If you have ever seen a Michelangelo sculpture up close, or for that matter, if you have ever seen any great work of art, you can appreciate that attention to detail is a necessary ingredient to any achievement. As an IT professional, you probably don’t dabble in marble sculpture fashioning or oil painting with great frequency. The likelihood is that the expression of your genius is in the ways in which you monitor and manage electronic devices. But unlike an artist who generally only works on one piece at a time, you are responsible for hundreds of devices. Being charged with the task of managing a slew of Assets can be a taxing task if for no other reason than it requires you to manage the details of hundreds of Assets so that you can best service your customers.
In order to transform this activity from a burdensome and grueling task to a simplified and streamlined enterprise, we added an Asset Configuration Note feature to version 5.6, the new release of our professional services automation (PSA) software.
The Asset Configuration Note, accessible in the Asset window’s Preview tab and Configuration Note tab, provides you with an easy way to customize data entries and lists of details stored and displayed for an Asset. The Asset Configuration Note also enables you to store different data according to the type of Asset. Moreover, each Asset can hold multiple Configuration Note Sections, and every Asset Configuration Note that you create can be stored as a template to be used by other Assets of the same variety.
As great as this feature sounds, you are probably asking yourself, but how does this work exactly?
Well, let us explain…
An Asset Configuration Note can be used anytime you want to store data in easy-to-setup, predefined structures, either from a Asset Configuration Note template, or one created on the spot. Unlike a standard field, Asset Configuration Notes can contain multiple sections, with each section containing its own data entries. In other words, instead of inputting single fields of information, such as a computer’s serial number, or its CPU, the Asset Configuration note enables you to create and manage a detailed set of data for an Asset, including, for example, the Asset’s name, OS, IP address, programs installed, RAM, CPU and Operating System Information.
As you can see from the image above, each section of data can contain either textual data entries, memo (multi-line text) entries or value-selection entries, for which you can select the value from a drop down list of values you create, thereby providing you with additional ways to customize and maximize the Asset Configuration Note feature.
In order to turn the Asset Configuration Note feature into an even more beneficial tool, you are also able to convert an Asset Configuration Note format into a template. For example, you can configure an Asset Configuration Note template to hold specific fields for a given Asset type (like the OS, CPU, Memory etc. for PCs). For each Asset of that type that you manage (e.g. PCs), you can easily insert and use the already created template.
In order to create a template, you can either go to the settings menu, click on Assets > Configuration Note Templates > New, or you can click “Save as Template” from within an Asset Configuration Note Window after you have created a Configuration Note.
Configuration Note templates can can be added to an Asset from within the Asset window’s Preview tab or Configuration Note tab. The template can either be inserted as-is, or edited to best fit the new Asset.
In addition to helping you manage Asset details in an efficient and easy to view manner, a powerful free text search tool is also available, enabling you to search both entry labels and values, so that you can find the information for which you are looking with greater ease and speed.
So, while you may never be recognized for bringing a life-size image of David to life with a chisel and a block of marble, with the Asset Configuration Note feature, you can garner a reputation for being a detail-conscious, efficient and proficient IT service provider who brings excellence to the workplace and unparalleled service to your customers.
As we like to say in our office, “Excellence: it is all about the details!”
Until next time,
-Success Team