Welcome to the Provance IT Asset Management Pack Readme. This Readme contains important information about the latest release. Please review the details of this release as outlined in the Table of Contents.
This Readme is related to the Provance IT Asset Management Pack 2012 CU5 for Microsoft® System Center Service Manager 2012 R2 RTM. Please review the IT Asset Management Pack Deployment Guide for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading the management pack.
The IT Asset Management Pack requires the following:
System Center Service Manager 2012 R2 or 2012 SP1
System Center Service Manager 2012 Authoring Tool (required for the IT Asset Management Pack Authoring Tool components)
This release includes the following updated materials:
Provance Setup.exe
Readme - IT Asset Management Pack for MS SCSM.htm (this document)
This release supports new installations and upgrades of the IT Asset Management Pack on System Center Service Manager 2012 R2 RTM and Service Manager 2012 SP1. Ensure that you have a valid key from Provance for the IT Asset Management Pack.
There are no special requirements for upgrading from IT Asset Management Pack 2012 RTM; the upgrade is performed automatically using the Provance setup.
If you have IT Asset Management Pack Beta 2.0 or 1.2 SP1 installed and you created a software usage connector, you likely encountered a data synchronization failure with it. This issue has been resolved, but the recommended practice is to delete the connector before upgrading.
To save metering rules and remove a software usage connector before upgrading:
Run a query to save the software metering rules associated with the version 2010 connector. See the Provance User Community for details.
Go to the Administration workspace > Connectors.
Select the software usage connector you created.
In the Tasks pane, click Delete.
Proceed with upgrading the IT Asset Management Pack.
This release will automatically upgrade an IT Asset Management Pack 2.0 Beta 4 or 5 installed on Service Manager 2012. If you have Beta 1, 2, or 3 installed, then upgrade Service Manager to 2012 RTM first before installing the IT Asset Management Pack 2012. If you have not selected the Software Usage feature, your installation is complete.
If you have selected Software Usage and plan on using it:
Create a new software usage connector, see the User Guide for the IT Asset Management Pack.
Import the software metering rules you saved in Upgrading with a Software Usage Connector.
Validate that the metering rules imported correctly and that the software usage connector is running.
Upgrade the IT Asset Management Pack 1.2 SP1, which is installed on Service Manager 2010, as follows:
Ensure that Service Manager 2010 has been upgraded to SP1 CU3. Also, ensure that CU3 is installed on both the CMDB and the Data Warehouse. Please see the Microsoft knowledge base article KB2588492 for details.
Ensure that you have a valid key from Provance for the IT Asset Management Pack.
Ensure that the IT Asset Management Pack has been upgraded to 1.2 SP1.
Ensure that Data Warehouse MPSync has completed successfully with no failures.
Ensure that Provance SRSS reports have been deployed in the Data Warehouse and are available from the console.
Back up the Service Manager CMDB and the Data Warehouse. Consult the Service Manager 2012 Upgrade documentation for specific details.
Upgrade to Service Manager 2012 RTM. We recommend that you permit MPSync to fully complete.
NOTES:
Provance IT Asset Management Pack 1.2 SP1 is installed under Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1. Provance IT Asset Management Pack 2.0 Beta (1) is installed under Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2012 CTP2. In both cases you need to upgrade System Center Service Manager to 2012 SP1.
Upgrade the operating system to Windows 2008 R2 SP1. This is a requirement of Service Manager 2012.
Upgrade to Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2012 RTM (GA).
If you have collected software usage data, run the Software Usage v2 hotfix. See the Provance User Community for details.
Upgrade the
IT Asset Management Pack.
If you have not invoked the Software Usage feature, your installation
is complete.
Create a new software usage connector, see the User Guide for the IT Asset Management Pack.
Import the software metering rules you saved in Upgrading with a Software Usage Connector.
Validate that the metering rules imported correctly and that the software usage connector is running.
The following items reflect the changes in this release:
A Use only when assigned check box has been added to the SKU. When you select this option any licenses that are associated with the SKU are removed from the calculation of your licensing position, unless there is a manual assignment of a license. For example, a SKU has two licenses associated with it — license A and license B — but only license B has been manually assigned to a user. When you select the Use only when assigned option on its SKU, only license B will be considered during licensing position calculation. License A has no assignment so it will be disregarded.
Downgrade paths on SKUs were being over reported, although the licensing position calculation was not affected. This has been corrected in the current release.
Some hardware assets were incorrectly counted towards your Provance Product Licensing. Hardware assets with custom life cycles that were children of returned, retired or disposed life cycles were incorrectly included. These assets are no longer counted towards your Provance Product license.
The Recalculate Software Licensing Values task had an imposed limit on the number of software titles that could be included in the calculation. That limit has been removed.
The Licensed Installs count on a software title and version was incorrect when the Assignment Quantity was greater than one. Now when you have multiple assignments to an asset, the Licensed Install count will show a single licensed install. For example, SQL Server Enterprise 2012 has five licenses and there is one version installed on server PROD. If you make two assignments of SQL Server 2012 to server PROD, then its Licensed Installs count will remain as 1.
The reoccurring Invalid View error message has been corrected. This usually occurred after installing or upgrading the IT Asset Management Pack.
The following is a list of known issues in the IT Asset Management Pack for the current release:
Do not insert the # character in a Contract ID of a Lease Schedule.
The Data Management concatenation operation cannot interpret a period (.) as a constant. Use another character in place of the period.
When you upgrade the IT Asset Management Pack, the language setting of the operating system must be the same as it was during installation. If you change the language before upgrading, the installation/upgrade fails with an error message.
An error is thrown during installation if the user level is not Administrator. To fix the problem, ensure the user performing the installation is an Administrator.
Ensure that the Workflow Account (a Run As Account) has the same permissions as that of the Administrator. Provance workflows will not run properly unless the Workflow Account has the correct permissions.
The Cost Event Total is not immediately updated after a new cost event is added. Close and re-open the hardware asset or click the Refresh task.
Currency values are limited to two decimal places.
When adding a new Base Currency to the Global Administration Settings, save the form first and then re-open it. The Base Currency list needs to be refreshed in order to see newly added base currencies.
When editing multiple SKUs, the License Quantity field may be marked as mandatory when it should not be mandatory. This occurs in two situations: when one or more SKUs does not have a license and when the SKUs all have a different License Quantity. If some of the SKUs being edited do not have a license, any changes you make to the License Quantity will not be saved. This behavior is expected, because the quantity cannot be changed in all of the SKUs. However, if each SKU being edited has a different number of licenses, the License Quantity can be changed and saved. In this situation you are forced to change the License Quantity because the field is mandatory, resulting in all SKUs having the same number of licenses. If you have SKUs with different License Quantities, edit them individually to prevent any data loss.
The following items have been addressed in the IT Asset Management Pack 2012 CU3 Hotfix 1:
Currency values now use the Service Manager console Language menu setting to determine their format.
Companies can now be related to more than one agreement during a Data Management Pack import. In previous releases the Data Management Pack would not permit a company from being related to more than one Software License or Software Maintenance Agreement. However, as an example you may now relate the Publisher on Software License Agreement A to Microsoft and the Publisher on Software License B to Microsoft during an import.
When a software title is assigned to a user there is now support for partial coverage of software licenses on multiple devices belonging to the user. For example, when a user has four hardware assets but there are no user based licenses and only three device-based licenses were found, then only three of the four devices will be covered by licenses.
The previous release contained fixes for the following items:
Allocation values were not saved on a software title.
When a software title also included a software manager, Incidents were not being added to its Related Items tab.
Event ID 4508 could appear in the Service Manager Opsman log, indicating an invalid assembly for Health Service.
A user who was not an Administrator could not run the Recalculate Software Licensing Values task.
Closing or cancelling any Edit Multiple form crashed the console.
Scroll bars were missing from the Edit Multiple Hardware Assets form.
When you recalculated the software licensing of multiple titles, some titles contained an incorrect licensing status or licensing count.
The Data Management Import Job Details form incorrectly reported the Records processed value.
IT Asset Management Pack User Guide
IT Asset Management Pack Deployment Guide
© 2014 Provance Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Provance Technologies Inc.
490 Saint-Joseph Boulevard, 2nd Floor
Gatineau, Quebec
CANADA
J8Y 3Y7
Provance® and the Provance logo are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Provance Technologies Inc.
Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft.
All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.