On the Road Again...for ZENworks Migrations
February 18, 2011
I've been on the road over the last ten weeks and thought I'd share some observations about my latest projects.
I've been working on a large ZENworks Configuration Management® (ZCM) project for Computer Integrated Services (CIS), a Novell® Platinum Partner in New York. They were selected by Watts Water Technologies, Inc.® in North Andover, MA, to perform a Windows® 7 migration. The customer also requested an asset management program for their enterprise, and that's where I come in. The initial mandate was to perform an assessment of their inventory to identify applications that have licensing implications vs. those that may be safely excluded from consideration. This required a lot of Google searches to determine which of over 800 applications in the inventory were commercial products, or were freeware, shareware, bundled with hardware, and so forth. I captured MSRP pricing as I searched and loaded everything into a spreadsheet exported from ZENworks Asset Management with installation and usage counts. This let us evaluate the inventory to prioritize future license management work.
Watts also provided purchasing data for several manufacturers - notably Microsoft®, Adobe® and Autodesk® - with which I started building licensed products. The Autodesk data was excellent from the beginning. However, it took some iterations to get solid, detailed dated purchasing data for Adobe and Microsoft. For Adobe, the customer eventually went back to their software partner and obtained an excellent spreadsheet listing all Adobe purchases for an 8-year period, including all the upgrades and upsells. There is enough data now to go in and try to define a best practice for dealing with Adobe licensing, especially around the Creative Suite products.
The customer also acquired a magnificent spreadsheet from Microsoft which included a complete purchasing history up to and including a recent EA agreement. I've barely begun to dig into all the different tabs of this document, which comes with purchasing and licensing data, fancy filters, pivot tables, etc. My point is that this is an exceptional resource that appears to be available for the asking from Microsoft.
I'll share more from this project in the future, including some manufacturer-specific notes on free and bundled applications and other tricks learned as I implement their asset management program. In the meantime, you can read more about this project here.
Recently, I had the pleasure of working with a couple of ZENworks® Asset Management rock stars - Bryant Caldwell and Tasha Whisman at Great American Financial Resources Inc.® (GAFRI) in Cincinnati. Bryant's involvement with ZAM actually goes well back into the Tally Systems® product line as he has moved from company to company, bringing his favorite asset management application along with him. (It's interesting to note that Bryant continues to evaluate ZAM against the competition on a regular basis and ZAM keeps coming out on top!) GAFRI is in the late stages of moving from ZAM 7.5 to version 10.3 and invited me in to help them with the transition to new features and how to work with the improved license management tools. But my work was purely nuts and bolts - this pair really has software asset management under control. In fact, they're the subjects of a recent article in IT Asset Knowledge Magazine from IAITAM. The story details how over a two year program period, GAFRI achieved over $900,000 in savings the first year and over $500,000 the second year (through the date of publication) by instituting a formal IT Asset Management program based on the IAITAM Best Practice Blueprint.
If you'd like to read the full story, navigate here and scroll to the bottom of the list of articles. Look for "Corporate Cooperation Creates Savings."
More on ZENworks 11 very soon!
I've been on the road over the last ten weeks and thought I'd share some observations about my latest projects.
I've been working on a large ZENworks Configuration Management® (ZCM) project for Computer Integrated Services (CIS), a Novell® Platinum Partner in New York. They were selected by Watts Water Technologies, Inc.® in North Andover, MA, to perform a Windows® 7 migration. The customer also requested an asset management program for their enterprise, and that's where I come in. The initial mandate was to perform an assessment of their inventory to identify applications that have licensing implications vs. those that may be safely excluded from consideration. This required a lot of Google searches to determine which of over 800 applications in the inventory were commercial products, or were freeware, shareware, bundled with hardware, and so forth. I captured MSRP pricing as I searched and loaded everything into a spreadsheet exported from ZENworks Asset Management with installation and usage counts. This let us evaluate the inventory to prioritize future license management work.
Watts also provided purchasing data for several manufacturers - notably Microsoft®, Adobe® and Autodesk® - with which I started building licensed products. The Autodesk data was excellent from the beginning. However, it took some iterations to get solid, detailed dated purchasing data for Adobe and Microsoft. For Adobe, the customer eventually went back to their software partner and obtained an excellent spreadsheet listing all Adobe purchases for an 8-year period, including all the upgrades and upsells. There is enough data now to go in and try to define a best practice for dealing with Adobe licensing, especially around the Creative Suite products.
The customer also acquired a magnificent spreadsheet from Microsoft which included a complete purchasing history up to and including a recent EA agreement. I've barely begun to dig into all the different tabs of this document, which comes with purchasing and licensing data, fancy filters, pivot tables, etc. My point is that this is an exceptional resource that appears to be available for the asking from Microsoft.
I'll share more from this project in the future, including some manufacturer-specific notes on free and bundled applications and other tricks learned as I implement their asset management program. In the meantime, you can read more about this project here.
Recently, I had the pleasure of working with a couple of ZENworks® Asset Management rock stars - Bryant Caldwell and Tasha Whisman at Great American Financial Resources Inc.® (GAFRI) in Cincinnati. Bryant's involvement with ZAM actually goes well back into the Tally Systems® product line as he has moved from company to company, bringing his favorite asset management application along with him. (It's interesting to note that Bryant continues to evaluate ZAM against the competition on a regular basis and ZAM keeps coming out on top!) GAFRI is in the late stages of moving from ZAM 7.5 to version 10.3 and invited me in to help them with the transition to new features and how to work with the improved license management tools. But my work was purely nuts and bolts - this pair really has software asset management under control. In fact, they're the subjects of a recent article in IT Asset Knowledge Magazine from IAITAM. The story details how over a two year program period, GAFRI achieved over $900,000 in savings the first year and over $500,000 the second year (through the date of publication) by instituting a formal IT Asset Management program based on the IAITAM Best Practice Blueprint.
If you'd like to read the full story, navigate here and scroll to the bottom of the list of articles. Look for "Corporate Cooperation Creates Savings."
More on ZENworks 11 very soon!
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