In a call with our Customer Care team the other day someone asked if there was an easy way to import printers into the Micro Focus Service Desk (MFSD) system. In order to do that you could use a straight CSV import if you already have a system that knows about these printers, or if you have ZENworks Configuration Management (ZCM), you can use a discovery task to first discover these devices and then the attached AMIE adapter to read the data from ZCM into MFSD. Once completed, your printers that were discovered by ZENworks will show up, similar to the screenshot below:



The attached XML file uses the inbuilt Printers & Scanners category with new custom fields to store the information read from ZCM. The extra fields are strings except for the ones where a different type is specified and are shown below:

Field 7 = DNS Name

Field 8 = Primary MAC Address

Field 9 = Asset Tag

Field 10 = Firmware Revision

Field 11 = System Location

Field 12 = System Contact

Field 13 = System Description

Field 14 = Total Pages Printed (Integer)

Field 15 = Is Leased? (Boolean)

Field 16 = Lease Expiry Date (Date)

This XML as been tested in a MFSD 7.1 with ZCM 11.4.1 environment. The ZCM database was a Microsoft SQL database. Likely this will work with Sybase, but slight modifications may be required for Oracle. This should work with any 11.x version of ZCM, but only with MFSD 7.1. To use this XML simply do the following:

1. Login as an Administrator to the MFSD console

2. Go to the Setup > AMIE > Customize tab.

3. Select Upload/Edit Configuration.

4. Click New.

5. Click the Browse button and browse to the XML file.

6. For the Database type, select SQLServer.

7. Click Import.

8. Go to the Setup tab under AMIE, then click New.

9. In the Type drop-down, select ZENguru-ZCM Printers 1.0 (Jason Blackett)

10. Enter an Identifier of your choosing.

11. In the Host field, enter the IP or DNS address of your SQL server.

12. In the Port field, enter the TCP port your SQL server is listening on.

13. In the Name field, enter the name of the database that your ZCM data is stored in.

14. In the Username field, enter the name of a SQL user that can read from the database.

15. In the Password field, enter the user's password.

16. In the Schema field, enter dbo.

17. In the Catalog field, enter the name of the database that your ZCM data is stored in.

18. Click Test to verify the configuration.

19. If it was successful, click Save.

20. Click Import to initiate the import.

21. Switch to the User console in MFSD.

22. Select Configuration > AMIE Snapshots. You should now see all of the network printers that have been previously discovered by a ZENworks discovery task.

You can now choose to create the Printer items and if desired change the adapter properties to auto-create.