Software Audit with Software Asset Management System

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Service of NCS Opscan 8/50 Optical Mark Reader Ended in December 2009

Please be reminded that the multiple-choice scanning and survey data collection service of the NCS Opscan 8/50 will cease soon. Originally the service was planned to cease by the end of Semester B 2008-09, but it is now extended to December 2009 (i.e. at the end of Semester A, 2009-10) to allow more time for our users to look for other alternatives. For queries on other alternatives, please feel free to contact the CSC Help Desk.

How to Go Green: Double-sided Printing

Double-sided (or 2-sided or duplex) printing should be used whenever possible. Besides the benefits of saving trees, reducing carbon in the atmosphere, and holding a handier set of hardcopies, surprisingly it can save up your print quota. With immediate effect, whenever you use duplex printing to print on a piece of paper through the Quota Controlled Fast Print Queue, your print quota will be deducted by 1.5 instead of 2. This is really a big saver!

To use double-sided printing, when you print:

Choose the printer Quota_FastPQ on CCSTUNG1
Click Preferences and then Finishing on the Printing Preferences window
Select 2-sided Printing and click OK

Using double-sided printing is a small change but can have a big impact. As going green is our common goal, act NOW to show your support!

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Got any questions, comments or suggestions? Contact the editors at ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk

Issue 47 - March 2006

Software Audit with Software Asset Management System
By Lily Siu

To comply with the Copyright Ordinance, the Management Board endorsed the implementation of a Software Asset Management Scheme in the University in July 2002.

To implement the scheme, two application systems have been developed for use by all departments. They are the Software Inventory System and the software scanning tool, named SAMScan.

The Software Inventory System aims to assist departments in managing their software inventory and licensing information. It has been incorporated into AIMS under "Software Asset Management". Data on software acquisitions are extracted from purchase orders and added directly to the departmental inventory database.

To assess the actual software that is used on each PC, SAMScan is made available to all staff. After SAMScan is run, management reports of SAMScan results will be made available in "Software Asset Management" in AIMS.

Two University-wide software asset assessment exercises had been conducted in 2002 and 2004. Along with the exercises, two versions of the systems had been launched.

Based on the experience from the previous two assessment exercises, a new version of the Software Asset Management System (Version 5) was launched in January 2006 and is now available for departments to use.

SAMScan 2005, the new version, provides many new features:

Besides detecting Ethernet address of a PC, SAMScan can now detect additional information about the PC such as serial number, domain users' name and department.
With SAMScan, users are asked to enter optional data such as the location and FAS number of the PC. However, departments may wish to make some of these optional data mandatory. As such, new functions are available for departments to define their own settings.
To assist general users to enter meaningful and appropriate remarks, a list of common remarks is defined and made available for users to select.
Besides typing in English remarks, Chinese character input is also enabled.

Under AIMS, the Software Inventory System as well as management reports of SAMScan results have also been enhanced. The new features include:

In older versions, when departments updated their departmental license and remarks, it took one or two days to process. With the new version, the update of departmental license and remarks are effective immediately.
To assist departments to reconcile the scanned results with software inventory records, the new system provides easier means for users to link the software in use with the actual software purchased.
To encourage departments to suggest software category to the central database, users can now make the suggestion directly through AIMS, without the need to send email.
Departments can now choose to review scanned results of their PCs before submission to the central.
For large departments, they may wish to group their staff by administrative sections for better management. The new system now provides summary reports that can sort machine owners according to their administrative sections.