1

My company allows local administrator access to all our field engineers. A side-effect of this policy is that it’s very possible for users to install software on their PC which is widely understood to be freeware without reading the EULA and ending up with a product which is only licensed for personal use on a company machine.

To offset this risk, I conduct regular software audits. I currently have to copy each software name into a search engine and attempt to find the license terms manually to check if commercial use of the software is permitted. Is there any way the Software Inventory tool could ever extrapolate if software is inappropriately licensed? Or even display the license type and licensee information…

I believe the main problem to be that the “Name” property of the software doesn’t include this information, nor does any WMIC output and every software uses a different naming convention. In some cases, the absence of any distinguishing name (such as “Professional” or “Pro”) is synonymous with the product in question being for home use only, however that is only the case if a business-use tier of the software exists. And all software which allows business use by default never mention it in their name either.

Is there any way to pull licensing details from the registry or filesystem or using some sort of API that has a reasonably high chance of accurately answering whether software is licensed for use on business PCs? And can this feature please be added to this tool?

2 Spice ups
2

My company allows local administrator access to all our field engineers. A side-effect of this policy is that it’s very possible for users to install software on their PC which is widely understood to be freeware without reading the EULA and ending up with a product which is only licensed for personal use on a company machine.

To offset this risk, I conduct regular software audits. I currently have to copy each software name into a search engine and attempt to find the license terms manually to check if commercial use of the software is permitted. Is there any way the Software Inventory tool could ever extrapolate if software is inappropriately licensed? Or even display the license type and licensee information…

I believe the main problem to be that the “Name” property of the software doesn’t include this information, nor does any WMIC output and every software uses a different naming convention. In some cases, the absence of any distinguishing name (such as “Professional” or “Pro”) is synonymous with the product in question being for home use only, however that is only the case if a business-use tier of the software exists. And all software which allows business use by default never mention it in their name either.

Is there any way to pull licensing details from the registry or filesystem or using some sort of API that has a reasonably high chance of accurately answering whether software is licensed for use on business PCs? And can this feature please be added to this tool?