Next Round of the Asset Inventory Service (AIS) 2.0 Beta

Three months ago we posted about the open beta for the Asset Inventory Service (AIS) 2.0. To all of you who signed up, we want to say thanks for your help and participation. It was great to see to people interested in the improved user interface, the enhanced hardware reporting, and the other changes we made like version aggregation and support for App-V packages in the software reporting.

Today we are opening up the next beta of AIS 2.0. New to this beta is multi-language support. The languages we are supporting are English, French, Japanese, German, Portuguese – Brazilian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. To make sure that you see the language you want, you need to have your browser language preferences configured correctly. Instructions on how to configure your language settings in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 can be found here.

To sign up for the beta, please go to – https://connect.microsoft.com/site310/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=3615&pageType=1

You will need to have a Microsoft Live ID to join. Once you have signed up and accepted the AIS pre-release online services agreement, we will begin the process of provisioning your AIS account and will send you an email within seven days with the account details. We ask participants to please submit their feedback to us on their experiences with the service and we will consider this input for future versions. Please be aware that all inventory data that you upload will be deleted once the beta is completed at the end of October.

After you sign up for the beta, I would recommend that you take a look at the new video we created for AIS 2.0. This scenario based video provides an overview of AIS and gives you an idea how AIS can help you manage you software and hardware inventory, understand your Microsoft license position, and introduce you to some of the new features in 2.0. You can find the video posted here on Springboard.