Systems Management

Yes you can do that with SMS. Under client agents for your site settings there is a Software Inventory item. You can set it to collect file types like you are talking about and even set what path to look in or scan every drive.

Be careful with this though. SMS does a pretty good job keep the database lean by using a great deal of table relationshipping(word?) but Office docs all have different names usually so there isn't a lean way to store all of that information. Essentially, you can collect a ton of data with this that you may not need.

Also, if you want to query on the fly Install Solutions has tools for this. The Remote System Query Utility will allow you to query systems for a specific file (not search for all files). So if you wanted to know the version of a DLL after an installation of software you can do that. Check it out.

thanks for replying yarborg.

Does it flood the machine during the collecting of the data on the machine ? I mean if I use SMS or the IntallSolution or Remote system query?

SMS says that is tones down the collection speed when the PC is in use...but some people have complained that software inventory slows their system down quite a bit. When you set it up you can schedule it (I believe) to run at certain times when users will not be at their desk or less users will be around. Keep in mind that it is a hard disk activity, so if your users are using apps that page heavily to the hard drive they will see the impact more than someone who is using something that works more in memory.

The RSQ does not since you are querying for a specific file instead of scanning all drives for a file type. You can however specify to search for notepa*.exe which will return the first match of that file, I guess that could cause some slow down...but usually that is not how the tool is used.

ok well I guess if I want to scan a server for some specific type of file it is better to run the collect of the data during the night.

and RSQ it's almost like a DIR as I understand or a quick search of file like we can do in Windows Am-I right?

RSQ allows you to search for more than one thing at a time, so you can search for a reg key value, file properties such as version, size, modified date etc, and a service all in one pass. That information is returned into a table that can be exported to Excel. It's very handy. It's all wizard driven and there is no client needed so everything is remote and very fast.

We also have a tool called the Remote Software Installation utility which in the same fashion allows you to deploy software remotely. So when SMS missed a few or a couple of systems were off when the advertisements ran you can use this tool to push the software out.

ok thanks