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After installing the Software Inventory tool on about 15 machines, I have about as many entries each of software like Visual C++ Redistributable, .NET runtime environment, Citrix Workspace, Microsoft Office, etc. Every time there’s even a slight difference in the name of either the software or publisher, including just the version number, it generates a new line. Additionally, I have 22 instances of AMD’s Catalyst Control Centre, all from a single PC, one listing for each language included in the software.

I would be over the moon if the Software Inventory tool attempted to group together software with similar names. It would be a good start to just group together 32-bit and 64-bit variants and different version numbers of software with exactly the same name.

If afterwards it makes sense to continue making it better, it would be good to also group items if parts of the name and publisher match. For example, I have 10 machines with a mixture of “Adobe Acrobat,” “Adobe Acrobat (64-bit)” and “Adobe Acrobat Reader” published by either “Adobe” or “Adobe Systems Incorporated.” Hence, group together somewhat dissimilar software names where at least one word of the publisher also matches.

I think the best solution would be having a little plus sign next to the software name that expands it into its component variations. The main software name could have the sum of all installations between all the variants where computer names are unique. Thus, the aforementioned AMD Catalyst Control Centre would show as only being installed on 1 machine despite there being 22 variants.

Finally, I appreciate that this solution won’t work for everyone and I believe a checkbox with the label “Group Similar” which enabled or disabled this feature would be a great idea.

I believe that this feature is mostly cosmetic as it’s just a different way of displaying the data that’s already collected so I hope that it will be considered for implementation.

Thank you very much for making this tool. It’s infinitely better than what I had to do before finding it.

Cheers
Adrian

1 Spice up
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After installing the Software Inventory tool on about 15 machines, I have about as many entries each of software like Visual C++ Redistributable, .NET runtime environment, Citrix Workspace, Microsoft Office, etc. Every time there’s even a slight difference in the name of either the software or publisher, including just the version number, it generates a new line. Additionally, I have 22 instances of AMD’s Catalyst Control Centre, all from a single PC, one listing for each language included in the software.

I would be over the moon if the Software Inventory tool attempted to group together software with similar names. It would be a good start to just group together 32-bit and 64-bit variants and different version numbers of software with exactly the same name.

If afterwards it makes sense to continue making it better, it would be good to also group items if parts of the name and publisher match. For example, I have 10 machines with a mixture of “Adobe Acrobat,” “Adobe Acrobat (64-bit)” and “Adobe Acrobat Reader” published by either “Adobe” or “Adobe Systems Incorporated.” Hence, group together somewhat dissimilar software names where at least one word of the publisher also matches.

I think the best solution would be having a little plus sign next to the software name that expands it into its component variations. The main software name could have the sum of all installations between all the variants where computer names are unique. Thus, the aforementioned AMD Catalyst Control Centre would show as only being installed on 1 machine despite there being 22 variants.

Finally, I appreciate that this solution won’t work for everyone and I believe a checkbox with the label “Group Similar” which enabled or disabled this feature would be a great idea.

I believe that this feature is mostly cosmetic as it’s just a different way of displaying the data that’s already collected so I hope that it will be considered for implementation.

Thank you very much for making this tool. It’s infinitely better than what I had to do before finding it.

Cheers
Adrian