indicates the
contract has expired or is about to expire today.
indicates the contract expires 12 months from today.
indicates that the contract is valid because it
expires in more than 12 months from today.
This section describes how to use the IT Asset Management Pack to record and discover important facts about your contracts, such as their status and the assets associated with them.
Milestones act as a historical record of important events that occur during the life of a contract. When entered in advance, milestones can spin off e-mail reminders that one is about to occur, such as a software audit due next month. Cost events can also be associated with a milestone. All cost events associated with a milestone are also added to the related contract. Milestones are added to a contract’s Financial tab. In summary, for each important milestone that takes place over the life of a contract, you can record when, why and how much.
To send out reminders about upcoming milestones, use e-mail notifications, see Creating notifications.
To associate cost events with milestones, use the cost event form.
Milestones can be given a type to classify them and make it easier to organize them together in the list presented on a contract. For example, if you are preparing for a true-up then you could select True up as the milestone type. Because they are considered a list, you can add, change or remove milestone types from the Library workspace > Lists view, see Configuration of lists.
The IT Asset Management Pack provides visual clues that a contract is going to expire. The visual clues or indicators show that a contract is going to expire in a certain period of time, or that it already has expired. These indicators appear on a hardware asset, when it is linked to a contract, on the Contract Summary report and on the Hardware Asset Details report. All types of contracts, both hardware and software, have the same visual indicators. By default, the indicators are as follows:
indicates the
contract has expired or is about to expire today.
indicates the contract expires 12 months from today.
indicates that the contract is valid because it
expires in more than 12 months from today.
The thresholds for determining when these indicators come on can be changed from the Contract Administration Settings (Administration workspace > Settings view). For more details, see Contract administration settings.
A contract is considered valid if its status is set to Active.
To determine if a hardware maintenance & support agreement, lease, software license agreement, software maintenance & support agreement, or a warranty is valid:
Go to the IT Asset Management Pack workspace and expand Contract Management.
Select the Active view for the type of contract you wish to review: Active Disposal Agreements, Active Lease Agreements, Active Software License Agreements, Active Software Maintenance & Support Agreements, Active Hardware Maintenance & Support Agreements or Active Warranty Agreements.
An Active status indicates a valid contract.
To determine the assets associated with a contract:
Go to the IT Asset Management Pack workspace, expand Contract Management and select an appropriate contract view (disposal agreement, lease agreement, warranty agreement or hardware maintenance & support agreement).
Find the contract in the appropriate view and select or open the item.
In the Tasks pane, click View Related Hardware Assets.
In the case of a warranty, use the Assets Under Warranty tab.
This generates a view that displays all hardware assets associated with the selected contract.