Software Inventory Overview
Software inventory operations collect information on the software installed on PCs in your organization. Using a customizable, regularly-updated Applications Library, they can automatically recognize many commonly-used applications. The stored inventory data can then be used to manage your system assets, to produce inventory reports, to help answer support problems, and to plan software installations and upgrades.
Software inventory data is collected using a two-stage process:
The
Vector AM Client takes a snapshot of the files and directory structure on the selected PCs. This includes
the sizes, dates and attributes of files together with version information when available. The Client
PCs copies this information to the offline area.
The
data is collected from the offline area by performing an Update Software Inventory operation and processed
using the rules defined in the Applications Library. The processed results are displayed at the Console
or saved in the Site database.
Two variants of the Update Software Inventory operation are supplied in Vector AM:
Update Software Inventory Interactively displays the inventory results. Use this operation when you want to check the results before saving them.
Update Software Inventory saves the inventory results in the Site database. To schedule this operation, right-click the operation icon and choose Submit Job from the shortcut menu.
Related Topics
Customizing Update Software Inventory Operations
Viewing Software Inventory Events