Do organizations pay too much for your software licensing? Paying more licences than you use doesn’t make your company really effective, especially when we talk about IT Cost Transparency. Do you know how much money your company spends on software licensing versus their utilization? Using inventory, SCCM detects if an application is installed, it also monitors usage using Software Metering and uninstalls the application using deployment mechanisms. Combining all, you can deliver a great solution to minimize licences cost to your organization. Software metering is a great feature that is not always well known by the business. The company must take the advantage of monitoring the usage and automatically uninstalling applications that are unused. For more details about Software Metering, read this TechNet post. This post shows how to automatically uninstall unused applications with SCCM witch is also part 5 of the Asset Intelligence Blog Series. Pre-Requisites The first thing … Read More
Merging Last Usage of Software Metering with Custom Labels of Asset Intelligence
Software Metering analyzes the usage of any executable files. Asset Intelligence inventory and manage software by using a catalogue. So why would we want to merge both? Have a comprehensive view of your software usage in order to save licensing costs. Companies spend lots of money on unused software licences each year. Monitor software usage can save lots of money for your organization. The problem with Software Metering is that it is based on the executable. It does not always mean that the software is installed on a machine. There’s a way to merge software usage with a real installation and that’s the goal of this post. First of all, you need to use custom labels in Asset Intelligence. Second, you’ll need to create a link between Asset Intelligence and Software Metering. Third, use reporting to share the usage of each installation in your organization. Asset Intelligence In our example, … Read More
Create Custom Reports with Labels of Asset Intelligence
Usually, we use information from Add Remove Programs when it’s time to make software reports. For technical reasons, it’s not always easy to have adequate results. The use of custom labels in Asset Intelligence helps standardize and gather software information. In this post, we will explain how to use the data from custom labels in asset intelligence to create custom reports. Before starting the reports, make sure the custom labels are set in your environment from how to maximize the use of custom views in Asset Intelligence. Configuration Manager 2012 came with a couple of Asset Intelligence reports but nothing special based on the custom labels. The only useful report is Software 12A | Software titles with a specific custom label defined. After this post, you will be able to do a report like the one below. Views First, here’s the list of SQL views used by SCCM for custom … Read More
How to maximize the use of Asset Intelligence in SCCM/MECM with Custom Labels
Asset Intelligence is a feature in Configuration Manager that allows you to identify and manage the inventoried software of your environment. It’s populated each time there’s a hardware inventory scan on the device. The catalog contains data about inventoried software and 5 labels can be defined to standardize product names or any useful information in your catalogue. Software developers are not always following a standard name for their own products. Consequently, the data quality for software reports will be better. In this post, we will show how you can maximize the use of custom labels in Asset Intelligence. We will use Office Visio as an example for this post. If Asset Intelligence is not enabled in your infrastructure, you can enable the component by following Technet post. Asset Intelligence node in the SCCM/MECM Console From the Configuration Manager console, click on Asset and Compliance in the left panel Expand Overview / Asset … Read More
Why should you use Asset Intelligence in SCCM
Did you ever need to analyze the installed software in your business? For those who experimented with it, you know that it’s not an easy task. In SCCM, one of the ways to achieve this goal is by using Add Remove Programs but you’ll have to deal with a minimum of customization. The problem is that software companies don’t work in the same direction and not even standardize their own product, Adobe and Microsoft included. You can experiment with issues where publisher or product names are different 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 … Read More