xAssets News Articles

xAssets June Newsletter

Read our June Newsletter here

xAssets Announces Industry Information Resource Service

xAssets a privately held developer of IT and software management, fixed asset management software and helpdesk software tools, with offices in the United Kingdom, United States of America and Australia, announced today that it has launched an industry resources service on its website www.xassets.com. For more information, read the PDF press release here

Click here to visit the resources page.

xAssets Hardware Discovery Service is Released - February 2010

xAssets Hardware Discovery Service is a hosted solution to enable customers to quickly establish their Hardware Inventory. The service runs for 60 days and is fast, affordable, agentless, low bandwidth, hosted and requires no expertise. Click here for more information, read the PDF press release here or get the fact sheet here.

End Date for Version 5 Technical Support - January 2010

xAssets is ending technical support capability on Version 5 on 1 September 2010. This means that existing customers on Version 5 will be allowed to maintain support subscription and therefore the right to upgrade, but there will be no Version 5 technical capability maintained within xAssets, and no possibility of fixes to the existing Version 5 product line. Many features of Version 5 have similarities to version 6, so technicans may still be able to answer support questions, but this cannot be guaranteed.

xAssets Network Discovery Receives SIIA Certification - January 2010

Wiltshire, United Kingdom January 5, 2010 - xAssets (www.xassets.com), a privately held developer of IT and software management, fixed asset management software and helpdesk software tools, with offices in the United Kingdom, United States of America and Australia, announced today that its IT asset and software discovery and reconciliation software has been certified by the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) as meeting its standards for accuracy, reliability, and ease of use for performing software audits.

Read the full press release

Click here for more information on xAssets Network Discovery, or get the fact sheet here.

xAssets Introduces Full 64 Bit Support Across its Product Range - December 2009

While xAssets Discovery tools have supported Discovery of 64 Bit systems for some time now, today xAssets has released version 6.3.13 of its Asset Management software products which include full native support for 64 bit servers without the need for 32 bit processes. This capability enables customers to take full advantage of the performance benefits associated with the 64 bit platform, and includes support for Sql Server 2008 - 64 bit editions which together lead to huge improvements in performance.

This change has also led to substantial improvements for hosted customers. Several of xAssets' hosting servers are now running Windows 2008 R2 64 bit edition, with Sql Server 2008 64 bit edition at the back end, and while the old 32-bit systems performed well, the performance gains on our new 64 bit servers are substantial.

Customers will be contacted individually through Q1 2010 to discuss to upgrading to these latest platforms.

xAssets Software Discovery Service is Released - October 2009

xAssets Software Discovery Service is a hosted solution to enable customers to quickly establish their Software License Compliance position. The service runs for 60 days and is fast, affordable, agentless, low bandwidth, hosted and requires no expertise. Click here for more information or get the fact sheet here.

The following Press Release was made public on the 29th October 2009:

Wiltshire, United Kingdom October 29, 2009 - xAssets (www.xassets.com), a privately held corporation with offices in the United Kingdom, United States of America and Australia, provides IT and software management, fixed asset management software and helpdesk software tools to medium and large scale enterprises, announced today that it is introducing a fully integrated automated hosted software compliance service.

xAssets hosted software discovery service provides organizations with the fastest and least complicated route to achieving software compliance. It requires no server acquisition, no software or agent deployment and minimal setup. A very small collection server tool is placed on the user's network and the system is typically up and running in minutes. The hosted service allows discovery for 30 consecutive days and reporting for an additional 30 days. Users can then choose to continue with the hosted service as needed.

Read the full press release

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xAssets Software has been nominated for a Codie award - October 2009

Wiltshire, United Kingdom October 19, 2009 - xAssets (www.xassets.com), a privately held corporation with offices in the United Kingdom, United States of America and Australia, provides IT and software management, fixed asset management software and helpdesk software tools to medium and large scale enterprises, announced today that it's flagship product suite has been nominated for the prestigious SIIA CODIE Award.

The CODiE Awards hold the distinction of being the industry's only peer-reviewed awards program, which provides member companies with a unique opportunity to earn praise from their competitors. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the CODiE Awards program has raised the standard for excellence and serves as prestigious representation of outstanding achievement and vision in the software and information industry.

Continued... Click Here to read the full press release.

xAssets Software 6.3 is Released - July 2009

xAssets Software Version 6.3 has been released with the following improvements:

• Discovery now sends Delta files, so repeat discoveries are much faster
• Discovery is now much faster on the end client - between 1 second and 4 seconds per machine
• Performance and Scalability improvements benefitting large enterprises
• Updated Software Recognition
• Easier setup and easier user interface with cut-down menus
• New reports for comparing IT assets
• Better recognition of computer types through Chassis identification
• SNMP community strings are now set in options
• Improvements to the RDP client launcher
• Six new SNMP attributes including Serial Number
• Planned Maintenance Improvements
• "Remember me" login allows direct access into the app from a shortcut without logging in (NT Users only)
• All products are now accessible from a single download

xAssets Achieves Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Status - January 2009

xAssets has now met Microsoft requirements to become a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. This is the highest level of partnership available to Microsoft partners and gives an indication of the high level of technical expertise within our organisation. It also indicates to customers that our business is reliable, experienced and endorsed by Microsoft.

A joint statement from the xAssets Management Team: "The management team are delighted that we have achieved this certification. Gold Certification highlights our position as a UK and US based software development company with the capacity to develop highly competitive and reliable solutions which are focussed on the needs of our customers. It also confirms to our customers and prospects that as a vendor we have the staff expertise and tools required to implement and support the highly focussed and configured solutions our customers need within a framework of excellence in quality and customer satisfaction."

Customer Update December 2008

xAssets Service Management was released on 22 December 2008. xAssets Service Management has been released as an add-on to the IT Asset Management Suite. Click the link above for more details xAssets Network Discovery 6.1.10 was released on 18 December 2008. 6.1.10 includes the latest software recognition updates and improvements to Monitor serial number cleaning.

September 2008 Software Releases

xAssets Fixed Asset Management 6.1 was released on 15 September 2008.

• Fixed Asset Management
• New Depreciation Calculation Engine
• Support for MACRS and IRS Tax Rules Section 179 Deductions, Limits, Tables and Calculations
• Support for Unusual Depreciation Scenarios
• Support for Short Tax Years and Unusual Accounting Periods
• Multi Currency Support
• Barcoding and Scanner Integration
• Procurement

xAssets IT Asset Management 6.1 was released on 15 September 2008. This product provides Comprehensive IT Asset Management and CMDB functionality for companies with established discovery tools or SMS. Features include

• Integration to any Discovery Tool
• Software Asset Management
• Hardware Asset Management
• IMACS and History Reporting
• Barcoding and Scanner Integration
• Procurement
• Contract Management
• Comprehensive Asset lifecycle Management

xAssets Network Discovery 6.1 was released on 15 September 2008 with the following changes:

• Easy Deployment Software
• Software Recognition Updates
• Improvements to IMACS reporting
• Comprehensive Printer Asset Management via integrations

All existing Version 6 Customers will be offered an upgrade in due course.

June 2008 Update

xAssets Network Discovery 6 is released on 23 June 2008 with the following changes:

• Updated Software Recognition Database
• Updated SNMP, Monitor and Printer Recognition Databases
• Improved Serial Number recognition and cleaning
• Software As A Service architectural enhancements
• Improved Software Product Suite Recognition
• New Discovery Exception and Accounting Reports
• Improved WMI exception workarounds
• Cross Domain Discovery and DomainLess Discovery
• Improved Support for USB stick and HTTP based discovery scenarios
• Location from IP recognition records automatically created
• Active Directory Integration now supports Multiple OU's from an options box
• Any collection server can now be used to pull OLEDB data as well as discovery data
• Improvements to the AutoReport engine

All existing Version 6 Customers will be offered an upgrade in due course.

April 2008 Update for Customers

Several recent xAssets Customer Acquisitions have taken advantage of the deep configuration capabilities of our new Network Discovery and Asset Management product - xAssets Network Discovery 6. An installation in England with 1200 discovered nodes recently extended the configuration to automatically detect broken installations of McAfee Antivirus through the inspection of the running state of the Windows Services associated with McAfee. The same client also used the windows service discovered data to detect wrongly configured installations of Windows Update and Patchlink. This enabled Network Administrators to detect problems across the entire network within a few days of installation, and those machines have now been fixed and are under survilance with a daily discovery schedule connecting directly through to configured email notifications for exception reporting. Another English implementation with around 2000 discovered nodes have recently completed their Software Asset Management implementation. All recognition data cleansing processes were completed by xAssets and software licence reconciliation has been completed. In the USA we have completed six new enterprise SAM and ITAM implementations and three more implementation projects are underway. Several new capabilities are being developed as a result of these including:

• SMS Integration as an alternative to discovery
• HP Web Jet Admin Integration for Detailed Printer Asset and Status information
• The SNMP Recognition database has been extended to new Manufacturers
• Additional SNMP Discovery Fields
• Disaster Recovery Processes can now be constructed through the Data Transformation Engine
• The Sql Server agentless instance discovery tools has been extended to allow discovery under any Windows Credentials alongside database logins, without the need to log in as a different user

Clarification of Version 5 Support Policy

A few customers have expressed concern that we may drop support for Version 5 implementations. The management team have agreed to guarantee support for Version 5 implementations at least until September 2010, and that support will comply with the standards and policies set out in our new "Intensive Support" initiative. xAssets plans to upgrade all customers to Version 6 by September 2009.

March 2008 Update for Customers

xAssets Network Discovery Version 6 has now passed extensive scalability and performance tests for Very Large Database (VLDB) installations. With specific tuning of the dashboards and queries we were able to support 240,000 IT Assets and 2,500,000 Fixed assets in the same database, with each IT Asset having detailed data for Software, Device Manager, Services, AutoRun, CPU, Memory, Disk Arrays and Printers. The testing was conducted using two low cost Dell Servers running Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition, Sql Server 2005 Standard Edition, each machine having 4GB RAM, 2x256GB IDE disks and Dual Core 2.0 MHz Woodcrest processors.

xAssets has entered into a business partner relationship with Infinite Technology Solutions in Australia. This replaces our former single office infrastructure in Melbourne with offices and people on the ground in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane. Infinite TS will service all existing customers with support contracts and will take control of distribution and direct sales to new resellers and customers.

New Website Release - March 2008

xAssets has released its new website on the 24th March 2008. This site has been rewritten to use the latest ASP.NET technology while also providing customers with instant chat and a support forum, which is designed to complement our existing access to product specialists for getting quick answers to support incidents, questions, issues, howtos and strategy.