Centennial Discovery - software auditing application

Marty999

This post is really aimed at the IT Managers and Administrators. My boss has asked me to carry out an audit of the software installed on our office PCs, and to check the situation quarterly. This is mainly so we can be sure that we hold official licenses for all the business applications that we use, and also so we can root out any dodgy software users may have installed. We have 25 PC users and rather than examine all the PCs individually, I have been recommended to take a look at a server-based product called Centennial Discovery. This is supposed to report back automatically and seems to be just what I need.

I was just wondering if anybody out there has experience of using this software, or is able to recommend another product which will do the same job. Thank you.

albertross_2

Centennial has a habit of churning away all day long on every PC, so bear that in mind, users may not notice, but it's always there, and can sometimes cause problems. For 25 PC's it may be a bit OTT.

If you are at all geeky, then you can use these tools to do a free and simplistic audit (i.e. see what directories are in program files, or interrogate registries for installed applications remotely), but that will involve a bit more work from you.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pstools.mspx

MadCowMan

There is a nice litt bit of freeware that you can script into a login script to do a software audit at logon.

It was freeware untill 2004 ( and still available as such ) I think you have to pay fro the more up to date version.

We used to have it run a software audit and save it into a hidden audit$ share on a file server.

Then someone had the fun job of collating the reports into somethign a little more management friendly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA32

HoofeHearted

Give this free utility a try.
http://www.pxserver.com/WinAudit.htm

It runs locally on each pc and can be run in command line mode, so can be scheduled to run periodically via login script or scheduled job. Output can be saved in different formats txt, csv, html and could be saved to a network share.

I use it to audit pcs before I fix/clean/upgrade them for friends. It does not need to be installed so I run it from a usb pen.