Smart Task to Display Online Warranty Information for Dell Computers
Filed under:
Helpdesk Solution
Inventory, Customization, Productivity
Submitted by PeeGee on 24 August, 2007 - 08:53.
When working with the Helpdesk Console, it's very handy to have warranty information about the selected asset available at a snap.
For evironments with Dell Computers that use Inventory Solution and Helpdesk Solution, there is an easy way to accomplish this.
Dell's online support offers the possibility to look up warranty information for any Dell System by entering the system's serial number/support tag.
Once this information has been collected via Inventory Solution, it is automatically passed to the Helpdesk Solution asset database.
From Helpdesk, a Smart Task can be used to call the Dell support page and pass the asset's serial number automatically to the page, which will display the warranty information for the particular system.
- In the Helpdesk Console go to: Admin > Import Admin Data.
- Copy and paste the content of the attached .txt file into the import field and click on "Import".
Note: The Smart-Task will only be displayed for an incident, if the selected asset is a Dell Computer (and inventory information about the computers is available).
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(37 votes)
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| dell_support_smart_task.txt | 1.08 KB |
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Great Tip ***One problem
The asset information isn't "automatically" being passed to the Helpdesk Solution. What triggers this information being passed. We see all of the computers within Helpdesk but it's detailed information (S/N, manufacture, etc.) isn't being pulled from NS.
Where do we go to get this information to replicate to Helpdesk?
Thanks for this article
By default HD imports
By default HD imports resources of the type "Computer" every one hour from the NS database. Based on the query it is running, it should import the following information, if Inventory Solution is installed:
[Office Location][Company][Department][OS Name][System Manufacturer][Computer Model][IP Address][Serial Number][Asset Tag].
You can check the HD Product Guide from page 24 which also contains more information about how the query works and from which fields the data is imported into the NS (see \AexHD\templates\nssource.xml).
Works like a charm
once your Helpdesk syncs up all the computers, the model and service tag get passed and it goes straight to that page within the Dell site.
Now who is going to do the same for other vendor system ;)
Wow! that is really neat! One warning, though...
One warning on using this is that if (undoubtedly you will) go through waranty motherboard replacements, such as the Optiplex Gx270 popped capacitor problems, you'll want to use Dell's tool to reconfigure the motherboard with the correct Dell service tag into it, so when Altiris harvests the inventory, it reflects the correct one, sending you to the correct waranty webpage, from Helpdesk incidents. I don't have a link to that tool to post right now.
Mike
This is very nice
I've been looking for something like this for some time. This is extremely important to me now as we being to put together a hardware refresh schedule and this handy tool gives me a quick way to get that ever important warranty information.
Great tool.
BASE URL modification needed
I just realized that the task stopped working for me, because Dell modified the base url.
To get it working again, simply modify the "Base URL" in the Smart task and replace it with the following string:
Good Catch
I noticed the same problem too and updated the task and it works perfectly again.
Works like a charm and saves time!
Works great! This saves us time from looking in deployement solution or inventory solution in order to gain this information. Thanks!!
Right click Menu
Would it be possible to add this into the right click menu structure so that you can use it without Helpdesk, simply right click on a Dell computer under resources and go straight to the Dell support site?
Amazing article
Thanks a lot for showing how to work this feature. Great tool for those of us in an all dell environment.
How about taking this information further?
Here is something I'm trying to figure out if it's possible in a more automated fashion.
I would like to load this warranty information for all my machines into the NS DB so that when I do my quarterly HW refreshes, i can simply run reports to find out the machines that are eligible.
I know this is possible with the Dell Client Manager installed. Someone on Altirigos discovered that you can open a resource and click on the Real-time tab and in the Dell Client manger section there is a Management task that will Update the Warranty. This information populates the INV_OMCA_Dell_Warranty table.
Very nice, but this is manual against each machine. For large environments, that could take a LOT of time to do.
Does anyone know of an automated way to run this task against all machines?
Open Enhancement Request for updating warranty information
I was looking around the Altiris Knowledgebase and discovered that there is an Enhancement requet for this very thing.
The article number is 40830.
So hopefully sometime in the near future there will be an automated or some kind of batch process to do update the warranty information for computers.