Patent ID: 7725352

Claim:
A method for collecting inventory data about a group of machines at an office, comprising the steps of: running an inventory tool on each of said machines, one of said machines being a dedicated client machine; the tool presenting dialogue displays on each of the machines; filling in or changing data in the dialogues presented by the tool; and submitting the collected information to a server; and wherein said running includes each of said machines using the inventory tool to generate a respective one inventory file, and all of said machines in said group of machines sending the respective inventory files to the dedicated client machine, said dedicated client machine receiving and processing the respective inventory files from all of said machines in said group of machines; and for each respective inventory file from one of the machines, the dedicated client machine asking one or more approver machines for approval for a specified change to said one of the machines, and the submitting includes, when the client machine receives a defined approval from said one or more of the approval machines, the client machine sending the inventory file to said server.