1

We’re at the beginning of what Microsoft lovingly refers to as an assessment of our licenses. I’m truly not concerned about the outcome because I know we are actually over licensed BUT I still want to be accurate.

We’ve ben inventorying our machines weekly for a few years. Today I ran a report to give me all “Microsoft Office” product listing expecting that I would be able to quickly get a report on just how many of each license I was using. I was wrong!

According to the Spiceworks inventory I have machines running 3 different versions of Office. One example machine reports Office 2007 Standard and that product has never actually been installed on that machine since upgrading it to Windows 10 (clean install).

All I can surmise is that Spiceworks does not remove things from the inventory when they no longer exist on the machine. It also identifies software as being installed that was never even there (Office Professional PLUS has never been installed on these machines yet a few of them show up as having it).

SO what am I looking at here? Do I have to wipe out everything and start again? How do I even do that (MS only gives you a week to respond so weekly scans are not going to work for me).

2 Spice ups
2

Spiceworks just reads what is in the registry and Office is notorious for not cleaning up the registry when apps are removed or upgraded. Check out the following How To for what to remove for better inventory scanning. If you are sure an old version is gone everywhere, you could use a Group Policy Preference to fix all of your workstations at once.

https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/2621-remove-leftover-office-registry-keys

3

Either or. You can’t upgrade if you did a clean install, and it isn’t a clean install if you upgraded.

I know it’s only terminology but they contradict each other

4

Spiceworks should not be your tool for Microsoft audits, it cannot get licenses for anything above Office 2013 and nothing for Windows 8 or higher.

As for your other products, if you’ve NEVER had them on ANY machine, I will look in to this with you, however if you have had it on ANY machine, I’d hazard a guess you have stale DNS entries and the machine you think your scanning is not the one you actually are.

Spiceworks doesn’t scan by DNS name, it scans by rDNS, so if Machine1 is 10.2.3.4 and ping -a 10.2.3.4 returns Server06, then server06 gets scanned but updates record Machine1, it gets confusing, but DNS stale records is to blame.

Again, not wanting to make SW sound bad, it is not a licensing tool, and you should not rely on this information to be accurate.

Snow Inventory on the other hand, while not free is.

5

I would agree with you if we were talking about one PC but in the grand scheme of things when we are talking about moving a corporation from Windows 7 to Windows 10 I would think we can refer to it as “upgrading” and mention that we did a clean install in the process of upgrading.

6

I’m not getting in to semantics, just pointing out the differences, they can mislead or confuse.

Migrated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 would be better sentence.