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#03 Software inventory

Installed software inventory + license reconciliation

Weekly CSV with all software installed across the fleet, compared against the authorized software list.

Implementation: Half day 4 technologies
The pain

What it costs you today

In a 1,500-endpoint fleet the question "how many Adobe Acrobat Pro licenses do we actually pay for and how many are used" can take 3 weeks of manual work between reconciling the vendor invoice, writing an ad-hoc script and interviewing each line of business. The same applies to prohibited software: a typical case is a department installing uTorrent on a workstation to move large files, with IT not finding out until an antivirus flags it. The annual audit becomes a nightmare: 2 people full-time for 4 weeks consolidating spreadsheets, and there is always one piece of untracked software that triggers a finding. "Legal uses FoxIt and never told us" is the kind of discovery common in findings review. How much capital do we have in installed software we do not need, and how much risk in software we do not know is there?

The value

What changes when you have it

On day one IT receives a weekly CSV listing installed software on every domain PC, reconciled against a master authorized-software list in SharePoint. The tool highlights what is over-licensed (paid software with no assigned license), what is missing (authorized software not installed) and what is out of policy (banned versions, torrent clients, risky freeware). The owner is procurement and security, which now negotiate renewals with real data. The visible output is the attached CSV, an optional Power BI dashboard and email alerts to the relevant owners. An education client with 2,800 endpoints recovered USD 47,000 per year in unused licenses and blocked 612 unauthorized software instances. The investment pays back with the first license harvest, typically in under 2 months.

Stack
Technologies we touch in the implementation
PowerShell 7CIM/WMIActiveDirectoryCSV / SharePoint
Installed software inventory + license reconciliation
#03 · Software inventory

Consolidated fleet view with drift alerts

Technical references
Software inventory

I want to implement this

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