The following bylined article can also be found in the April issue of IAITAM’s ITAK Magazine and the April edition of FAST IiS Kaleidoscope.

Since the dawn of the desktop era, IT departments have struggled to keep track of software installed across their corporate networks.  Accurate software inventories are crucial to ensuring installed applications are properly licensed, understanding whether or not they’re being used, and budgeting for future software purchases.  Unfortunately, no standard methodology exists across applications and manufacturers for correlating installed program executables with actual application titles.  This leaves asset managers and the software discovery tools they utilize with any number of half-complete approaches to application recognition.

Driven by licensing challenges stemming from inaccurate and incomplete software identification, the ISO/IEC 19770-2 software tagging standard has been developed, providing publishers with guidelines for “tagging” their applications in a standard way that makes identification straightforward, automated, and virtually foolproof for discovery tools.  Yet despite the technical ease with which software tags can be implemented, publishers have been painfully slow to adopt the standard, and end users have not pressed vendors hard enough to spur them to action. 

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If your organization has adopted a “Go Green” initiative and you’re evaluating ways to get IT involved with the effort, check out this article, “Retiring IT Assets for Green Reasons,” by Steve Suesens, of Staples Inc. Though not exhaustive, the column offers helpful advice for using IT asset management best practices to get more out of your deployed assets and determine when retiring those assets makes sense.   

As with any IT asset management initiative, whether it be license compliance, reduction of software costs, or planning for an organization-wide OS migration, developing a green policy for IT requires, at its most basic level, detailed computer inventory data revealing what assets exist and their capabilities, and software usage statistics showing what’s being used and what’s sitting idle. Once you’ve blended this information with key considerations such as power consumption, purchase and maintenance costs, recyclability, and more, you can begin to weigh the trade-offs related to various options such as upgrading, replacing, refurbishing, recycling, or donating it the dinosaur exhibit at the Museum of Science and Technology. 

Express Software Manager delivers the “discoverable” IT asset data mentioned above that can be used as the foundation of any green IT policy.  After that, the hard part begins.  Of course, nobody said it was easy being green – but if you do your homework and apply your learning thoughtfully, you’ll receive dividends both in terms of reducing your carbon footprint and strengthening your bottom line.

We’re always interested in hearing different ways our customers use Express Software Manager’s computer inventory and software metering reports to make their jobs easier. And believe me, over the last couple of years as budgets have been stretched thin, our end-users have been especially creative in identifying alternative uses.  The one we most commonly hear is to aid in the process of troubleshooting issues on remote PCs. While we certainly don’t claim to be a dedicated help desk tool, customers often provide access to Express Software Manager’s reports to their technical support staff.  Here are a couple of common issues our users are able to identify and tackle using Express Software Manager’s IT asset reporting.

Application Conflicts

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This post is part 3 of 4 of a series of articles addressing many of the common misconceptions associated with agent-based asset management solutions.  The four parts in this series are:

1. Intro: The Great Debate
2. Agent Deployment
3. Data Collection
4. Network and End-User Impact

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