New Microsoft Select Plus Licensing Program
On July 1st Microsoft announced a new licensing program designed for large organizations with multiple affiliates. Called Select Plus, it is another sign that Microsoft is trying to reign in its complex licensing system.
If a company has several affiliates in different locations, Select Plus will enable your affiliates to take advantage of price-level adjustments that are based on the actual purchase volume for your entire organization.
Registration has been simplified to one page making it faster and simpler to register each affiliate. Under the plan your company can purchase software licenses at any time, easing planning and deployment as your needs change.
The Select Plus licensing program is due to start up in October 2008
Microsoft lists these as the top five reasons to choose Select Plus:
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IT Asset Management - Part 2 Usage Tracking
This is the second in a series of articles to help you improve your inventory management system. Read the first installment in the series IT Asset Management - Part 1 Catalog of Assets.
Usage Tracking
Usage data is a key part of an inventory management system. The data provide from usage tracking will help you:
- Determine the minimum on-hand inventory you need to maintain
- Help you set minimum inventory levels to trigger ordering
- Spot trends in usage that indicate the need for root cause analysis
- Give you snapshots in time of inventory usage
What Do You Need to Track?
Everything. Whatever you use, internal or external needs to be tracked. If you have it in inventory you should track it. If you order it you should track it. If you must maintain on-hand inventory you should track it. I also like to break down the data between our different internal and external customers. This shows what is going where and provides data that can be used in other reports such as for a particular customer.
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IT Asset Management - Part 1 Catalog of Assets
This is the first in a series of articles about setting up and running an IT Asset Management System. This article will focus on a Catalog of Assets. The catalog serves as a framework for other areas of your system as well as a quick reference for all of the assets you need to track.
You can use products such as Excel to create a basic system. For a more inclusive system you may want to use database software such as Access. There are also a host of commercial software packages out there to choose from.
Continue reading IT Asset Management - Part 1 Catalog of Assets
