Reporting

Here are some more tips and tricks for those who use Deployment Solution for Dell Servers 3+ to manage their Dell Server hardware. This article builds on its predecessor, providing more shortcuts and clues on how to make your job easier as an IT manager over Dell systems.

Active Directory and Altiris Notification Server seem to have a love hate relationship. The Active Directory connector loves to import user names and computer names, but it hates to do anything related to group membership. A common request has been the ability to incorporate user group information from Active Directory into collections in order to allow user based software delivery. In other words, install Quickbooks to all of the users who are in the Accounting OU. This tip steps through how to accomplish this.

Who among you has ever looked at the CPU information that the Altiris hardware inventory gathers and said "That's not what I need. I need to know how many physical CPUs are there, or how many cores there are, or whether this is a hyper threading CPU, etc."

Altiris Workflow is currently in beta, but is still quite powerful. One of the ways to get information out of workflow is to create an integration library that uses existing information in the web reports. These reports can be either be the existing pre-built reports or custom reports that you have created previously.

Measure twice and cut once. Sometimes not remembering to do that causes trouble, and has sometimes ruined some beautiful wood stock.

Frequently we do something similar in the Task Server environment when we forget to check the collection references that our tasks are assigned to. Like sending a Shutdown, or Restart task to "All Computers".

I recently received request for a report that would show which of our computers are covered by a warranty. I looked around and didn't see a report off hand (that was not tied to the expiration of the warranty) but I did see a lot of similar reports for expiring leases.

Hopefully my solution to this reporting problem will come in handy for someone else.