License Management showing software - even after it is uninstalled
Currently I am working on Microsoft Office License compliance. I am using that particular piece from KACE. It is working pretty well so far, but the only issue I run into is that it shows Office is still there, even though I have uninstalled the program and checked the device back in.
From what I see, it is gone from Installed Programs, but it is still there for Discovered Software. How am I able to remove that? I want to have very accurate numbers, but it is obviously more difficult when I can't get this to work correctly. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do to get rid of these?
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Once the software is "discovered" it will remain in your list of discovered software titles. You shouldn't be deleting those items. What will change however is if you view the details of the software title, it will display that it is NOT installed on any active computers. I recently went through an audit with MS and used custom reports to display MS distributed software titles throughout the organization. The updated software catalog in v6 I believe is a much more useful feature for tracking MS products as they tend to consolidate the various versions of Office into a singular list format versus developing custom labels to sort through non-essential items. - rrjustin 8 years ago
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So, you do not depend on the License Management piece? That is what I was hoping to use. However, it shouldn't be a problem to use custom report to view the installed licenses. - zgillette 8 years ago
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Posted by:
zgillette
8 years ago
After working with this for many hours with KACE support, it looks as if it is entirely possible that it may be impossible to remove the Office license on a device from Discovered Software. From what I gathered, there are 3 places it looks for the license on a device.
- It checks to find the software in Programs and Features. If it is there, it most definitely should show up in Discovered software.
- It checks the registry for the installer.
Now that I have that out of the way, let's talk about the registry.
I was shown that it would be in:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office
From what I have been reading from other sites is that you should also look at: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
to try to find if your program in there. The Office programs normally end in 0000000FF1CE (Clever, isn't it?).
Microsoft also has removal tools that will help take Office off of your machine:
3. Look for anywhere that might have an Office install file.
I would say that this would be the hardest to find out of the 3. The Office installer is Setup.exe. I figured that this may not be a way to look for the setup for Office.
From what I am seeing, I will probably just write a custom report to find out which machines are running Office in my environment instead of the licensing tool. It is quite a shame, especially since the licensing tool is a nice and easy interface to see everything together. However, if anyone else knows of a way to clear up this data and make it more accurate, I will be more than happy to listen!