The OCS, Open Computer and Software Inventory Next Generation, is an open source software that allows the IT department to scan and inventory all devices.
It can deploy both hardware and software packages to keep your environment secure. Numerous add-ons are available that provide great flexibility to adapt OCS Inventory to your own system. FactorFX is the main contributor and publishes the software daily. This French company guides companies in the integration and support of OCS Inventory.
Among its advantages we will find that the bandwidth used through its agent is very low, only 5 Kilobytes. Another advantage is the number of available plugins that are developed for this software, which will allow us to obtain information about printers, system configurations, and processes that are running on a computer.
How does an OCS work?
Being an inventory system, through its agent it offers all the information of the computer where the agent or equipment is installed, such as installed software, hardware, memory, processor, storage…
It not only works on Windows and Linux systems, but also on Mac or OS systems, Android, iOs…
The agent can be installed both manually and via GPOs on Windows systems, or through Scripts on Linux systems. We can develop a script to make a massive deployment of the agent on a Linux computer, or, through a GPO, perform an MSI with the configurations such as the name of the server, the server IP and the configurations we want to send via MSI.
Before making any deployment it is important to make a demo. This can be done through the same Inventory page. With the Modem credentials we can see the different characteristics of the OCS.
