Inventory Scan with Application Compatibility Toolkit

[Parcival21]

Hi there,

I've now been searching through several Microsoft documentations but I can't find an answer to my question.
Does anybody know where the application compatibility program takes his information from when it performs an inventory scan.
Does it give information only for packages installed with an MSI file or does it scan the registry somehow to identify applications.
Did has any experience in using ACT for inventory scans.
Was the use successful. How many applications of the installed applications have been identified (percentage?).

Tnaks a lot for any information,
busche

 

[Parcival21]

One more thing in addition to the question I asked in the thread.
Does anybody know gpinventory? I tried to scan software with this tool too.
Result was that less than half of my software was reported.
My opinion was that this tool should print out the software that was in my Add/Remove Programs view.
It showed maybe half of that software.
Can anybody explain that?

Thanks, busche

 

[linney]

Not really the answers you want but you might find the articles, and the contained links, useful?

"The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0 and Application Compatibility Toolkit Data Collector (ACT-DC) use compatibility evaluators to collect and process your application information. Each evaluator performs a set of functions, providing a specific type of information to ACT".



Application Compatibility (6 pages long)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905066.aspx

How to troubleshoot a program that does not run as expected after it is installed on Windows Vista

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931362/en-us

This one talks about WMI.

Windows Vista Hardware Assessment

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...mg_id=10110&displaylang=en#QuickInfoContainer

 

[Parcival21]

Hi linney,

first thank you for your reply.

Well this is not exactly what I was looking for.
I have been searching through microsoft.com and technet.microsoft for some hours but I didn't exactly find what I was looking for.
I'm searching for a way to do an inventory scan that finds as many applications as possibly. I saw that one agent of the ACT performs an inventory scan. Before trying I just wanted to know whether this agent will find more applications that the gpinventory from Microsoft because that one doesn't really fit my needs.
Maybe there are other possibilities for an inventory scan.

Thanks for any hints,
busche

 

[linney]

To be honest I can't really help you on this.

What if you were to use Search and pull out all the .exe, .com and .bat files on a machine? Is that what you are after?

What is in the Registry under the "Software" Keys?

 

[Parcival21]

I have already been looking at HKEY Local Machine / Software.

Hard for me to identify something in there but I think there should be entries there for nearly every software that is installed on a client.
Don't know a tool though that can search through this and identify software for me.

To search for executables might be a possible way but as I want to scan a few thousand clients and it is sometimes not that easy to tell from the name of the executable what the name from the software is this will probably be a hard way. too.

 

[linney]

You could Export the whole "Software" Key as a .reg file, then open it up in a text editor like Notepad etc. That might be one way but it sounds a bit cumbersome.

Have you looked at software like the Belarc Advisor to see what that can do for you? It is free for home use but not business.

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html