Asset/CI and custom fields

[KB15]

If my understanding of how this works is completely wrong, I apologize and would greatly appreciate some correction. I'm planning on taking the asset course in a few weeks however I'd like to get a little bit of a head start with populating printers in to ServiceNow.

I'd like to add a custom field that only applies to printers. Which asset and CI table should I add this field? Lastly, are the fields synchronized with the out of box business rule or does it have to be custom?

[KB15]

This is a dumb question but how would I skip this?

[Community Alums]

Not dumb. You just ignore the statuses. The system does not really do anything with that except let you know if the Contract is approved or not.

When/if you are ready to use it, you can use the State of the Contract to identify those that are approved and active. Until then, you can just assume any Contract you create is active.

[KB15]

After think about this, contracts would be an ideal solution however, I don't believe it's the correct one for us now. Each printer has it's own contact (700+ printer contracts) and the thought of someone actually going into the system to modify the contracts other than myself when needed, is not realistic. We're definitely not mature or disciplined enough to handle this. If we were to simply add data for the sake of adding data, I'm afraid that this information would get stale and we'd have to go through each one at a later time. Perhaps going forward when we're ready might be a better plan.

For now, I'm going for a custom field in asset to simplify things. If we need it on a different location, I'll revisit the sync option at another time.

I also look at your "Add Multiple Covered Assets to a Contract" video and saw you've used asset tag information for the display name. Is this good practice? I would think I'd be able to see the serial number appear when an asset is associated but it's not. Is this behavior right? I currently have just the model information which doesn't help for identification purposes when associating to a contract.

[KB15]

I considered the contract option and it may work with the vendor account. I'm thinking this would apply best since this is a vendor generated number which we do not use internally.

The only reason I would not use this at this time is the introduction of something more complex to capture simple data when our data keeping process is not monitored. I'm always concerned with data accuracy.

This is something to consider and explore more options. I'll probably have a better idea after training but I think I'd like to move toward a contract though its usefulness now is questionable. We don't have any good historical data to back fill data. This has given me more to think about...

Thanks to everyone with their input. It was definitely helpful.