Assigning Assets to Analysts - edmozley/freeitsm GitHub Wiki

Assigning assets to analysts

Equipment held by the service desk itself — a spare laptop, the loan phone, a test handset, the camera that lives in the drawer — now has somewhere to live.

Until 2.5.0 an asset could only be assigned to one of the people you support. Analysts are not those people: on most installs the people running the desk have no requester record at all, so most of your own team could not be recorded as holding anything, even by somebody willing to type the name.

Giving an asset to an analyst

Open the asset and click Assign. The dialog now has a User / Analyst switch at the top.

  • User searches the people you support, exactly as before.
  • Analyst searches your own team.

Type two characters or more and pick a name. You can set an expected return date either way, which is the useful half of lending something out.

Only active analysts appear. Somebody who has left the desk should not turn up as a candidate to hand a laptop to — but equipment they already hold still shows their name, so past custody stays readable.

Telling the two apart

Wherever an asset shows who holds it, an analyst carries a small Analyst tag beside their name.

Their name is not a link, where a requester's is. An analyst has no person record to open, and linking to one would land you on somebody else entirely — the requester who happens to share that number.

Taking it back

Remove, the same as for a requester. The handover history records the return either way, so "who had the loan phone in March" has one answer whichever kind of person it was.

What has not changed

An asset is held by one person at a time in one row — either a requester or an analyst, never both. Nothing about assigning equipment to the people you support behaves differently, and an install that never assigns anything to an analyst will not notice this exists.

A note for anyone upgrading. Run System → Database Verification after updating. This adds a column and relaxes a rule on an existing one; it cannot invalidate anything already recorded, because every existing assignment already names a requester.

See also