Command-line Tool to Manage Surface Pro 3 Asset Tags

For those tasked with keeping track of Surface Pro 3 tablets delivered to business workers in the organization, it helps to be able to assign and then identify company-specific asset labels.

AssetTag.exe writes to and reads from the SMBIOS setting in Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), allowing you to assign asset designations, and then query them later on.

The simple tool uses a couple command-line switches to provide for the different functions. Here's the options:

-g = Queries the asset tag value and displays it.

-s = Used by itself, it clears the asset tag value.

-s = Used with a proper asset string, it sets the proposed asset tag.

Example: AssetTag -s Abc456.zZ

The asset tag can be up to 36 characters long and must contain valid characters, which include A-Z, a-z, 0-9, a period and a hyphen.

The utility works with Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows 8.1 and ONLY the Surface Pro 3. It does NOT work for Surface RT, Surface 2, Surface Pro, or Surface Pro 2. For those with management applications that can read the SMBIOS setting in WMI, asset tag information can be included in normal inventory using the following WMI query:

(Get-WmiObject -query "Select * from Win32_SystemEnclosure").SMBiosAssetTag

And, of course, PowerShell can also be utilized to retrieve the asset tag information from the WMI repository.

The utility is downloadable from here: Surface Pro 3 Asset Tag CLI Utility