Software Inventory

mrhaun03

Does anyone know of a program that will pull software information from a remote machine and place it in a database?

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amyamandaallen

its now quite what you want but may help www.balarc.com

provides machine specs and software installed in HTML form

sprkymrk

Free vbscript:

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objTextFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile("c:\software.txt", True)

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
    & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colSoftware = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
    ("Select * from Win32_Product")

objTextFile.WriteLine "Caption" & vbtab & _
    "Description" & vbtab & "Identifying Number" & vbtab & _
    "Install Date" & vbtab & "Install Location" & vbtab & _
    "Install State" & vbtab & "Name" & vbtab & _ 
    "Package Cache" & vbtab & "SKU Number" & vbtab & "Vendor" & vbtab _
        & "Version" 

For Each objSoftware in colSoftware
    objTextFile.WriteLine objSoftware.Caption & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.Description & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.IdentifyingNumber & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.InstallDate2 & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.InstallLocation & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.InstallState & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.Name & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.PackageCache & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.SKUNumber & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.Vendor & vbtab & _
    objSoftware.Version
Next
objTextFile.Close

Run as an admin on the computer to get a list of all MSI installed software on a computer. Replace the "." (dot) in:

strComputer = "."

with a remote computer name if desired. The resulting text file can be imported into a spreadsheet for a nice read out.

Programs I know of that do software inventory include Ghost Corporate v8, Ghost Solution Suite, SMS, and Track-It!.

helms20

We use a program here at work called LANstate. You can view all the programs installed on a client computer and then copy that to your clipboard to paste into something like excel or access. I am not sure how you would import into a database from that (guess thats why I am not a DBA

)

mrhaun03

Thanks for the replies. But, I think those programs are a little more than what we are looking for.

How do you guys manage software? What we're looking to do is create a database, so we can run reports and queries for what software is installed on a specific machine. It wouldn't be a problem, but we have no DBAs here. If anyone has any other suggestions or solutions, that would be great.

sprkymrk

mrhaun03 wrote:

Thanks for the replies. But, I think those programs are a little more than what we are looking for.

How do you guys manage software? What we're looking to do is create a database, so we can run reports and queries for what software is installed on a specific machine. It wouldn't be a problem, but we have no DBAs here. If anyone has any other suggestions or solutions, that would be great.

Try the vbscript I gave you. It's free, fast and easy. You can set a variable to have it run against a list of computers.

Or try this, but it only works on Microsoft products:

Microsoft Software Inventory Analyzer
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/msia.mspx

One other link that may have what you're looking for:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/partnerguide/howto_inv_db.mspx

royal

We are currently working with some organizations using a product called Express Metrics. You deploy a client on all your workstations, and it reports back to the Express Metrics server tons of information about those clients. Hardware, software, and there's just so much to do. I know this is more than what you are looking for, but perhaps when someone searches in the future and sees this thread, they might show some interest in it. This tool is great for keeping track of licensing.

Treg

Cool, might look in to a few of those.

malcybood

Similar to the product icroyal mentioned and this is probably more than you need but we use ZAM Zenworks Asset Management 7.5

This is a really cool piece of software that can capture every single piece of software on every PC on the network that is imported into Zenworks and you can specify certain software into categories i.e. trusted, potential threat etc etc.

It can also run hardware scans and tell you the exact type of hardware that is present in the machine. We're currently using it for a major RAM upgrade to get all machines in the business upgraded to at least 1GB RAM, some are already up there but this makes it easy to identify which are and which arn't.

The way we've set it up for this particular project, ZAM identifies the machine asset tag (computer name), location (By ip address or DNS name), type of memory (DIMM SDRAM, DDR), which slot, how many slots are available on the desktop etc and provides the functionality to export reports to Excel documents etc...Alot quicker than opening up 1600 desktops to find out what type of RAM they have in which slot!

It can be installed on Windows platforms 2000, 2003 and XP. We use Novell clients and EDirectory but I'm pretty sure it can be integrated with Active Directory. May want to look it up on the Novell website though

Here's the general overview of the install doc and info

http://www.novell.com/documentation/zam7/pdfdoc/am7install/am7install_sp1.pdf

plettner

http://www.laytontechnology.com/pages/auditwizard.asp

There is a free demo which lets you audit 10 or so PCs. We use it here and the asett management is really good. It too may be a little more than what you need, but the price is quite reasonable depending on your. Plus, there's a demo which you can try first.

We use it here and we have the enterprise licence.

keatron

I recommend the vbs script Mark posted. Also there's a program called WinReporter. It's VERY GOOD at doing this. Not only does it list installed software, it lists running services, shared folders and drives, permissions to those shared folders and drives, drivers installed, pc serial number, amount of ram installed, local user accounts, every account that's ever logged in, password expiration dates and settings, and much more. Once the data is gathered, you can do a simple save as or export to save it as a word doc, html, xml, or pdf. Cool stuff.

RTmarc

Centennial Discovery

http://www.centennial-software.com/

I highly recommend this program for software auditing and asset management.

samschmidt

Microsoft BDD is inventory tool for Vista and Office 2007 to inventory hardware and software. It is a free download for inventory of hardware and software to a SQL database (SQLexpress). It creates an executable to push out to clients which reports back to the database and is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=13F05BE2-FD0E-4620-8CA6-1AAD6FC54741&displaylang=en

The BDD is for inventory and deployment. I have used it some and it does a good job of listing applications and hardware.

mrhaun03

Thanks for the posts everybody...I'll definitely look into a few of these.