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Hi All,

I’m new to this site and definitely an amateur so I can use all the help I can get. Since our IT Manager left it’s my job to keep the systems in our company up and running smoothly. It’s a bit of a mess and I need some way of finding the product keys for all the software we have installed on our computers. I’ve seen several free applications that claim to be able to find and report the product key information for Office and Windows. Does anyone have any experience with them? Can you recommend one? I’m afraid to download free stuff because it might contain viruses, etc. Let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks so much.

10 Spice ups
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I’ve had pretty good success with License Crawler. License Crawler - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download

First came onto it from Hiron’s Ultimate Boot Disk, a must have tool in my opinion for troubleshooting.

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

Click the .zip file at the bottom, the rest are ad ware unfortunately.

One more thing. You can create a bootable usb drive from the .iso of HUBCD using this tool.

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

I find it very helpful and much faster to boot to the usb drive. I install any operating systems the same way if we for some reason don’t push it from configuration manager.

Little tip. Boot options in HP=F9, Lenovo=F12

GL to you! Hope this helps!!

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How far along have you gotten on your Spiceworks/SW installation? It does report this sort of thing. Heck, it is a fantastic first step to get to know an unknown network. When the SW unknowns come back, it gives something to track down and resolve.

Alternate reputable option is MJB (Magic Jelly Bean)—

10 Spice ups
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I have used MJB dozens of time and have never experienced an issue.

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Belarc Advisor.

Finds the keys for all programs installed. Print out the audit report or save to PDF.

4 Spice ups
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i’ve always had pretty good luck with ProduKey

It’s free :slight_smile:

2 Spice ups
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I have always used magicjellybean

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I haven’t installed the Spiceworks software. I was waiting for our IT consultants to check it out and tell me what they think. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes but I’m also anxious to get on with the cleanup so I think I’ll try MJB and see how far I get.

I want to just say how impressed I am with all the responses I got in such a short time. You guys are awesome. Thank you!

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Your IT consultants will possibly not want it installed as it will help you manage the network with less interaction from them. Which also means less time spent by them on site.
All of which means less revenue for them.

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+1 for Magical Jelly Bean keyfinder

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Magic JElly Bean has never worked correctly for me. I prefer Belarc and you can print off the reports to save in a binder as well as save the bci or html files for reference at any time on the network.

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ProduKey, is a nifty utility from NirSoft that lets you retrieve the product keys from various packages like Microsoft Office, Exchange Server, Windows 7, Vista etc. Installed on your PC. While there are many products similar to ProduKey, this stands apart from being a portable and a groovy little utility. You don’t have to go through the hassle of installing this software on your PC. Just run it and you’re done.

Produkey has support for Microsoft Operating systems from windows 98 onward (with the exception of some versions of Windows 7) and works with Windows 8 too.

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^ Belarc is good. It is free for personal use.

As the use case is for a business, would need to buy Belarc should it be decided to use the program—

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Adding my vote for Belarc.

Simple, quick, free. In addition to your software keys, it also gives you a snapshot of the workstation; its components, serial numbers, missing updates, network info.

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Reminder: Belarc Advisor is free for home-use. Commercial use violates the license.

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Unfortunately Produkey has not kept up. On the Produkey page linked above it says it supports Office through Office 2007 and doesn’t mention later versions (2010, 2013). It does show the key for my Office Professional Plus 2010, but it’s a single-user version, not a domain VLK version. If others here can report back on Produkey supporting volume keys for 2010 and any keys for 2013 it would be useful info to have. The version notes show the following:

  • Version 1.40: Fixed ProduKey to display the right product key of Microsoft Office 2010 Beta (Office 14)

but that’s just the beta version. No newer version notes mention “Office 2010” or 2013…

Microsoft has gone to great lengths to hide the keys in 2013, and many of the key-finding utilities are just not keeping up.

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True, unless you happen to fall under their definition of “charitable organization”. From their website:

Q: Can I purchase a license to run the Belarc Advisor on my corporate network, or my customer’s network?
A: We do not permit use of the Belarc Advisor for commercial purposes, however we suggest that you take a look at our products , which we do license for commercial use.

We offer some charitable organizations a license to use the Belarc Advisor at no cost, under certain conditions. Please send us information about your charity, a URL and the number of PCs and servers. Email: info@belarc.com

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I’ve just started a job where Spiceworks is used. Getting up to speed with it now and if you go ahead and use it, you’ll find a lot of useful reporting tools made by the great user community I’m discovering. For your request, try this: http://community.spiceworks.com/reports/74 its a report that will run on your inventory within Spiceworks and give you product keys. Probably not what you need right now, but food for thought when deciding to implement Spiceworks or not.

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FWIW I have tested many Product Key Finders against Office 2013 Home & Business, and AFAICT Microsoft has made it impossible to recover the Product Keys for Office 2013 Home & Business.

Apparently they hash the PK and store that, calling it Product ID, but they haven’t documented the hash function so we have no way of tying the PID (which we can see in the registry) to a given PK.

They have provided a VBS script* that will let you see the last 5 characters of the PK, so if you have a list of PKs you can run the script on each machine and document it manually.

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You can scan up to 75 machines for free with Lansweeper. It will report license keys for Windows/Office/Adobe products.