Collection of inventory information is still a challenge for most organizations, especially if they haven’t yet implemented a formal application tracking system. Those systems that have the ability to scan an environment for installed programs will report back with a lot of extraneous information that is not critical to the task at hand when looking to migrate a portfolio to a new system. Drivers, patches and other installed bits can clog up the inventory view with information that you probably don’t need to care about. This is a pervasive problem regardless of the system that you probably use.

To further aggravate the problem; in some cases an application name cannot reflect the “common” name that an app has been given internally. One customer recently explained that he has over 10 unique names for one common reporting application listed in his inventory.

Recent upgrades to our AppRx platform can you with both of these issues. First, we can take your inventory and sort the vendor apps from the patches and drivers and other installed software. This is going to allow you to accurately assess the scope of your migration challenge. Second, we can provide you with the ability to assign a common name to your applications. You can view this information in conjunction with the vendor name of the application to reduce confusion around what it is that you are tasked with managing. Thanks to the input of our user base, these small inclusions will make your jobs a little bit simpler.

Original post: http://futurestateit.com/2013/01/31/making-portfolio-management-a-little-bit-easier/ 

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