There is a workaround to the 64 entry limit - use a script to set the rules. I know of a significant organization that at least used to do that. I don't know how supported it is, but it at least used to work fine. And scripted solutions are supportable (a separate topic that I've gotten into a few times over the years).
And unless your org is VERY large, if you're only inventorying a relatively small number of files then you could increase your software inventory cycles quite dramatically. Daily certainly, and maybe every 12 hours or so. If your people need to know how commonly an executable is deployed, as opposed to which specific machines, and they're comfortable with the concept of extrapolation, then they could literally have solid information within hours. In other words, if all your machines are reporting in daily, then after 7 hours you'll have updated software inventory from about 25% of them. For reasonably large populations that would be statistically significant. Even with all that, I agree it's not going to be an easy argument to win, but think of all the processing that could be saved, making your network and infrastructure much more efficient. Paul Thomsen | Solutions Engineer | 1E From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Daniel Ratliff Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 9:44 AM To: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: [mssms] RE: Software inventory best practices We fought through some similar issues here and lost the battle. We still scan all .exe's, including Windows. We do have some apps that hit the Windows directory that we use SINV for tracking. Our client machines take over 2 hours to do SINV as a result. One thing to note, if you use individual entries in the SINV client settings, there is a max of 64 entries. It's a hard limit and Microsoft could not provide a workaround. Not sure if 2012 has the same rules. Daniel Ratliff From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Poole, Richard Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 12:32 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [mssms] Software inventory best practices Hey everyone, Have a question from my desktop team that I'm trying to fight back with some real documentation or numbers. In our CM2007 environment we had the inventory agent looking for *.exe throughout all hard disks, including the Windows directory. Their excuse for having it set that way is on some off chance some executable gets installed somewhere in the Windows directory and they want to query on it. I personally hate the idea of an extra 2000+ lines of extra entries for each system being stored in the database when they could just specify a file to add and they'd have the same complete report in as many days as our software scan cycle occurs. The price of instant gratification for a "maybe" seems too high to me and really wanting to change that mentality moving forward into the new CM2012 environment. Does anyone know of anything out there showing either the resource hit on the backend or how each entry that calls for a scan across the whole hard drive is not very keen to the client machine either? Heck, even a best practices whitepaper on how one should streamline an inventory. Thank you, Richard Poole IT Systems Engineer Consultant Infrastructure, Servers, Databases - System Center Configuration Manager (ISD-SCCM) Office:(480)684-7643 | Cell/Text/Pager:(602)317-5977 Banner Health - "We exist to make a difference in people's lives through excellent patient care" <http://www.bannerhealth.com/> http://www.bannerhealth.com The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain CONFIDENTIAL material. If you receive this material/information in error, please contact the sender and delete or destroy the material/information.
