There are some product enhancements from AMS 6.x to 7.1 as well as 64-bit native code. It’s a good thing that the fundamentals of managing IT assets remain consistent regardless of the technology. I am biased and happen to believe that Altiris has the shortest path to implementation when compared with other enterprise products and is by far the simplest to implement for SMB’s. These are some of my project notes for an AMS 6.x installation, but the broad strokes remain consistent.
When implementing Asset Management, one size does not fit all. The implementation of such a solution in an enterprise may seem like a daunting task at first. How does one eat an elephant? (Rhetorical question; No elephants were harmed in the production of this blog) One eats an elephant one byte at a time. Knowing a company’s culture and corporate structure can go a long way in determining how this will be approached. Making sure that all the stakeholders and sources of information are aware of the project and communicating management’s priorities is absolutely essential. This short series of blogs generically lay out an implementation project for a very generic company of about 1200 seats. This is most likely not an exact fit and approach for your needs, but hopefully, it will get the gears turning in defining the project for your organization. Bye the way, the generic IS jargon for AMS is ‘asset management system’ and may be confused at times when addressing the product specifically as AMS ‘Asset Management Suite’. I think the overlap was intentional by marketing to keep the product related to the infromat systems needs.
Project Management 101: Scope Document. Make sure you have a scope document that is clear on what assets are to be included in the project (implementation) so that you’ll have a fairly static target to shoot at. It is quite easy to develop scope creep as people learn more of the capabilities of AMS. Along with scope creep comes increased level of effort and project costs. No one likes that, especially if you’re the hired help billing by the hour.
Here is an example of an Altiris AMS implementation scope document in Microsoft Word format. An actual document could have a considerable more amount of detail and information. A distilled document referencing the actual document may be nice for most management and other stake holders not neck-deep in the project: