The Administration folder in the IT Asset Management Pack includes the following business entities: companies, contacts, cost centers, locations, and organizations. Business entities allow you to structure and segment contract, hardware, and software assets for reporting and tracking purposes. Both hardware assets and software titles can make use of business entities.
Location, organization and cost center
The location represents the physical location of an asset, such as a building, a city or a rack. Choose the structure of your location information based on what suits your organization. One example would be a city based structure, such as Boston, New York and San Francisco. Each city could have one or more buildings and each building could have one or more rooms.
An organization represents a logical division of your business. It can be as large as a region or as small as a department.
A cost center represents a financial entity in your organization.
Locations, organizations and cost centers are considered business information. Add them to your hardware assets, software titles and users to improve your assignment, allocation and harvesting tasks. When added to your hardware assets, business information helps you determine who has paid for the asset, where it is located, and who is responsible for it. Add business information to a software license so you can track where your licenses have been allocated (see Allocating software licenses). Add, or affiliate, business information to a user so you can make more informed decisions when assigning and allocating the user to a software title. Also, when affiliated with a user, business information can be automatically associated with service requests made by or on behalf of the user. They may also be taken into account when making a decision about harvesting licenses. Does the user with the software installed belong to the cost center that purchased the license?
You can also add contacts, a parent and children to locations, organizations and cost centers. For more details, see Working with parent-child relationships.
There are several methods for viewing the relationships you have set up for locations, organizations and cost centers:
You can see all the hardware assets related to a location, organization, or cost center through the View Related Hardware Assets task.
You can see the software allocation from a location, organization, or cost center, through the View Allocated Software Assets task.
You can see a visual representation of the parent-child relationships created for organizations, locations, and cost centers. Use a tree view to see these relationships. For more details about tree views, see Using the tree view.
You will notice on forms that the fully qualified hierarchy for locations, cost centers, and organizations is displayed, but on views only the location, organization or cost center identifier is displayed. Fully qualified names include the separator \. An example of a fully qualified location would be as follows: \North America\United States\San Francisco, CA - USA\Building 4 - San Fransico South\5th Floor\Suite 501\Cubicle 501-1E.
Each location, organization and cost center must have a name or a code that you create to identify it in the system.
Companies are used to represent suppliers, manufacturers, publishers and other external companies in contracts, agreements, and hardware and software assets. Companies can be created either before or during the creation of agreements, and the creation of hardware and software catalogs.
To create a company:
Go to the IT Asset Management Pack workspace and expand the Administration > Companies view.
In the Tasks pane, click Create Company. The New Company form opens.
Complete the fields on the General tab and click OK to save the company.
Contacts are used to provide your assets with additional information. Some of the items that contacts can be associated with include agreements, companies, locations, organizations, and cost centers. When you access these items through a hardware asset, and in some cases a software title and a software license, you can obtain a contact’s information.
To create a contact:
Go to the IT Asset Management Pack workspace and expand the Administration > Contacts folder.
In the Tasks pane, click Create Contact. The New Contact form opens.
Complete the fields on the General tab and click OK to save the contact.
Go to the IT Asset Management Pack workspace and expand the Administration > Cost Centers folder.
In the Tasks pane, click Create Cost Center. The New Cost Center form opens.
Complete the fields on the General tab.
(Optional) To add a parent and/or children cost centers, complete the fields on the Hierarchy tab.
Click OK to save the cost center.
Go to the IT Asset Management Pack workspace and expand the Administration > Locations folder.
In the Tasks pane, click Create Location. The New Location form opens.
Complete the fields on the General tab.
(Optional) To add a parent and/or children to the location, complete the fields on the Hierarchy tab.
Click OK to save the location.
Go to the IT Asset Management Pack workspace and expand the Administration > Organizations folder.
In the Tasks pane, click Create Organization. The New Organization form opens.
Complete the fields on the General tab.
(Optional) To add a parent and/or children to the organization, complete the fields on the Hierarchy tab.