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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One of the reports I suspect few people know about is the Activity Log.  It’s actually one of the oldest reports found within Express Software Manager, dating back to version 3.0, when it was still a pure software metering tool!  Little known to many of our customers, the Activity Log is a fantastic troubleshooting tool that can be used in any number of situations (some of which are described below). 

The Activity Log summarizes application usage based on license unit(s), machine(s), user(s) or server(s), with a level of detail that you won’t find in any other of Express Software Manager IT asset management reports.  This can be used to pinpoint applications being launched on specific machines or by specific users, as well as what remote devices and/or users are accessing applications on your Citrix or terminal server.  With usage data such as start and end time, idle time, and total time launched, you can zero in on all kinds of activities taking place on your network that are extremely useful from a troubleshooting standpoint. 

Here are some ways our customers have used the Activity Log report.

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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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Our featured Express Software Manager report this month is the “Suite Application” report.  At its highest level, this report helps you determine what components of suite products are actually being utilized, so you can ensure your software budget is being wisely spent.

Here’s a real-life example of how this information can be useful.  Let’s say that your company has 1000 employees, each of whom has a license for Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Plus.  The Professional Plus version of the 2007 Office suite is comprised of eight individual components.  We know that most people take advantage of Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  But what about the other four components:  Access, Publisher, InfoPath, and Office Communicator?  (Based on what we hear from customers, a majority of most organization’s users don’t use any of these components – and come on, do you know anyone who uses Communicator?) 

Now, let’s assume that half of your users licensed for 2007 Professional Plus are not using Access, Publisher, InfoPath, and Communicator–meaning they could get by just fine with the Standard edition.  The delta between the MSRP of the Professional Plus and Standard editions of Office is around $100, which means you could save something to the tune of $50,000 by renegotiating your software contract.  Not a trivial amount when your boss is telling you there’s no budget for the Windows OS upgrade.

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I wanted to notify existing customers that we’ve added some new topics to our webinar series.  These presentations are intended to help customers get the most out of their investment in Express Software Manager and take advantage of special features they may not be familiar with.  Below are the abstracts for our three most recent customer-centric webinar offerings. 

What’s New in Express Software Manager?
Friday, 8-Mar-2011, 10:00AM (PT), 1:00PM (ET)  — REGISTER NOW

In this live demonstration, we’ll discuss new feature enhancements made to our asset management software within the past year. The webinar will focus primarily on the Express Purchasing Module, a new IT purchasing system that transforms your ability to track and manage the countless details related to your hardware and software purchases.

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