Most of our commercial customers with The Full Circle (www.thefullcircle.com) aren’t technology businesses so managing software isn’t what they do.
Whilst we often perform this as part of a managed service, we still implement a software library (AKA Media Library) for them comprising of their software installers, ISO images, drivers, patches, etc… which makes various rollout & upgrade activities easier & faster in the long run and easier to audit when the time comes.
Having been asked a few times what this structure looks like I thought I’d do a post on it. It’s a very small piece of the data storage puzzle but one which makes life a lot easier for techie and companies with a lot of software assets.
Once in place, the next step is to carefully decide who has write access. No easy task figuring out who you can trust to put things in the right place, but one thing is for sure whatever you decide – it should be read only by default and write access by exception. The best practise would be to have several people nominated as librarians but this isn’t always possible. Whether you store your licence/activation keys here though is down to your businesses policy. Some prefer to keep them secure in something like Keypass, while other are comfortable keeping keys in text files along with the media.
In the ITIL world this structure be known as the Definitive Software Library or DSL.
The core structure follows this basic pattern:
Documentation >
Drivers > Major Driver Categories >
Major Platform Binaries >Vendor > Package/Package Group >Product Version >
You can download a zip of the folder structure here –