Microsoft Asset Inventory Service
Translating software inventory into business intelligence
Microsoft Asset Inventory Service provides a comprehensive view of your enterprise's desktop software environment. It helps reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve licensing compliance through advanced software inventory scanning and by translating inventory data into actionable information.
Microsoft Asset Inventory Service is a core component of the Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, a suite of advanced technologies designed to improve desktop manageability and security and decrease TCO.
Challenges with discovering and maintaining desktop software assets
Among the most challenging tasks facing enterprise IT managers is maintaining accurate information about all the software installed on desktops throughout their organization. This is critical for everything from license compliance and policy management to migration and true-up planning.
Your software infrastructure is likely becoming more complex all the time, given the number of applications available, the mobility of your workforce, and increasingly sophisticated licensing programs.
Microsoft Asset Inventory Service helps change your complex software asset management process into a streamlined, manageable task.
Microsoft asset inventory service: Advantages
Ensure compliance
By getting the most complete view of the software installed on enterprise PCs, you can tell whether licenses have been deployed. You can also tell whether all software is compliant with license agreements, key industry standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, and corporate policies. By letting you identify applications that are out of date or that don't comply with corporate policy, it can also help your IT staff identify unapproved applications that may be causing conflicts.
Improve forecasting and budgeting
You can gather data on all software assets in a single query that takes just seconds per system and that doesn't interrupt people using their computers. Microsoft Asset Inventory Service captures a comprehensive list of all the applications installed on each machine. Then the inventory data is reconciled against the Microsoft Asset Inventory Service Application Knowledgebase, containing more than 430,000 software titles, to create a detailed inventory of the software in use in your organization. This information can be transformed into browser-based reports that help your IT staff manage software assets and forecast future needs. The service also analyzes how Microsoft volume license agreements are deployed to help you more easily manage true-ups, renewals, and license reallocation.
Implement easily, cost-effectively, and more securely
Microsoft Asset Inventory Service was designed for ease of use. It can be set up in just a few hours. And because it is offered as a service, inventory data is more securely hosted by Microsoft, so there are no servers for you to maintain. Microsoft helps ensure that the data gathered in this hosted service is more secure and remains confidential to your organization.
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