Coming very soon! Asset Inventory Service 1.5 (AIS)
We are happy to say that all MDOP 2008 R2 components due for general release in October are now available for customers to download! You can download MDOP 2008 R2 here: https://licensing.microsoft.com. As we blogged previously, one part of this release is Asset Inventory Service 1.5, and it’s going to be available to MDOP customers in November of this year. AIS 1.0 has been available to MDOP customers since November 2007, and many of our customers using the current version are anticipating the added license reconciliation feature that will be delivered with version 1.5.
David Driggers, System Center Configuration Manager Administrator from Energen, is one of those customers. He shared his experience with the Asset Inventory Service with us:
“I was amazed at how easy the AIS client was to deploy and how fast it started returning data from clients . After attending a TechED session about AIS I contacted our TAM about setting up access to the service. By lunch that day we were setup and ready to start testing the client install. I returned to my hotel room and downloaded the AIS client -- my laptop was the first test subject. The install was very fast, there was no noticeable impact to performance on the laptop, and within one hour inventory data was available on the AIS website. To say I was impressed was an understatement. One of the biggest issues we face at Energen is keeping an up to date inventory on the laptops we have. They are rarely in the office and when they do come in it is for a very short period of time. Having an inventory tool that can collect data over an Internet connection is something we have needed for a long time.
After testing the client on my laptop I connected to our network and setup a System Center Configuration Manager package to deploy the AIS client to a set of test machines. That test was flawless and once again the data was available in a very short period of time on the AIS website. The third and final test would be to 100 clients in the five-state region we operate in. As with the previous tests this one exceeded my expectations. The final step was to deploy the client enterprise wide. I started the deployment the night I returned from TechED and by the next morning 1000 of our clients had the client installed and inventory data was available on the AIS website.
The current version of AIS is very easy to deploy, very quick to collect and post inventory data and the web interface is very easy to use. Since this is a version 1 release of the product there are parts that are a work in progress like reporting but it is still a useful tool for collecting inventory data on clients especially clients that are not on the corporate network very often. It was worth the wait and I can hardly wait for version 1.5 to be released. “
It is always great to hear from our customers. If you would like to share your experience with the MDOP products, please drop us a line.