Automatic trees are a major and totally new feature of Synexsys Inventory. By optimising everyday asset management, treeviews allow you to save a lot of time without any maintenance.
In practice, believing you can work based on a simple list of several hundred PCs is unrealistic. Managing IT assets everyday requires classifying the information according to different rules depending upon the tasks that need to be performed. These classification criteria can be technical, administrative, or mixed (i.e. "End of guarantee" by "PC brand").
Simple manual treeviews are classification structures that are easy to create and easy to use. But their maintenance requires time and order. And, therefore, after a while, they could become very different from reality. Hence the idea of automatic treeviews.
Understanding how automatic trees work is very simple. Automatic treeviews classify Objects automatically on several levels, based on their features. The big advantage is that this classification is done dynamically and does not require maintenance. The trees that have been created become useful work tools that can be used everyday.
The two examples below illustrate the practical use of automatic trees:
Warranties - A PC's warranty expiration date is often used as a major criteria for equipment replacement or the activation of new maintenance contracts. In order to make daily follow-ups of warranties, we could create the following automatic treeview:
![]() | Tree Name: Warranties |
![]() | First Level: End of warranty year - calculated with a formula based on the purchase date or the end of warranty date, if available. (See Automatic Trees Creation Window) |
![]() | Second Level: End of warranty month (same as above) |
![]() | Third Level: Processor type |
This tree will allow you to instantly know: | |
![]() | Which PCs warranty will expire within the next 3 months. |
![]() | What to do with the PCs whose warranty will expire soon. Based on their CPU, you can decide to keep them and renew their maintenance contract or change them. |
The main advantages of this tree are:
![]() | It only took a few minutes to create the tree. |
![]() | The tree is constantly updated without maintenance. |
![]() | It can be used by all users as an everyday work tool. |
![]() | Creating and using trees does not require specific knowledge. |
Migration - when a big technical change is operated, typically when a migration from an OS to another is scheduled, a lot of time is lost just gathering the information and following-up everyday changes. Creating an automatic treeview that will solve the related problems is child's play with Synexsys. For example, you could create the following treeview:
![]() | Tree Name: XP Migration. |
![]() | First Level: CPU Speed - a formula that separates the PCs into two branches:"CPU_OUT" if CPU <1300 MHz and "CPU_OK" if CPU is higher. |
![]() | Second Level: RAM - a formula that separates PCs into two branches: "RAM OK" if RAM >=256 Mb and "ADD_RAM" if RAM is lower. |
![]() | Third Level: OS - a formula that separates PCs into two branches: "OS OK" if OS is already installed and "INSTALL_XP" if it is not installed yet. |
![]() | Fourth Level: Service Pack - a formula that separates PCs into two branches: "SP OK" if the PC has at least SP2 installed and "INSTALL_SP" if it is not the case. |
![]() | Fifth Level: Location (based on the information contained in a custom field or in the IP address, for instance) (See formulas). |
This tree will allow you to instantly know: | |
![]() | Which PCs will be kept for migration (CPU=OK). |
![]() | Which PCs will need additional RAM. |
![]() | Which PCs will require migration (those whose OS is not yet updated). |
![]() | Which PCs have been migrated but require a Service Pack. |
![]() | Which PCs require an action related to the migration. |
![]() | Which PCs cannot be migrated and their location. |
The advantage of this automatic tree is that, as the migration is taking place, the tree is instantaneously updated with new data. For instance, if a PC's RAM has been upgraded from 128 to 256 MB, the PC will be automatically reclassified in the "RAM_OK" node and will disappear from the "ADD_RAM" list. Another advantage is to be able to plan the migration by location. |
Automatic trees are created in a specific window that opens when the user selects "Create an automatic tree" from the context menu.