Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Overview of this book

OCS Inventory NG is a cross-platform, open-source inventory and asset management solution. It brings more than plentiful features to the table to satisfy the business needs of small-to-large organizations with up to tens of thousands of computers. However, to put this inventory solution to optimum use requires a lot of skill.This book will lead you through the steps of implementing OCS-NG until you master working with it. This book aims at reducing efforts involved in resource management. The solution gives a robust foundation on top of which we can implement other third party applications, plugins, and much more.This book begins with the basics—it explains what IT inventorying needs are to be met in the real-world. Then, it covers a step-by-step approach to everything you need to know to set up and implement OCS-NG as a centralized inventory solution to meet all these requirements. It delves deeper into carrying out inventory tasks with every chapter.You will learn how to choose the best agent type and deployment method. We discuss the process of gathering inventory data and cover techniques for creating and deploying packages. You will also learn how to acquire added benefits with the use of plugins. We discuss best practices on inventorying and troubleshooting agent-related problems. The book presents real-world inventorying scenarios along with their solutions. You will basically learn how to use OCS-NG to get the most out of it.As a conclusion, if you want to learn about a free solution that fulfils inventorying necessities of the real-world, this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Keeping Pace with Version Updates—Glancing over the changelog of the Latest Release

Setting up the OCS-NG management server on Windows operating systems


Over the years, people from all walks of life got familiar with the Microsoft Windows OS. The reason for that is simple; their focus lay on the standard definition of user friendliness. No matter what the task to be carried out using Windows was, it needed to be automated, wizard based, and intuitive with a beautiful user interface.

The same goes for software installations. We expect wizards and we expect to be able to go through the stages of an application's setup just by clicking Next, accepting the license agreement, filling out some text fields, browsing for the target location, and eventually ticking some checkboxes identifying what we really need. However, this last step is hidden under the name of advanced or expert mode. For the average user, the typical configuration should suffice.

Regardless of the application type and what purpose it's going to serve, most people would expect such an installation using Windows...