Open Computer and Software Inventory Next Generation (OCS inventory NG) is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

that enables users to inventory IT assets. OCS-NG collects information about the hardware and software of networked machines running the OCS client program ("OCS Inventory Agent"). OCS can visualize the inventory through a web interface. Furthermore, OCS includes the capability of deploying applications on computers according to search criteria. Agent-side IpDiscover makes it possible to discover the entirety of networked computers and devices.

History

The

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

OCS Inventory NG project started in late 2005 and produced its first release version of OCS Inventory in early 2007. Since version 1.0rc3, most of OCS Inventory functionality can be adapted or extended via a module system.

Operation

The dialogue between OCS client machines and the server depends on the

Hypertext Transfer Protocol The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

(HTTP). The software formats data in

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

. The management server uses

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

and

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

. OCS runs on multiple platforms: under

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

es and under

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

(95 or later). A web-interface written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

offers consultation of the inventory, user-rights management, and technical support features.

Agents

In order to collect detailed information, one can install agents on the client machines in the inventory. Developers have made client agents available for: * Microsoft Windows * Linux * Mac OS X * Sun Solaris * IBM AIX * FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD * HP-UX * Android

Relation to other software

* OCS Inventory can be used to feed the manager of GLPI and thus offers part of an ITAM solution. *

Samanage Samanage, an enterprise service-desk and IT asset-management provider, has its headquarters in Cary, North Carolina. The company's flagship product, Samanage, operates as a multi-tenant, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system for IT and enterprise serv ...

is a cloud-based, commercial ITAM, that has used modified OCS-NG agent as a data source.

License

OCS Inventory consists of free software published under

GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

v2. The developers own the copyright.

References

External links

The official site of OCS InventoryGLPI Project

OCS and BPM
{{Perl Free software programmed in Perl