Express 2000 Software Manager

Users constantly bombard network administrators with requests for software package purchases, obscuring exactly what applications users have installed on their machines. If you're unsure about what software your clients are running, you can't know whether your machines are Year 2000 (Y2K)-compliant. WRQ's Express 2000 Software Manager can help you get a firm grip on what applications are installed on your clients' machines.

Express 2000 Software Manager is a suite of applications you use to manage your company's computing environment. Express 2000 Software Manager contains five components: Express Meter, Express Inventory, Express 2000, Express Reports, and Express Enterprise. Each of these components plays a vital role in your system management. You use the Express Console to perform all of your management activities.

Background
You can compare Express 2000 Software Manager to Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS), because WRQ's product performs many of the same functions as SMS. However, Express 2000 Software Manager is more powerful and offers many features not found in SMS.

Express Meter is the software-metering component of the Express 2000 Software Manager suite. Software metering is a practical and legal way to reduce your software purchasing costs. Software metering means purchasing only a few copies of a software package, then restricting the number of users who run the software at one time to the number of copies you purchased. However, many companies (e.g., Microsoft) implement restrictions in their software licenses to prevent you from metering applications. Thus, you must check your software licenses to ensure you can legally meter your applications.

Express Inventory is the component responsible for inventorying the hardware and software installed on your client workstations. This component has numerous benefits: The major benefit is that you receive a complete and accurate inventory of all the hardware and software installed on all the client workstations on your network. This inventory can take days, if not weeks, to manually collect. A second benefit is that the product includes an extensive product knowledge base that identifies software installed on remote machines. This component lets you monitor whether users install unauthorized software on their machines.

Express 2000 is a Y2K-compliance testing and management component. This component tests your hardware configuration to ensure that you're Y2K-compliant. Also, Express 2000 uses the product knowledge base to maintain a comprehensive database containing the applications in your environment that are not Y2K-compliant.

These three modules feed information to the fourth component, Express Reports. Express Reports is a collection of management reports the software maintains within a Microsoft Access database. You can use the information collected by Express Meter, Express Inventory, and Express 2000 to generate comprehensive reports and graphs about the status of your computing environment. For example, you can create a Y2K-compliance report that lists the Y2K status of all the software installed on all the machines in your network. The reports you generate with Express Reports are invaluable and can save you money and time otherwise spent manually collecting, sorting, and reporting data.

Express Enterprise facilitates data interchanges between multiple instances of Express 2000 Software Manager. For example, you use Express Enterprise if you want to share information the software collected from a marketing department on one server and an accounting department on another server. This component is optional and isn't necessary in small environments.

These features sound promising. However, you might wonder how the software performs in the real world. I found that the software worked remarkably well, although the learning curve was longer than I had hoped.

   Previous  [1]  2  3  Next