Asset Handover - edmozley/freeitsm GitHub Wiki

Who holds what, and handover documents

Seeing everything one person has been issued, producing a document for them to sign, and laying that document out yourself. The technical version is Asset handover — Developer Guide.

Asked for in discussion #56 by Daniel (dschipfel). Shipped in 605811aa and 2aed483e.

The problem

Assets could always be assigned to people, but the register is organised by asset. Answering "what has Alice actually got?" meant searching the list one item at a time and hoping you had found everything — which is exactly the question you need answered during onboarding, a hardware swap, an audit, or somebody's last day.

1. Who holds what

Assets → Users.

The list on the left is your current people, with a count of what each holds. Search by name, email or department if it is long.

  • The first dropdown chooses Current people (the default), Leavers, Everyone, or only those Holding equipment. Somebody holding nothing is still listed by default, because you cannot issue a laptop to a new starter the list refuses to show.
  • Where people come from a directory or an address book, a second dropdown, Source, narrows the list to one of them or to the people added in FreeITSM. Each person's panel names where their details come from, and the list flags them Directory or Address book.
  • Someone in no address book can be added to one with Add to address book, if an administrator has allowed it on that address book - see CardDAV contact sync.

Click a person and you get everything assigned to them: type, name, make and model, serial number, asset tag, and the date each item was assigned. That is the list an audit or an offboarding check actually needs, on one screen.

Equipment is assigned on the asset itself, so if somebody is missing here, or an item looks wrong, open the asset and check its assigned user.

Keeping their details right. Edit opens the person editor - the same one Tickets → Users opens, so name, contact details, company, manager (a type-ahead) and password are changed the same way from either screen; details a directory owns are greyed out. Mark as left takes somebody out of the current list while keeping them, and what they held, on record; Reactivate brings them back. Where somebody manages people, their panel lists who reports to them.

Manager access opens a full-screen page setting out whose tickets that person can see in the self-service portal, with the means to add people, groups or departments to their team - see Portal managers.

2. The handover document

The Handover document button produces a record of what that person holds:

  • who they are
  • every item, with serial numbers and asset tags
  • when each was assigned
  • a declaration that the equipment remains the organisation's property
  • a signature line for them, and one for IT

Your company logo appears on it if you have set one under System → Branding, so it looks like the rest of your paperwork.

Three ways to use it:
Print The browser's print dialogue
PDF Save as PDF inside that same dialogue — the text stays selectable and searchable, not a screenshot
Email to them Sends it straight to the person, laid out in the body of the message rather than as an attachment, so it can be read on a phone without downloading anything

There is no separate "generate PDF" button because there does not need to be one: every platform's print dialogue produces a PDF, and using it means the printed copy and the PDF can never drift apart.

3. Designing the document

Assets → Settings → Handover document.

The document is built from sections. For each one you can:

  • switch it off — a tick box on every section
  • move it — arrows to reorder
  • change the wording — headings, the introduction, the declaration, the signature labels, the footer
  • choose columns — on the equipment table: type, name, make and model, serial, asset tag, assigned date, location, status, notes

The sections are: company logo, title, introduction, person details, equipment table, declaration, signatures, footer.

Merge codes

Text fields accept merge codes that fill themselves in when a document is produced:

Code Becomes
{{employee.name}} The person's name
{{employee.email}} Their email address
{{employee.id}} Their record number
{{asset_count}} How many items they hold
{{date}} Today's date
{{analyst.name}} Whoever is producing the document

Click a code in the palette and it drops in where you were last typing.

A code you mistype is left alone rather than blanked, so it appears in the preview as itself. That is deliberate: "I mistyped something" is a much easier thing to notice than a mysteriously empty line.

The preview is the real thing

The panel on the right is not an approximation. It is rendered by exactly the same code that produces the printed document and the email, so it cannot show you something the finished document will not produce.

Several templates

Keep as many as you like — an onboarding pack and a leaver's checklist, say — and mark one as the default. That default is what the Handover document button uses.

An installation that never opens the designer still gets a complete, sensible document. There is nothing to set up before the feature works.

Permissions

Capability Grants
Access to the Assets module Seeing who holds what, and producing a handover document
assets.handover The Settings tab — designing the document

Note the split: designing the document is administration, producing one is not. Withholding assets.handover stops somebody changing the template; it does not stop them printing a handover for a new starter.

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