SMS 2.0 for Software Compliancy....How ???

[jpmackl]

Has anyone used SMS Software Inventory for Compliancy?
How did you do this? I understand it as follows:
You must tell SMS 2.0 what products to find - If you
don't know what you have - how do you tell it what to
find? How can you become software compliant?

Has anyone created a process or have you found a add-on
tool to resolve this issue?

Please let me know.

Thanks!

 

[Trunk]

Since Y2K is kind of old news, I assume that by "compliancy" you mean having licenses for the software installed on your PC's.

Since SMS inventories every .exe on all your clients, it's not so much a matter of telling SMS what to find, but more of a matter of extracting what it has found.

SMS 2.0 comes with a sample query (All Systems with Microsoft Word 97) that you can use as a guideline for how to find all machines with a particular software package and version. However, it is helpful to know all the different titles and versions SMS has found in your site.

If you haven't done so already, it is helpful to build a frontend to the SMS SQL tables so that you can see what they contain. I use an Access 2000 frontend and have all of the tables linked. If you open the SQL table called SoftwareProduct, it will show you all of the software titles and versions that SMS has found in your site (for .exe's that have header information). Using this as a guideline, you can use this information to build queries similar to the sample query mentioned above.

In other words, it takes some work to extract what you are looking for, but all of the information is there.

Tom Thaden
thadents@usano.ksc.nasa.gov