tasks, the Inventory Task Wizard has been removed. Also, The Inventory Task viewer and Inventory Client Task Viewers have been removed. In Inventory Solution 7.0, these viewers were used for creating, modifying, deleting, and viewing the status of Inventory tasks. Inventory Solution 7.0 SP1 focuses more on Inventory policies than on Inventory tasks. You can create, edit, delete, and view the status of inventory policies from the Inventory home page. The task viewers were no longer required and have been removed.