Any suggestions for a way of scanning PCs on a domain and getting a list of installed applications?

Some of our users do have a genuine need to have admin rights on their machines , but a few have a habit of also installing some pikey software which I'd like to be able to spot and deal with.

We use Centennial Discovery. It's not cheap, but it does software & hardware auditing.

they use

Software Asset Management | Express Software Manager® from Express Metrix

where i work

If you have HP workstations purchsed via a business channel, they should come with an Altiris licence which has software auditing capabilities. It all ties into RDP (Rapid Deployment Pack)

If you have HP workstations purchsed via a business channel, they should come with an Altiris licence which has software auditing capabilities. It all ties into RDP (Rapid Deployment Pack)

Nope , we bought all Dells

We use Belarc BelManage.

Any suggestions for a way of scanning PCs on a domain and getting a list of installed applications?

Some of our users do have a genuine need to have admin rights on their machines , but a few have a habit of also installing some pikey software which I'd like to be able to spot and deal with.

Funny you should mention this, i've just finished playing with "Spiceworks" on our domain.

It's free software and I just have it running on my local machine. It uses WMI so is fairly easy to get up and running (may need a couple things set via domain GP).

It will discover all machines, then pull information. You can search for software and which machines it is/isn't installed on.

VERY impressed so far and it's completely free.

It can also monitor devices and has a pretty decent helpdesk section. Worth a look...

Funny you should mention this, i've just finished playing with "Spiceworks" on our domain.

It's free software and I just have it running on my local machine. It uses WMI so is fairly easy to get up and running (may need a couple things set via domain GP).

It will discover all machines, then pull information. You can search for software and which machines it is/isn't installed on.

VERY impressed so far and it's completely free.

It can also monitor devices and has a pretty decent helpdesk section. Worth a look...

That looks perfect.

Thanks

This Spiceworks sounds interesting. I used to use EZ-Audit, which was excellent. But then the company decided upon a full Altiris roll-out for audit management, and remote software deployment functions etc; I don't find it as intuitive or useful as EZ-Audit was though, for the software auditing side of things.

Steve.