Did you ever need to analyze the installed software in your business? For those who have experimented with it, you know that it’s not an easy task. In SCCM, one way to achieve this goal is by using Add Remove Programs, but you’ll have to deal with a minimum of customization.

Problem

The problem is that software companies, including Adobe and Microsoft, don’t work in the same direction and don’t even standardize their own products.

You can experiment with issues where publisher or product names differ on the same product. You can even have the same executable file version for two different products. This explains why you see discrepancies with the SCCM inventories mechanism.

• Hardware Inventory (Add Remove Program, Installed Software)
• Software Inventory (File Inventory)
• Software Metering

Technet warned the reader when they talk about software inventory in client settings :

Because these names are not always standardized in the file header information, when you view software inventory information in Resource Explorer or run queries, different versions of the same manufacturer or product name can sometimes appear. If you want to standardize these display names…

Software Inventory

There’s an option for software inventory in client settings. Here, you can configure display names for manufacturers or products to help standardize some discrepancies.

Click on Administration / Client Settings / Software Inventory and Set Names to list the inventoried names.

The problem is that it only affects software inventory, which isn’t included in Add Remove Programs.

There’s no solution if you want to modify the data value reported in Add Remove Programs. Creating software reports in SCCM becomes difficult if you constantly need to deal with exclusions to develop data quality.

While creating the report Asset—Installed Software, we analyzed the Installed Software WMI class and concluded that a product like Microsoft Visio causes us a lot of trouble.

As an example, querying Visio gives this result :

• What is the difference between Microsoft Office Visio and Microsoft Visio?

• Why Microsoft Visio Standard 2013 is there twice?

This explains why there’s a company like Flexera or Provance that helps the community achieve the best results in Asset Management inventory. What are the possible solutions if an enterprise does not want to invest in third-party applications?

Custom Labels

A good starting point would be to use Asset Intelligence in SCCM. You can manipulate and standardize each software detail using five custom labels, which is enough to create something organized.

In the next blog post, we will show you how to use those five custom labels in SCCM Asset Intelligence so you can customize your structure.

Asset Intelligence Blog Series

• Part 1 | Why should you use Asset Intelligence in SCCM 2012
• Part 2 | How to maximize the use of Asset Intelligence with Labels
• Part 3 | Create Custom Reports with Labels of Asset Intelligence
• Part 4 | Merging Last Usage of Software Metering with Custom Labels of Asset Intelligence
• Part 5 | Automatically Uninstall Unused Applications based on Software Metering with SCCM

sccm 2012 asset intelligence