Asset Management

Install Asset Management from the application catalog. It adds Home, Work, Hardware, Tasks and Configuration. Existing software products, entitlements and contracts remain available. A normal installation creates no sample records; optional demo data adds two example tasks.

Manage software assets

Open Work to use the software asset workspace:

• Products lists software identities, installations and entitlement counts. Open a product to inspect its license positions and installed hosts.
• Positions compares owned rights with measured consumption. Reconcile refreshes these measurements when your role permits it.
• Contracts maintains vendor agreements and renewal dates.
• Entitlements records purchased rights and links them to products, license metrics and contracts.

The active tab is included in the URL. Search filters the loaded view. A product without reported over-deployment is not necessarily compliant: review its measured positions and any unmeasurable results before drawing a conclusion.

Record what an entitlement costs and when it ends

An entitlement carries a start date, an expiry date, a cost and a currency, next to its product, metric and quantity. Open an entitlement from the list to change them. Leave the cost empty when you do not know it. An empty cost is stored as unknown, not as zero.

Delete a product, a contract or an entitlement

Each row in Products, Contracts and Entitlements has a Delete action for people who may change software assets. Deleting removes the row from the lists. Its history is kept.

Something that is still in use is not deleted. The dialog names what uses it:

You delete	It is refused while
A contract	An entitlement was purchased under it
A product	An entitlement or a discovered installation names it
An entitlement	Never. Nothing depends on an entitlement.

Delete or move what is named, then delete again. Products that ship with the platform catalog have no Delete action. Create your own product to replace one.

Track hardware

Open Hardware to track devices this tenant owns, whether Discovery found them or someone entered them by hand. A device is one row whether it was discovered or registered by hand, so the same laptop never appears twice.

A device moves through six states: In stock, In use, In repair, Retired, Disposed and Missing. The list’s tabs show a live count for each. A device nobody has registered yet carries no state and shows as Not set, listed under All.

A manager may add a device from the Hardware page. Set its identity (name, asset tag, serial number, type), its purchase record (vendor, purchase date, cost, warranty) and its place (location, cost center). Manufacturer and model come from Discovery when it classified the device, or from what was entered by hand; the device page marks which one it is, or reads Not known when neither source has an answer.

Four actions move a device through its life, offered only when the device’s current state and your role allow them:

• Assign puts a device In use with a person, from In stock, In repair, In use (a reassignment) or no state yet. A contributor or a manager may assign.
• Return to stock clears the assignment and puts a device back In stock. A contributor or a manager may return.
• Send to repair moves a device to In repair. A contributor or a manager may send a device to repair.
• Retire moves a device to Retired and clears its assignment; this cannot be undone from the device page. Only a manager may retire a device, and only a manager may edit its register columns afterward.

Discovery’s read of whether a device answers on the network, shown as Seen on the network, is a separate field from its state: an In use device can go quiet on the network, and a device In repair can still answer. The two are never merged into one field, because they answer different questions.

Coordinate lifecycle work

Tasks provides My Work, Open, Unassigned and All views. Create a task for a purchase, renewal, reclamation, retirement or review. Renewals require a contract; reclamation and retirement require a product. Use the shared record page for assignment, due dates, comments, attachments and history.

Move work from New to In progress and provide an outcome before marking it Completed. Completing a task does not automatically purchase software, revoke access, retire a product or modify an entitlement. Perform the relevant action through its existing management surface and record the result.

Home shows attention counts from these same task views, quick actions and charts of current work. Automated license compliance findings remain owned by the separate License Management application.

Settings

Configuration also holds the tenant’s Asset Management settings, each in its own card with its own Save button:

• Renewals and alerts sets how many days before a contract’s end date the renewal detection rule warns, and a master switch for license alerts (renewal, over-deployment and under-utilization). An unedited value shows its own hint; a value you changed offers Reset to default, which clears it back to the shipped value.
• Defaults sets the currency used for a new contract or entitlement when none is given. Type it in any case; it is saved uppercase. Leave it empty for no assumed currency.
• Discovery is read only here: the confidence at which a device found by Discovery becomes an item in the register, with a link to the full Discovery settings page.
• Lists is where an asset manager curates hardware types and locations: one card per list, showing each value with how many records use it. Add a value, rename it inline, or Deactivate it so it is no longer offered (there is no delete; a value already in use keeps its label). A deactivated value shows greyed out as Not offered, and can be turned back on with Reactivate. Hardware type is a closed list: the hardware pages only offer active values, and changing a device to a deactivated type is refused. Location is a suggestion list: any text is still accepted on a device even if it is not in the list yet. Without the write permission, the Lists section is read only.

A save applies only the fields you changed in that card; the rest of the tenant’s settings are left exactly as they were. A value out of range is refused with the reason, and what you typed stays in the field so you can correct it.

The full set of classification and CMDB-promotion confidence thresholds that Discovery itself depends on lives on its own settings page, reachable from the Discovery card above or from the admin navigation under Assets & Discovery.

Configure access and measurement

Configuration also links to the product, contract and entitlement editors and opens license metrics. Metrics define how consumption is measured.

Asset Management appears in the app rail for people who hold one of the roles below, and for the tenant’s administrators. A person with none of them does not see the application.

Administrators assign access through the existing role administration:

• Asset Viewer reads software assets, lifecycle tasks and the hardware register.
• Asset Contributor also creates and updates lifecycle tasks, and assigns, returns and sends hardware to repair.
• Asset Manager also maintains SAM records, reconciles license positions, and creates, edits and retires hardware.

This application uses the existing software asset management service and the platform’s CMDB item table for hardware, so a device found by Discovery and a device entered here are always the same record. Stockrooms and warehouse movements remain in Inventory Management.