Software auditing tools

[Darius]

Hi all,

I need to do an audit on what software is installed on how many PCs so for example I need to say;

220 instances of Visio 2010 installed.

And these needs to take place on around 2000 PCs

Any idea on a good tool for this?

Thanks
Darius!

 

[Homer-Simpson]

Got a budget or looking for a free tool? Snow software would do the job, I would suggest getting on contact with a reseller, they might do you a good price for a one off audit. I think Softcat offers this service, if you would like a contact number for someone I can pass your details on?

I am sure dk might be able to put you in touch with someone there too.

 

[Andy.]

If you've got 2000 workstations, don't you have some form of deployment software that can also report on what is installed?

 

[dk]

Got a budget or looking for a free tool? Snow software would do the job, I would suggest getting on contact with a reseller, they might do you a good price for a one off audit. I think Softcat offers this service, if you would like a contact number for someone I can pass your details on?

I am sure @dk might be able to put you in touch with someone there too.

Indeed, snow is the flavour of the month at the moment, we use it ourselves, and 2000 pcs is a rather large job.

we can provide this as a service, and also the licenses to do it yourself I think.

if you want a contact drop me a pm, your company probably already has an account manager.....

 

[Addicted]

We have LANDesk installed at work, no idea if it's any good or not, but that's for a good few thousand workstations.

 

[Darius]

Yeah I think we already have an account manager with softcat, we use SCCM to deploy software but some people have been doing manual installs so was going to check it out but if it's bigger task than I first thought I'll leave it someone else lol

 

[Sargara]

We have LANDesk installed at work, no idea if it's any good or not, but that's for a good few thousand workstations.

We use LANDesk too across all of our own staff and customers pc's. Do you work for Capita as well?

Yeah I think we already have an account manager with softcat, we use SCCM to deploy software but some people have been doing manual installs so was going to check it out but if it's bigger task than I first thought I'll leave it someone else lol

It doesn't matter how it was installed. If you have SCCM then do a query on how many instances of "software X" are on workstations. Filter the results in Excel. That kind of information is stored in Inventory details that SCCM clients send back to the management server.

You might want to baseline it against an AD export so you can identify how many devices are missing SCCM (and therefore wont be able to report their software status) if your SCCM isn't domain sync'd.

I do this kind of stuff day in day out. I hope you are good with Excel VLOOKUP's

 

[ThomasBrentnall]

We use OCS inventory. It's free and does the job fine.

 

[ChrisR]

If you have SCCM use that for it.

As said doesn't matter how something's been installed, SCCM can audit the machine a number of ways, for instance either by looking at exe files on the machine or querying the add remove program's registry entries.

Used to be an SMS/SCCM 'specialist' in days gone by, been a while though!

Used to use Softcat for some of our MS licensing audits back when they were flogging Centennial/Frontrange stuff as well, seems like ages since I last spoke to Matt!

 

[Addicted]

We use LANDesk too across all of our own staff and customers pc's. Do you work for Capita as well?

Nah I work for a big american health company, I only know it's LANDesk as we had to install it

 

[iain187]

Anyone used this?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/solutionaccelerators/dd537566.aspx

 

[BruceTea]

Anyone used this?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/solutionaccelerators/dd537566.aspx

Yep - a while back but the info returned was very half arsed and left you with more questions than you started with!

 

[iain187]

It looked a bit too good to be true!

 

[dk]

The MAP tool is more for evaluating an environment for virtualisation.

 

[iain187]

Ah, i heard someone mention it and also mention it was agent-less

So I thought I'd post despite not knowing a lot about it because at the moment we use a home made script because our governance people don't like agents

 

[Chapster5]

Spice works will do an audit of a whole network and what software is on what machine and I think license keys as well

http://www.spiceworks.com/free-software-inventory-audit-tool/

For free you can't grumble.