Alternate Names for Software CIs

A new field for alternate names of software versions has been added to the configuration item form.  Organizations that have used a discovery tool to populate their configuration management database (CMDB) with the software that they run on their PCs and servers will know that this causes an enormous number of configuration items to be generated for software versions from different products.  Most of this software does not need to be tracked in the CMDB, however.  That’s because their licenses do not need to be managed or it does not really help the specialists or service desk analysts when they initially try to get an idea of the server or PC for which an issue has been reported.

So instead of registering every discoverable piece of software in the CMDB, configuration managers have found that it is better to take the opposite approach.  They let the discovery tool know which software versions they are interested in by registering them manually in the CMDB.  The discovery tool then automatically links these software CIs with the machines on which they were discovered.  But because a discovery tool may know a single software version by many different names, (e.g. due to different language editions or because of different patch levels that do not need to be tracked in the CMDB), it is important that these names can be registered in the CI record of each software version.  For this reason, the Alternate names field has now been added to the Configuration Item form.

This field is only visible in configuration item records of which the product is of the software category.  The field supports pasting multiple lines with alternative names.