Extending Hardware Inventory for PNP Devices
A few days ago, the project manager for our desktop teleconferencing project came to me with a challenge. (He didn't know it was a challenge; he thought he was just asking for a new report!) The pilot for the Cisco VT Advantage cameras over the VOIP system has been in place for several months; and originally the way to know who had these cameras was to simply see who has the software installed in Add/Remove Programs.
Well, it was noticed that there were several more instances of the software installed vs. the # of cameras purchased; so the project manager wanted to know 'who actually has the camera devices plugged in'? Using Rob Olson's article (The Dude from www.dudeworks.com) http://www.myitforum.com/articles/1/view.asp?id=2744 as a guide, I extended my mini.mof to report on devices that report via PnP, which included those cameras.
The mof snippet was modified slightly from Rob's article. I saw that there were additional elements in WMI for that class on Vista machines. I had to leave them as 'FALSE', otherwise the XP workstation wouldn't report successfully; but I left them in the snippet so that perhaps one day in the distant future when the environment is all homogenously Vista & Longhorn, I could enable those elements.
Attached is a zip with the MOF snippet (as pnpentity-for-mini.mof), a couple of report mofs (import-these-reports.mof). One of those reports is very specifically "Computers which have Cisco Unified Video Advantage, do not have VT Camera II". That particular report might not be very useful unless you have the exact same project going on, but it could serve as an example report.