software inventory software

While the latter only reports on Office (2000 or later), Microsoft offers another free tool, the Software Inventory software Analyzer, that covers all Microsoft products on any computer in your network. This tool was produced to help in its anti-piracy drive. For information about all the software products on a PC, you can use the Microsoft Application Compatibility Analyzer. While designed to report on application compatibility for the purpose of operating system upgrades, it still generates a report on the software and applications found on each computer in your network and sorts it by computer, department or application.

Network inventories should also include other useful information such as free disk space, printers and Group Policy. For the first, you can use freedisk.exe, a utility formerly included in Windows Resource Kits, which is now an integral part of Windows 2003. For printer status, you can use new scripts included with Windows 2003. These scripts work on Win2K and XP as well as NT; but if you use them on NT, you’ll need to install the PrnAdmin.dll file to support the operation of the scripts. The prnmngr.vbs script is specifically designed to list all printers, queues and drivers on any Windows computer.