I have been asked in the past if ZENworks Asset Management could be used to create a repository for license codes. One could spoof this by utilizing a note/comments field on the purchasing side in a consistent fashion or be adding the codes to documents and archiving them under document management, but each of these approaches requires storing the codes in less than intuitive locations and creating custom reports to retrieve the information.

I feel like the optimal solution would be in a new table specific to the task. I would extend the purchase data import schema to allow for codes to be imported from reseller data, as well as provide a simple, straightforward UI approach. It occurs to me that there should be administrator permissions that protect the data, with options for read-write, read-only, and a default of no-access.

Not sure how to handle reporting if that is to be provided, as that would require a degree of permissions granularity (single table or domain subset) that is not currently supported. Might be best to not support reporting in this area and leave access to the UI.

Comments

  • Absolutely. Having to maintain activation keys in a separate system (or having to kluge something together in ZenAM) is frustrating. If I'm using ZenAM to keep track of purchase, installation, and compliance information, it doesn't make sense that when I need an activation key I have to build a different process to maintain that.