Today at TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona Microsoft released Asset Inventory Service (AIS) to the web. In case you aren't familiar with AIS, it includes technology Microsoft acquired from AssetMetrix in 2006. In addition to the hosted service announced today, the 'brain power' behind AIS is also available in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and SMS 2003 SP3 in the form of Asset Intelligence. Bottom line - we're talking about tools to help make sense of all the software products deployed across an enterprise. Here's the full PDF datasheet on AIS if you're interested.
The First System Center Online Service
One important thing to note about AIS is that the entire solution is hosted by Microsoft. As an administrator all you do is deploy a small client to your PCs and wait for the data to appear at https://sc.microsoft.com. I've included screen shots at the end of this post to give you a feel for the interface.
How Do I Get It?
If you own Microsoft Software Assurance and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) you're half way there. You'll need to activate the MDOP-AIS 'benefit' through the Volume License Portal and designate an AIS administrator. The System Center Online team has a detailed post on the activation process over at their blog - so I won't delve into the details.
Other Details
Right now the AIS client installer weighs in at 1.37MB. I've been running various iterations of the AIS client over the last few months with no negative side-effects (including on Vista x64). Microsoft even published an ADM template on the public download site so you can tweak AIS settings using Active Directory.
Screen Shots
As usual I'll update this post with more info and screen shots as time permits. However, I wanted to get something in your hands before the weekend. The following screen shots were taken about a week ago using the final Release Candidate version of AIS. Differences between the RC and RTW interfaces are almost non-existent except removal of the word Beta. This should represent what you'll see on your own AIS home page. I've included images of the management page and several example reports (software and computer).
Expect to hear more about AIS and the System Center Online group in the near future. Check back in a couple days for updated info... or better yet, subscribe to the site RSS feed and get notified of any changes to this and other posts.