Software Audit with Software Asset Management System
To comply with the Copyright Ordinance, the Management Board endorsed the implementation of a Software Asset Management Scheme in the University in July 2002.
To implement the scheme, two application systems have been developed for use by all departments. They are the Software Inventory System and the software scanning tool, named SAMScan.
The Software Inventory System aims to assist departments in managing their software inventory and licensing information. It has been incorporated into AIMS under "Software Asset Management". Data on software acquisitions are extracted from purchase orders and added directly to the departmental inventory database.
To assess the actual software that is used on each PC, SAMScan is made available to all staff. After SAMScan is run, management reports of SAMScan results will be made available in "Software Asset Management" in AIMS.
Two University-wide software asset assessment exercises had been conducted in 2002 and 2004. Along with the exercises, two versions of the systems had been launched.
Based on the experience from the previous two assessment exercises, a new version of the Software Asset Management System (Version 5) was launched in January 2006 and is now available for departments to use.
SAMScan 2005, the new version, provides many new features:
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Besides detecting Ethernet address of a PC, SAMScan can now detect additional information about the PC such as serial number, domain users' name and department.
- With SAMScan, users are asked to enter optional data such as the location and FAS number of the PC. However, departments may wish to make some of these optional data mandatory. As such, new functions are available for departments to define their own settings.
- To assist general users to enter meaningful and appropriate remarks, a list of common remarks is defined and made available for users to select.
- Besides typing in English remarks, Chinese character input is also enabled.
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In older versions, when departments updated their departmental license and remarks, it took one or two days to process. With the new version, the update of departmental license and remarks are effective immediately.
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To assist departments to reconcile the scanned results with software inventory records, the new system provides easier means for users to link the software in use with the actual software purchased.
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To encourage departments to suggest software category to the central database, users can now make the suggestion directly through AIMS, without the need to send email.
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Departments can now choose to review scanned results of their PCs before submission to the central.
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For large departments, they may wish to group their staff by administrative sections for better management. The new system now provides summary reports that can sort machine owners according to their administrative sections.
For more details about Software Asset Assessment Exercise, please click the URL http://www.ncm2.xyz/esu/SAM/AssEx/.