Tips & Advice on Collecting Software Inventory Information in LAN/WANs
Here you can find tips and expert advice on collecting software inventory info from network PCs, software usage audit and software license compliance.
This site is a collection of articles, tips and tricks about software inventory and audit in Microsoft networks. Software inventory procedures described on this site are aimed to help network administrators and IT professional to audit software used in company and organization, analyze software license compliancy and optimize software licenses usage.
The articles below can help you to understand different software audit methods and utilities that can be used to collect software inventory information. These articles also explain strong and weak points of software audit approaches and explain how to automate software inventory info collecting.
What is a Software License Compliance and How to Ensure It
License policies are very complicated nowadays and even IT people may not understand the difference between concurrent, non-concurrent, volume and other types of licenses. Here is a very common software installation scenario when someone in the office installs the application required urgently using a serial key from another installation. Depending on a license agreement of installed software it can be a legal action or it can be qualified as a software license compliance violation. How to avoid such kind of license compliance problems? Continue reading
How to Audit Software Using Software Inventory Tools
If you need to analyze software licensing compliance for one PC you can simply open the Add/Remove Programs list in Windows in order to understand what software is installed on the computer. But if you need to analyze license compliance for entire organization this approach can take a lot of time and it's better to use one of software inventory tools. But what is important to know in order to select a right tool and what is the difference between inventory tools available now on the market? These questions are answered in course of this article. Continue reading
How to Audit Installed Software from the Command Line
For various purposes it's required sometimes to have a software audit information as a list of all programs installed on a PC. It is possible to see this information in the Add/Remove Programs view in Windows, but for reports preparation and other tasks this information should be available in a file. Fortunately you don't need to create such file manually, because you can use WMI requests to get a software inventory information that you need. Continue reading