Software Auditing Tool to Collect Software Inventory Information Remotely

With EMCO Network Inventory you can always have clear and up-to-date information about all software assets in your entire network to increase effectiveness of asset management, guarantee software license compliance and minimize licensing costs. For every computer in your network you can always have detailed software inventory information about installed applications and automatically detect software compliance violations. You also can protect network from appearing of unwanted installations or resources by timely detection them on remote PCs.

Automatic Software Inventory — Your IT Budget Optimizer

As you may know, software licenses are pretty expensive and significant part of IT budget goes for software purchasing and maintenance. But are you sure that these costs are distributed by the optimal way? Very often companies and organizations waste large amounts for purchasing of unused applications, while they have a lack of licenses for other often-used applications, or they spend on licenses maintenance more then required. Is it a known situation for you?

In order to make considered decisions and organize your software asset management, you need to have software inventory information. If you tried to audit installed software manually, you know that it’s a very ineffective and requires too many time. If you tried some tools to automate software auditing, you may know that often you don’t get valuable application inventory information in a usable form.

What if every time when you need to make software purchasing, you can get fresh software inventory report generated automatically in few minutes? How effective your decisions can become in this case and how many costs you can save? You can bring your software asset management to a new level with EMCO Network Inventory. It will not only collect application inventory information from remote PCs in automatic mode, but also use this information to produce software inventory and software compliance audit reports.

Features and Benefits: Software Compliance and Inventory

OS and System Information for Every PC

Detailed OS report is a part of software audit information collected from remote PCs. It includes basic OS information, such as OS name, type, service pack as well as system configuration and runtime information like services, running processes, shares, startup commands, scheduled tasks, installed hotfixes, etc.

Installed Software Inventory

You can scan selected PC or group of PCs remotely in automatic mode and get a list of installed applications. Installed software audit report for each PC looks similarly to Add/Remove Programs summary and includes application name, version, publisher, installation folder and application installation date.

Software License Compliance Audit

Collected application inventory information is automatically aggregated to display a total number of installations across the network for each application. It is represented by a special reconcile license report, where you can enter a number of purchased licenses and get a required and unused licenses count.

Installation Changes Tracking

Changes in the list of installed applications are automatically detected for each PC in your local network. It saves you from analyzing complete inventory report each time when you make software audit. Instead, you can compare actual software inventory information with results of previous scan and analyze changes only.

Detect Software Policy Violations

A special feature allows you to scan registry and file system on remote PCs and find set of files, folders and registry entries according with specified conditions. It is helpful in cases when you need to find unlicensed or forbidden content, such as movies, music, pictures or to detect specific applications, viruses, etc.

Extract Software Serial Numbers

Windows serial number and product keys for MS Office are automatically extracted from remote PC during software audit scan. Set of reported keys includes Windows product ID and Windows digital product ID, MS Office product ID, Internet Explorer product ID. It saves you from collecting these keys manually.

Best 5 Software Inventory Tools 2021

Software inventory management tools are often confused with inventory management software. Whereas software inventory management is part of IT asset management, inventory management is an element of supply chain management. It is the management of inventory and stock, including aspects such as controlling and overseeing ordering inventory, storage of inventory, and others.

What Is Software Inventory?

A software inventory consists of all the software and applications used within an IT environment. The process of keeping a record of a software inventory is called software inventory management.

“Along with hardware inventory management, software inventory management is part of IT asset management, enabling the recording of various data related to software installations. ”

Along with hardware inventory management, software inventory management is part of IT asset management, enabling the recording of various data related to software installations. A typical software inventory management process keeps a record of the number of software installations, corresponding installation dates, the type of software installed, expiry and license renewal dates, and sometimes even the total monetary worth of the installed software.

What Are the Advantages of Software Inventory Management?

Software inventory management is the answer to the growing complexity of the software market. With the proliferation of cloud-based enterprise software solutions and subscription-based licensing models, even relatively small companies often find it difficult to keep track of their software assets.

A failure to comply with license agreements may prompt a software audit, which may have far-reaching consequences. Instead of risking a software audit, it makes sense to invest into a robust software inventory management solution capable of automating the entire process of software asset tracking.

Some of the best software inventory tools have integrated software monitoring capabilities that allow them to automatically detect and track all software installations within an IT environment. Most software monitoring tools can generate detailed reports and send alerts in case of incoming software license expirations.

As such, software inventory tools should be an integral part of any wider IT asset management strategy. A well-implemented software inventory management process can save the company a significant amount of time by automating what would otherwise be a time-consuming process that would most likely become a responsibility of the IT department.

What Are the Best Software Inventory Tools?

The market with software inventory tools is booming, and there’s no shortage of capable, reliable software inventory management solutions. Comparing many leading software inventory tools and taking into consideration the experience of other users, we’ve been able to create a list of top 5 best software inventory tools that you can try today.

5 Free Software Inventory Tool For Windows

Here are 5 free software inventory tool for Windows. Using these free software you can easily keep track all the installed software on your PC with detailed information. Not only that, some of these software can also show other information such as Bios information, registered users, ISP information, installed services, etc. Apart from general software details, some of them can also show the product keys associated with any software. After generating the software inventory report, you can export it as CSV, HTML, TXT file.

Though, you can easily use Control Panel of your PC to find out the software details, but the details that it shows are limited. That’s where these free software inventory tool for Windows come in handy. After using these software, you will be able to easily audit your PC to find out all the details about the installed software.

5 Free Software Inventory Tool For Windows

WinAudit

WinAudit is an open source and lightweight software inventory tool for Windows. It offers various options to generate reports of system hardware and software. Using this freeware, you can generate the list of all the installed software in your PC. Not only the list, it also shows vendor name, version, Software ID, Product ID, location, source package location, and lot more. It creates a detailed block of every software in the final report. And after generating the report you can export it as CSV, HTML, and RTF file.

Getting started with WinAudit is pretty easy, just download and install it from the above link and launch it. As you launch it, it will automatically start scanning your PC. By default it reports about all the components of your PC. But you can stop the scan and select desired options by clicking on the Options button. When you do so, a window will pop up where you can see various options. Check the ones which you want to include in the report. Now, apply the changes and get back to the main interface window. Hit the Audit button and when the report appears, you can analyze it from here. If you want to export it, then choose Save option from the File menu.

So, in this way you can audit your PC using this free software inventory tool for Windows.

LookInMyPC

LookInMyPC is the best free software inventory tool for Windows according to me. Using this free tool, you can easily analyze the detailed information about your PC. LookInMyPC lets you extract CPU information, installed software list, installed services, Printer info, Hard drive info, Bios info, environment variables, and a lot more. And you can selectively generate the report of the mentioned options. Apart from just getting information about software resources your PC, you can also compare two reports for the differences. And LookInMyPC also comes as a portable software, so you don’t really have to install it in order to audit your PC for software inventory.

To use LookInMyPC freeware, simply install it from the above link and launch it. The interface of LookInMyPC is divided into two tabs. In the first tab, which is Report Options, you can see various options to generate reports. You can either check them all, or you can select only relevant ones. After selecting the options, simply hit the generate Report button. After that, the generated report will be open in the browser in HTML format. You can analyze it there.

Sol, in this way you can easily find out every detail about various resources of your PC. It has included many options in it to generate the report about. I find it a very useful and powerful software inventory tool for Windows.

Free PC Audit

Free PC Audit is another portable and free software inventory tool for Windows. Using this software you can find out all the details of installed software on your PC. Using this free software you can audit your PC for installed software, system’s status, and running processes. After getting the list, you can export as a TXT file. It’s pretty simple software and shows various essential information about a particular software. In the report you can see the software name, version, publisher, install date, size on disk, and product key.

It comes as a portable software, so you can start using it the moment you have downloaded it. It automatically starts auditing your PC when you launch it. When the scan has completed, you can see the list of all the software in the Software tab with the relevant details. And if you want to export the list to a file, then choose Save option from the File menu. After that, you can export the list as a TXT file to a desired directory.

So, in this way you can use this freeware to find out all the details of the installed software including the product keys.

Belarc Advisor

Belarc Advisor is a free software inventory tool for Windows but for non-commercial use only. This software is quite different from the other software that I have mentioned above. The software doesn’t really have an interface, it just shows different dialogs during the scan progress. It shows all the essential information about hardware and software. For software, you can see the name, version, licence, product keys, and usage. However, there is no option to export the generated report. And if you really want to save the report, then you can save the web page as HTML or PDF file.

Getting started with Belarc Advisor is pretty easy. Just download and install it from the above link. After that, you can just click on its icon and a progress bar will run for a short amount of time. When the analyzing progress completes, it will open a web page in a default browser where you can see the final generated report. In the report you can navigate to the Software Licenses or Software Versions and Usage section to find out the detailed stuff about all the software. Also, you can hover the mouse over the “i” icon to view details of the software in a tool tip. And clicking on the “i” icon will open the directory where the software is located.

Belarc Advisor is really a very nice software inventory tool for Windows. However, it cannot be used freely by everyone as it is free for home users only. So, if you are a home user, then Belarc Advisor is very good option for you to audit your PC to find out various software details.

Fast Software Audit

Fast Software Audit is simple and free software inventory tool for Windows. It is a dedicated tool that only finds the information of all the installed software in current or network PC. However, the remote PC auditing feature didn’t work for me. Fast Software Audit can generate the report of all the installed software and after generating the report, you can export it as a CSV file. In the report you can see the various details about the installed software on your PC. You can see name, version, and product key in some cases.

It is not very difficult to use this software. The software has a very simple interface. After launching it you can type the name of your PC in it. If you don’t know the name of your PC, then you can type “Sysdm.cpl” in the run box to get the PC name. After entering the name of your PC, hit the Audit Now button to get the report.

So, in this way you can easily audit your PC using this free software inventory tool for Windows. Though the report generated by it is very simple, but still its worth a shot.

Final Words:

It was the list of best free software inventory tools for Windows that I have found so far. Using any of these free software, you can easily audit your PC to find out all the essential details about installed software. Also, some of these software also allow you to audit other PC resources such as memory, hard drive, network, USB drives, running processes, services, etc. And after getting the report, you can also export that to a CSV, HTML or TXT file. So, if you are looking for free software inventory tools for Windows, then this list can handy to you.