Subtitles of the Movie

We'll now move on to talk about Workstation Inventory. Workstation Inventory, as its name implies, allows you to collect workstation hardware and software configuration information. The Workstation Inventory agent runs on the workstation at specified intervals and collects this historical information about the installed hardware and software so that you can then do query-driven reports to find out, for example, how quickly is disk space being depleted across all the machines in my computer lab, or how many machines have Microsoft Office installed in the month of January. You and then run reports in an ad hoc manner, or schedule these reports to run and send you the information so that you can then provide those reports to your management to justify business decisions as in we need bigger, beefier workstations because we're completely out of disk space on these existing workstations; or, we need to upgrade to Windows XP or Windows Vista and these 27 workstations on the network will not support it because it falls outside the recommended hardware configuration for the operating system. For administrators that may have used Microsoft SMS, or SCCM as it's now called, or Tivoli, to perform similar functions, they all work pretty much the same. It gathers all the information about the workstations, it puts them into a relational database, in this case it defaults to Sybase, although you can make it store it in Microsoft SQL. And then you can take that information that's in that relational database and slice and dice it any way you want. The Workstation Inventory piece of ZDM7 is very modular, meaning that you can roll up inventory across a multiple eDirectory trees; say if you have an eDirectory tree for your Europe and Asia markets and you have an eDirectory tree for the U.S. and you have an eDirectory tree for South America, you can collect the information about the child workstations in all of those eDirectory trees and roll them up to your one corporate management eDirectory tree so that you can report on all the machines anywhere in your Enterprise from a single database. We'll show you how that's done but again, because I have limited hardware in our lab we can't really demonstrate that per se. And this concludes the introduction to ZENworks Desktop Management 7.