Microsoft Licensing Tracking/Reporting Discussion

[MikeRigsby]

This is sort of a long winded Report related post and also just a basic request for some input on ideas so I'm not really sure what community category this would best fit into.

TL;DR - I'm trying to figure out a one button report for purchased Microsoft licenses, Agreement Number, Qty. Has anyone out there gotten LANSweeper to work for exactly what they need to provide in a SAM Audit?

I'm in a company that gets hit for SAM audits every couple years and I really want to try and get my LANSweeper system configured to make life easier.

The problem is that the Asset: Microsoft SAM/CIDC Audit Report that's in the Reports section here is honestly (no offense to the creator of the report) pretty much useless for an actual SAM audit.

Microsoft only cares about total Quantity of Licenses, not a full list of every PC on the network and that report generates a list of every Active PC on the network. They don't need that. They don't care about Model, BIOS Serial, etc. so that report, while nice, doesn't return any actual valuable data.

Then there's also the 'free' Microsoft software versus the licensed software. The built-in Software: All Microsoft software is great, and very useful for general information. However for a SAM audit it's also pretty useless. Audits don't care about .NET Framework, Visual C++, Silverlight, Internet Explorer, etc.

Toss in their other free titles that get confused in with paid for licenses, like Excel, Visio, Word Viewers, SQL Management Studio, etc. and things get very confusing.

The next thing that comes into play is Microsoft titles we own, but aren't using. So these don't show in LANSweeper at all. I can manually add them, but then if we do install them at some point the LANSweeper scanning engine might not identify the software as the same as my manually entered description.

[Esben_D]

The root of the problem you are discussing seems to be that Lansweeper currently is not able to distinguish between commercial and free software. We already have a feature request for this and we will link this topic to it in order to add weight to this feature.

The next thing that comes into play is Microsoft titles we own, but aren't using. So these don't show in LANSweeper at all. I can manually add them, but then if we do install them at some point the LANSweeper scanning engine might not identify the software as the same as my manually entered description.

Currently it is not possible to manually add software. Software is automatically scanned from the registry of the client machine. Alternatively, you could add software which is installed, but not recognized by Lansweeper, by using custom file scanning.

The built-in reports are general reports which contain information that you can take and modify. This allows users to take a report and customize it for their specific needs. It rarely occurs that a single report can fit the needs for all the clients, we therefore try and create reports that will give back as much information that they may require at one point or another.

We will however take into account your feedback on the report for future report updates/additions.