Hello everyone I am currently looking for an inventory system that will be able to track our assets currently connected to the network and also to track assets in our closet like loaner laptops, spare computers etc.... Can we add offline assets to configuration manager like Hard Drive or do we have to get something like System Center Service Manager to manually track items?

I think, you need to use third part tool to achieve this goal. May be, http://www.shavlik.com/info/it-asset-management.aspxAnoop C Nair - Twitter @anoopmannur MY BLOG: http://anoopmannur.wordpress.com SCCM Professionals This posting is provided AS-IS with no warranties/guarantees and confers no rights.

We use a feature called Hardware Inventory (HINV) in ConfigMgr to get at client data. We get this from the Clients WMI repository, most queries for HINV run against ROOT\CIMV2 and any data in there that is accessible can be defined and collected, this includes individual drives installed in a Client machine. That's a super cool summary of the feature. I should warn you that ConfigMgr has a history "window", it cannot retain client records and client data forever, if the clients do not report in for a predefined amount of time, maintenance tasks remove the data from the database. So, you cannot really use ConfigMgr as the definitive source of asset information unless you tell it to never delete client data which would have an impact on the product the severity of which depends on the size of your Hierarchy. I believe Service Manager would be the way to go, and use the handy integration into ConfigMgr to feed up data. HTH

Agree with Marshall, Use Service Manger to manage the corp's assert is a good solution. Service manager can be used for assert management, inside it all asserts can be managed as a configuration item(computer, printer...). It is not designed for just assert, service manager privode the framework for you with custom management pack which can have classes, relationships etc. defined. So you can customize SM for your corp. and create an assert related management pack by the authoring tool. Hope this will help. Thanks