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One of Canada's oldest libraries is closing the books on
labour-intensive systems monitoring and inventory processing with the help of a
recently released software asset management product set from Microsoft.

The Kitchener Public Library's (KPL) four-person IT team can now easily run a system serving 150 employees and a community of 250,000.

What's more it is able to manage servers, desktop machines and various hardware, from a single console.

These capabilities, says KPL, are being driven by System Center Essentials 2007 a set of IT systems management software products from Microsoft Corp. specifically designed for mid-sized businesses (up to 500 PCs and 30 servers).

IT team members say their ability to monitor, update and control asset inventory remotely allows them to identify and deal proactively with potential problems before they even occur.

"We're no longer just fighting fires as they pop up,” said Bryan Dunham, coordinator of the IT department at the library. “The system sends us a warning if a server is undergoing any stress even before we receive a ticket from our users."

But this happy state of affairs is relatively recent.

Prior to deployment, last September, the 124-year-old library did not have an automated asset tracking system.

To monitor and maintain the building's 20 servers and 241 workstations, IT personnel often had to check each machine physically.

As the main office of four smaller libraries in the community, the KPL provides research assistance to various students, professionals and companies in the area as well as cataloguing and sharing services with the Waterloo Public Library.

The volume of system activity often puts a strain on Dunham's small team.

Apart from a limited staff, the IT team was often slowed down by the special security methods used for computers open to the public.

These desktops are used by library patrons for a gamut of activities ranging from research, to resume writing and job application to playing online games.

"We have to lock down the computers to guard against any unauthorized downloads and to prevent users from altering settings," Dunham said.

He said this practice used to make for very cumbersome asset management.

While on office desktops it's relatively easy to roll out software upgrades or new applications, Dunham's team members at KPL had to go into each public computer and unlock it to do the same work.

As updates to certain applications are available frequently, the team waits for these updates to build up so as to cut down on the number of times they have to service each machine.

This was a time-consuming method, however, and updating a single PC could easily take as much as one hour, said Dunham.

Inconsistent machine inventory numbers was also a cause for concern.

Dunham kept a spreadsheet containing the inventory number and locations of each PC to help the team keep track of each machine.

The PCs, however, are often moved around by library staff without the team's knowledge, making it difficult for the technicians to locate the machines.

To resolve these issues, KPL considered several automated asset management tools but found these products to expensive.

With the help of CMS Consulting Inc, a Toronto-based IT consulting and implementation firm, the library identified Microsoft's System Center Essentials 2007 as being the right product for its needs.

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