Asset Management Suite

I believe in Altiris 6.5, the inventory to asset sync would populate the system number with the computer's asset tag, however this doesn't appear to happen in 7.0/7.1.  Is the design intended for the asset tag to be manually typed in each time?

Is there some way to force the system number field to be populated with the computer's asset tag?  We enter the tag into the BIOS of each Dell computer we have.

Ok upon further digging, it looks like I need to create a CMDB rule that will take the Chassis.Asset Tag field and put its value into the System Number field.  The interface for the CMDB rule creation is pretty confusing, at least for me... can anyone walk me through how I would go about creating a rule like this?  I can get the right data classes added but I'm not sure how to get it to populate a field from one class to another...

Ok, I figured it out.  The interface is just strange and non-sensical to me, but at least now I know how it works.

I made a report that shows the computer name as well as its asset tag info from the hardware inventory (inv_HW_chassis).  Then I used that report in Step 1 - Select Resources.  I finally figured out that this is what populates the drop down for the "Source" when I am trying to update the Identity - System Number field within the CMDB.

Next step is to deploy the Dell OMCI to all of our machines so that we can script the addition of the asset tag for machine where it is missing (or change it when necessary) without having the boot the machine into BIOS!

You don't need Dell OMCI just to update the asset tag of some machines, for that... the way we do it is with a script that uses this command line tool from Dell

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/555/DriverDetails/DriverFileFormats?DriverId=R81909

sometimes it is easier to do it in sql 

if your name is the asset tag use this 

WOW. Thanks.  This wil help me alot and I can modify it for my needs.

I used to have 5 differnt jobs running as SQL jobs at night to update all my machines for different sequences like this 

Can anyone from Symantec answer if this is working as intended or a bug in the agent?

Since this is Asset-related, it would need to be gathered by an import or a CMDB rule.  This field is not Inventory-related and therefore will not be automatically populated by inventory.

I'm not sure what the benefit is of filling out a field with another field that's already populated.  Why not just query that other, populated field?  I didn't read this particular thread yet, so maybe I've missed some critical information.

From my own perspective, it helps us to verify that the asset tag has been properly entered into the BIOS by technicians.  Instead of going through the effort of manually entering an asset tag into the asset field and then doing comparisons on the inventory vs the asset tag info, we can just have the asset tag come from the inventory and any blank ones we know we need to enter into the BIOS (or fix the agent, as that is commonly a problem for us). 

I don't see the value in having two fields for the same thing that must be populated by different sources so the CMDB rule seems like a no brainer to me, but again that is based on our internal processes.

well the purpose for my query was to make sure that I had the barcode field filled in at all times. The barcode field is a Asset field and the asset tag field is a inventory field from the remote machine 

Also the Barcode process pull from the Barcode field directly. So it is easier to use the stock functionality with a little bit of SQL on the back end

I had seperate queries as to why the Barcode field was not filled in. In the Leasing world the Barcode was the connection between the Contract and the machine. The Barcode was also my billing refernce to a machine not the serial number.