Assign assets/software to non- "account" individuals

[Deathomen]

Presently you have to setup an “account” for a user before you can checkout an asset or software license to a user. In my specific environment, I won’t ever have more than a few ITAM employees accessing this site, so they don’t really need accounts persay. It would be nice to have the ability to choose between assigning the asset to a pre-existing account or typing a name in the field that would go into a separate database table which is strictly a name an GUID to identify them. Is this something that is possible?

[snipe]

Hi @BHollowell - thanks for posting this here. As I mentioned, it comes up a bit, so I'd rather have a public record of responses, so I don't have to repeat myself. :)

I've considered this, and you're not the first person asking for it. Right now, based on requested feature sets, it looks like folks would like to be able to assign an asset to an actual user, a location (such as a room), or a non-user person.

I had originally decided to make all people "users" so that I can work in the functionality that people can request assets (test tablet devices for QA, etc.), but I can certainly see reasons for the other use cases as well.

I'll figure out the best way to do this (from a UX and a DB schema perspective). It's a non-trivial change, but I feel like it's requested enough to make it worth doing.

[Deathomen]

Thanks! I'm glad to see a developer that is open to the suggestions of the user base instead of just developing a tool for their own use exclusively. I really love SnipeIT so far, and I definitely plan to use it as our production utility, there are just a few things I was hoping to find when looking for an asset management system, and this is one of them.

Thanks again for all your hard work. You really have a great platform here!

[snipe]

No problem :) I'm away at Foo Camp this weekend, but will take a look as soon as I get back next week.

[Deathomen]

@snipe If you have not already started working on this, I would very much appreciate it if you could code it in such a way that we didn't need the extra step of "creating" the user or "room" before we can assign to it. Since there's nothing but the name to generate (no email or password, ect) I would assume you could just create a fillable text-field and have the value of that field be inserted to the DB, correct?

[snipe]

@BHollowell - I was away at a conference, so I haven't started on this. I understand what you're saying, and that's the UX I was expecting to build out.

[Deathomen]

@snipe No pressure here, but I'm just checking in to see how this is coming or if you've had a chance to get started on it. Just looking for a status update, or a timeline. I have SnipeIT configured on a test server in my company and would like to put it into production, but I need to present it to our management before we do that and I'd really like to have this feature added first.

[snipe]

Hi @BHollowell - I'll be working on this feature this week.

[Deathomen]

@snipe Thanks! You're awesome :)

[snipe]

NP. This solution will likely be the same as the one for #142.

[Deathomen]

Hi @snipe can you give an update on the status for this?

[snipe]

No progress to report. My day job has been taking up a lot of time, and I've been working on file uploads before this.

[bullfrog3459]

@snipe I wanted to say that this program so far has been a help and is great! I wanted to check in on this as I don't see it in the latest alpha and i haven't seen any progress on dev. Do you have a timeline as when this might be implemented?

Thanks!

[snipe]

I think an easy win here might be to switch to using a username instead of a an email address for the login. We can randomly generate a username if an email address isn't given, and that way the user never even needs to know that they have an account.

[Deathomen]

I think that's a fantastic idea. Allowing us to create arbitrary usernames while still requiring an email address would be perfectly fine, as we could just use a generic email for conference rooms and the sort.

[snipe]

Or even not require email addresses. Email addresses are required to be unique, currently, so re-using one over and over wouldn't be possible. Plus, some folks want to have users that basically never have any interaction with the system, so they don't want to have to find email addresses for everyone.

I think the process would basically be:

• [x] Write a migration to copy all of the email addresses into the username field in the DB
• [x] Update the auth system to use username instead of email
• [x] Update the user model so that email is no longer required (but still validated if one is provided)
• [ ] Update the user import to generate a username automagically if none is given, and store the email address if a valid one is giving
• [ ] Double check everything else that may email the user to make sure it only fires if an email address is given

[Deathomen]

I think this is a perfect solution. My only recommendation would be to truncate the usernames start at the @ symbol so it only contains the first portion of the email.

[snipe]

I think it would be smarter to leave them as they are for the copying, so no one gets confused. If you were always logging in with an email address, and suddenly have to login with a username, that could be problematic. Presumably the user can update their own username, so if they prefer to use the shorter version, they could change it. Not sure how I want to go with that just yet.

[Deathomen]

Just as a follow up to a previous question in this thread - do you still intend to add a field to the asset creation process that will allow us to create a new user at the same time as the asset is added to the database?

[snipe]

Yeah, that's still planned

[Deathomen]

Great to hear! I'm really excited for this feature. Now that you have a preliminary asset acceptance process, and this seems to be on the horizon, the only thing left for my environment would be LDAP integration. That feature is definitely just a convenience thing, though. Being able to create user accounts at the time of asset entry will be a major win for me.