Objectives

Some people might be reading this document in order to save money by identifying software products for which their organization holds excess licenses; others my wish to ensure software license compliance by identifying products that they are using but for which they do not hold a current license.

Probably most people reading are interested in a bit of both though and the technical steps that we have to take in order to find over and under licensed software are identical, so we’ll cover both.

Basically, what we want to do is:

Of course, the usefulness of doing this will depend on the accuracy of the information that is obtained. As such, it is important that the data that you collect about both the software that is installed on the computers you manage and about the licenses that you own are accurate.

Additionally, if the process takes overly long then it may be the case that software has been installed/uninstalled or that licenses have been acquired or lapsed by the time we generate our software legitimacy report (which would make the report less useful than it might be), so it’s important that we be able to perform at least two of the above steps fairly quickly (if collecting information about the software licenses that we own takes a very long time but we can audit software installations and generate a report instantly, then we can ensure a fairly accurate report).

As such, a system to automate as much of this process as possible is certainly desirable.