Chapter 2. Assets and Compliance

The Asset Intelligence section of System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2 gives you the ability to build inventories of your software licenses and also lets you manage them. It gives you an overview of the software installed on your infrastructure by keeping an Asset Intelligence catalog. Asset Intelligence uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to extract more detailed information from the hardware and software that is being used. SCCM 2012 R2 gives the users more than 60 different reports about the gathered asset information and displays them in a format that is easy to read. Most reports lead to more specific reports, where you can create custom queries to get detailed information. You can add custom information, such as custom software categories, software families, software labels, and hardware requirements, to the Asset Intelligence catalog.

SCCM 2012 R2 delivers an integrated, intelligent, and comprehensive overview of your company's software installations. It helps reduce the total cost of ownership of your application management life cycle, making software inventories by scanning all the hardware resources and translating inventoried data into useful information. You can limit software license usage by importing software license information into the Configuration Manager site's database. Asset Intelligence is very useful for keeping track of all the assets in your infrastructure, including software and hardware. The Asset Intelligence functionality in SCCM 2012 R2 can be used to inventory and report software that is in use in your infrastructure.