How to report laptop computers or other mobile / portable devices in an environment?

Products

• Inventory Solution

Issue/Introduction

In order to implement Cloud Enabled Management or some other internal policies it can be useful to have a filter containing all computing devices of portable types together.

Environment

ITMS 7.6 and above.

Resolution

Inventory Solution gathers hardware data from the computers and the information needed to discriminate laptop from desktop from other computer form factor is available in vHWChassis.

However this view does not provide direct information on the chassis type names directly. The following query can be used to list all portable computing devices or can be simplified to show all chassis data (once you remove the where clause):

select vc.name, vc.domain, t.Chassis, c.*
  from vComputer vc
  join vHWChassis c
    on vc.Guid = c._Resourceguid
  join (
        select cast(REPLACE(stringref, 'listitem.chassis.chassistypes.', '') as int) ID, string Chassis
          from String s
         where s.StringRef like 'listitem.chassis.chassistypes%'
           and Culture = ''
       ) as t
    on c.[Chassis Package Type] = t.ID
 where [ID] in (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14)

/*
8    Portable
9    Laptop
10   Notebook
11   Hand Held
12   Docking Station
14   Sub Notebook
*/

The "Chassis Package Type" data is gathered by Inventory Solution using the WMI / CIM data available on Windows devices.

The following query provides the list of supported types and their default (english) string:

select cast(REPLACE(stringref, 'listitem.chassis.chassistypes.', '') as int) ID, string Chassis
  from String s
 where s.StringRef like 'listitem.chassis.chassistypes%'
   and Culture = ''
 order by ID

Additional information on the source data from Windows can be found on the Microsoft site:

• Identifying the Chassis Type of a Computer
• Win32_SystemEnclosure class
• CIM_Chassis class