sduscheid's blog

I have been asked recently if ZENworks Asset Management (ZAM) can help them monitor licenses used over
Citrix or Windows Terminal Server.  The answer is yes.

First of all, the usage monitoring (both local and served) is based on application recognition from
the standard software inventory.  That is, the inventory scans the server and monitors the usage of
all applications found.  First, we find it in the inventory and then we monitor local and served
usage of the applications and pick up this activity every time we conduct a subsequent inventory.

For served usage, zam logS the following details for each session:
> Served Installations Used
> Total Used
> # Not Used
> Devices Used From
> # of Users
> Last Used Date
> Hours Used
> Hours Active
> Ave. Usage Days

ZAM offers a set of standard reports for displaying served app usage, including
served app usage by app, server, workstation and user.

See the ZAM Installation Guide for details on supported versions of Citrix and Windows Terminal Server.

One of the things ZENworks Asset Management customers have asked about is integration with common bar code tracking solutions. I am looking to get feedback from the Novell Cool Blogs community about what (if any) bar code solution you use and some thoughts about how you'd like to see it work/integrate with ZENworks Asset Management.

For those wait-until-the-last-minute-shoppers types out there. If you don't have your arms around which computers have been updated to deal with the early DST, then you might want to run a quick report in ZENworks Asset Management to find out.

ZENworks Asset Management collects and reports Windows hotfix data and custom reports can be used to show you a list of machines that do (or, more importantly, do not) have the published Microsoft patches (see KB 931836 and 928388) to correct this.

To generate a report of Windows machines that do not have one of these DST hotfixes installed, you can use the "dependent report" function, whereby you create a custom report (A) to show all machines that have a particular attribute value and then another custom report (B) that includes orkstation "not in Report" (A) in the criteria.

Of course, if you have ZENworks Patch Management, you should not have to worry about any of this at this late hour.

We recently published an article about how ZENworks Asset Management maps to and enables many of the best practices described by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)- particularly the Software Asset Management (SAM) Best Practices Guide.

Check it out here and reply with comments.

If you are not familiar with ITIL, it is simply a framework for organizing and managing IT operations in a way that aligns to a set of services provided to the business. You can read more about ITIL here.

Today we officially closed the ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management beta program. I just wanted to thank all the beta sites for your participation and feedback. We will be sending all of the beta sites a web survey so that we can get your final thoughts on the beta and product features.

I am also glad to report that we are very close to general availability. Here is a quick thumbnail of new features coming in this release:

> Web Console navigation and new home page
> Contract Management
> Server-side usage (Citrix and Terminal Server)
> Web app usage tracking/reporting
> Windows Vista and SLED 10 client support
> Windows Vista and SLED 10 readiness reports
> User-defined software collections defined and tracked

Look for more detail on the new release coming soon.

Yes, this time Lenovo/ThinkPads. They announced today that about 526,000 Sony batteries shipped in their various ThinkPad models are subject to recall because of the same over-heating/fire hazards that caused Dell to recall 4.1 million batteries. The models were sold worldwide from February 2005 until September 2006 and include these models:

* ThinkPad R Series (R51e, R52, R60, R60e)
* ThinkPad T Series (T43, T43p, T60)
* ThinkPad X Series (X60, X60s)
* ThinkPad T4x Series or ThinkPad R5x Series systems (in some cases)

If you are running ZENworks Asset Management, you can easily create a custom report to query for these system models and then have users run Lonovo's automated check from this page to determine if the battery is actually subject to recall or
users can enter their battery part number on this same web page to determine if their battery is subject to recall or not.

Either way, it is prudent to create a report of these sytem models and document what steps were taken to ensure that affected batteries were identified and replaced. The auditors will eventually ask for it.