Better Reporting for installed software
Software normalization built into SCCM reporting. An integrated solution to manage software inventory, software intelligence and license management. As a SCCM administrator it has been difficult to provide accurate reporting on installed software packages without purchasing third party normalization tools like BDNA or SNOW. Software normalization capabilities would be a great addition to SCCM.
1. Software Recognition Service that recognizes software requiring a license.
2. Software title normalization.
3. Ability to import all owned software licenses and then compare against what is actually installed.
4. Ability to recognize when software has been removed or upgraded. Example: if Office 2010 has been upgraded to Office 2013, will SCCM reporting show both Office 2010 and 2013 installed, same with Visio?
5. Ability to detect software version information. Example: SQL Server 2014 version, is it Standard or Enterprise?
System Center Configuration Manager has a good inventory agent, normalization would make it great!
Thank you and Regards

8 comments
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Kasper Jensen commented
Bumping this one. SNOW, BDNA, Flexera, they're all making dirty money off of data you already have.
Yes, it's slightly easier with Windows Analytics. No, it's not a solution because it's not integrated with System Center Online and its intelligence. -
Martin Ohlsen commented
The Editions would be a huge improvement on software Inventory right now having to run Powershell Scripts as Configuration baselines, in order to discover whether for example, SQL Server is Standard or Enterprise, is very clunky and could be problems in the future when changes are made.
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Santosh Seth commented
Sooner the better please
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Anonymous commented
I agree with all statements below. We should be able to use SCCM as a reporting tool for software and have more confidence in it.
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Ryan Seymour commented
Also a field for Win 10 Application Compat
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Ryan Seymour commented
Something that I feel could also help this would be to create a community based platform for people to contribute to the normalization catalogue that feeds into asset intelligence to help speed up the discovery, definition and quality of the data.
In addition some added fields to this to identify:
Flag for licensed software
Flag for Freeware
Stipulate Parent-Child relationships to help define software suites.
Accurate software hash to join back to other views to make it possible to report last time software was executed. -
Marc commented
Fix this at least for Microsoft software, you have all the tools and knowledge available. Make sure you can provide a true up report through the license 01A asset intelligence report. We are monitoring Microsoft software with a Microsoft tool and it cannot create correct reports. We have to resort to other tools like snow and bdna to get it correct. Make sure you don't have to include the first note on this page. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb680578.aspx.
Tx Marc
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Charles Herrington commented
I agree, MS has come to us a couple times to audit our licenses and both times we have to go to SpiceWorks because SCCM doesn't seem to be able to provide us with product keys.
Its a shame that we can use a Microsoft tool to provide Microsoft information on the Microsoft Licenses we have at any given time.