Computersight -

Will you resist the idea of having a good picture of your assets?

If you are in your right mind then you will definitely not be bothered by knowing how much you are worth.

All the more a growing company, right?

Any company would certainly entertain the idea of doing a much-needed inventory to know how much it is worth at one point or another.

Nowadays, most companies have two kinds of asset: hardware and software. However, a hardware asset and a software asset differ from each other in many aspects, especially in terms of manageability.

Many experts would agree that software assets are more manageable than their hardware counterparts as software assets readily allow themselves to be under inventory procedures while hardware assets require a more tedious physical detection and tagging processes.

This difference may be attributed to a so-called registry (just like what Microsoft Windows has), which serves as a storehouse of all available settings and is expected to receive the markings that any software would leave once installed. With this ability of the registry to store information, details about installed software become readily available for scrutiny.

It is this capability that existing software asset management services employ to collect recorded software inventory details like acquisitions; installations and deletions; and the periodic settlement of documented values versus real time values.

With all that has been said, the software evidently goes above the fiscal value of what can be seen physically and, therefore, should be taken care of and subjected to an efficient software inventory from time to time.

Luckily, there are numerous ways of getting information about software assets in order to do inventory, such as the following free programs:

• The first is Microsoft’s tool labeled Microsoft Software Inventory Analyzer (MSIA). Though it only gathers Microsoft software, the MSIA has an outstanding web-based interface.
• SAMLite 2.0, which was worked on by ISA Technologies and Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), has a much simpler Microsoft access-based interface on the other hand, and has the capacity to acquire even the inventory non-Microsoft applications.

However, aside from inventory, a company’s software should also be subjected to other software asset management practices that go beyond avoiding piracy and police raids.

Let’s take a look at the following suggestions:

• Different software vendors have diverse licensing options in place. It is very important in software management to know these schemes and remain meeting the requirements.
• Documentation on all assets of your software should be done to identify what was actually bought by the company
• Boxes, licenses, certificates, and other documents should be collected to prove the authenticity of the programs and should be filed properly just in case the need for them arises
• Ensure periodic settlement of recorded numbers against realistic ones. This still boils down to an annual inventory of software.
• Make sure that computer users are not free to install just any software that they want. This is ideal for both security purposes and software asset management issues, and ensures that only legal software is being used on the computers that needed them.

With the full knowledge of what a company owns comes enjoying the full benefits of the software being used without any fear of legal consequences, saving precious capital by not buying unnecessary software, and keeping the network secure since software that is free from malware are being used.