Take Control of IT Costs

Data Management

The success of your IT Asset Management program is heavily dependent on effective data management: The ability to get data in, manipulate large quantities of data, and get data out. The Provance IT Asset Management Pack and Microsoft System Center 2012 provide data management capabilities that ensure your IT business processes are supported with accurate, timely and consistent information. The solution lets you easily connect to a variety of sources to import data, reliably maintain your data in an ITIL-compliant CMDB (configuration management database) and extract selected data for viewing and distribution.

Data Import

Microsoft System Center 2012 - Service Manager features built-in data connectors to Microsoft Active Directory®, and System Center 2012 - Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager and Orchestrator. A simple wizard driven process let’s you quickly and easily create connectors, schedule imports and populate the Service Manager CMDB. The Provance IT Asset Management Pack takes advantage of the user, organization, asset inventory and configuration detail provided by these “out of the box” System Center 2012 connectors as a ready-made foundation for the IT Asset Management repository.

Additional IT Asset Management data can either be input manually or imported from files. The Provance IT Asset Management Pack allows you to import data from files using the System Center 2012 - Service Manager CSV (comma separated value) connector. Data from Excel spreadsheets, electronic invoices, barcode scanning devices, supplier reports, file outputs from ERP and finance systems, and other sources can be saved in a CSV file format and imported directly to the Service Manager CMDB. PowerShell scripts can be used to schedule and fully automate the import of your source data.

The new Provance Data Management Pack for Microsoft System Center 2012 - Service Manager greatly simplifies and speeds the process for getting data into and out of Service Manager while simultaneously improving the consistency and accuracy of your data.Provance supplements the connectors provided with Service Manager to give you to access to data from additional sources, including Microsoft SQL Server databases and LDAP directories. An easy to use graphical interface makes it simple to create and save templates that let you import data from both files and databases without coding or extensive knowledge about the CMDB schema.

Data Manipulation

The dynamic nature of business makes it necessary to constantly change and update the asset information you are tracking. For example, entire departments move to new locations, organization or cost center structures change, or thousands of computers are retired and replaced as part of a hardware refresh program. The Provance IT Asset Management Pack lets you rapidly change data for many asset items all at one time. Simply open or create a view of Hardware or Software assets you want to change, and filter the view based on your specified criteria or make specific selections. The Provance IT Asset Management Pack automatically presents you with tasks you can perform with all the assets simultaneously, such as IMACD (install/move/add/change/dispose) activities, adding assets to contracts and agreements, and changing asset details like status, identification, ownership, location and cost.

For frequent and routine data manipulations, such as always associating new computers with the manufacturer’s standard warranty, the Provance IT Asset Management Pack lets you create workflows or use PowerShell scripts to fully automate changes based on your predefined business rules.

Because the Provance IT Asset Management Pack runs natively within Microsoft System Center 2012 - Service Manager, you can also create Incident or Change Requests for multiple assets and have all the assets related to the work item.

A complete history is maintained of all data changes, when they were made and who made them to allow trend analysis and auditing.

Data Export

Data only becomes valuable when it’s used to effectively support business decisions. The Provance IT Asset Management Pack lets you extract, view and distribute data across your enterprise to provide actionable decision support information.

The Provance IT Asset Management Pack supports the export of data from both the transactional Microsoft System Center 2012 - Service Manager CMDB and the System Center 2012 data warehouse. The Data Export task allows you to filter and select CIs (configuration items) in the Service Manager CMDB from a view in the Service Manager Console, specify columns representing the data classes and attributes you want to include, and export the data to a CSV file. The CSV file can then be used for viewing, manipulation and distribution using Microsoft Excel.

The Provance IT Asset Management Pack populates the System Center 2012 data warehouse with IT asset management data to support your reporting and analysis requirements. In addition to the provided dashboards and reports for hardware asset management, software asset management and contract management, you can create your own reports for consumption within the Service Manager Console or distribution through Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and SharePoint. Reports can be saved in XML, CSV, PDF, MHTML, Excel, TIFF and Word file formats and shared broadly across your organization.

Data Exchange with Other Applications

The Provance IT Asset Management Pack and System Center 2012 - Service Manager give you several powerful options to perform system-to-system data exchange. Microsoft System Center 2012 - Orchestrator, PowerShell and the System Center 2012 SDK can all be used to establish workflow driven or programmatic exchanges of IT asset management data maintained by the Provance IT Asset Management Pack in the Service Manager CMDB with your other business and IT management applications.