One of the likely reasons you invested in Express Software Manager is because of its outstanding software recognition.  We can all thank the Express Software Identification Database (ESID) for that.  Under development for over a decade, the ESID is recognized throughout the industry as the most accurate and comprehensive database of commercial applications, enabling proper identification of software installed and used across corporate desktops and servers.  

Despite the database’s completeness, there will likely be occasions that you find one or more unrecognized applications within your environment.  If this is ever the case, be sure to use the machine scanning technology found within Express Software Manager to capture the information needed to add the application(s) to the ESID!  It takes just a few minutes, and helps ensure there are no gaps in your IT asset reporting.

To contribute unrecognized apps to the ESID, simply follow the steps below:

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Do you ever find yourself wishing for a dynamic view of what’s changing within your environment, versus an inventory snapshot representing a single point in time?  One supremely useful report that satisfies this need is the “What’s Changed” report.   Its purpose is to help you determine what has changed from a hardware and/or software perspective in your environment between two specified dates.  From a hardware perspective, the “What’s Changed” report shows when hardware attributes such as RAM have changed.  For software, the “What’s Changed” report shows machines on which applications have been installed and/or removed.  As you can imagine, there are countless situations in which this information could be useful. 

For example, let’s say you roll out 200 new computers to your sales department in November, and everything was working beautifully.  But in January you begin fielding calls from the users saying their machines are running slowly.  You look at the “What’s Changed” report and discover that nearly every sales rep has installed both iTunes and Plaxo on their new machines, causing performance issues. 

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One useful report many customers aren’t familiar with is the “Express History” report, which allows you to track changes made to your Express Software Manager implementation.   For example, imagine you turned on software metering for a particular application, but two days later metering is no longer enabled.  The Express History report would identify the user that made that change, so you can mete out the proper punishment. 

Below are several screenshots illustrating various ways this report can be used.  

Screenshot 1:  The first image shows all changes made to this Express Software Manager implementation.  Entries by user “ESM” represent the system making changes such as routine maintenance processes that run daily, weekly, or monthly. 

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As most of our customers know, software usage analysis is a critical component of effective IT asset management, offering a means to analyze whether software investments are being fully utilized, ensure concurrently-licensed apps are being used within proper usage limits, and evaluate usage patterns of unauthorized applications within your environment.  This month, we’ll take a look at the “Software Usage Statistics” report, one of Express Software Manager’s most widely used reports, which provides valuable insight into application usage patterns within your organization. 

The Software Usage Statistics report, when filtered by license unit, helps you determine the percentage of any given application launched within a specifed time frame, as well as more granular details such as average amount of time used (or unused) per day.  These statistics provide clues as to which applications may be underutilized and represent opportunities for re-harvesting and/or renegotiating license agreements to better reflect actul usage.   In other situations, the report can be used to examine the prevalence of unauthorized, harmful, or “nuisance” applications within your organization.  To investigate further, you can click on any of the displayed license units to see usage patterns for each application on individual machines, and even sort that data based on usage to see which machines show the highest and/or lowest amount of activity.   

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If you need to review detailed network inventory information across your organization, the Custom Hardware Inventory report is the place to find it. 

Prior to running the Custom Hardware Inventory report, you’ll be asked to select the attributes you wish to report on (Screenshot 1).  The Fixed Attributes column to the left shows the default hardware attributes Express Software Manager collects.  The Custom Attributes column shows additional hardware or software values that can be selected by the administrator to include within the report.  These items are collected by a variety of methods including WMI, the registry, imported list, or manual entry of data.