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

Viewing Software Inventory Results

Working with the Applications Library