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:
