Workstation Auditor

Overview

The single most important question when defining and managing your IT strategy is "What's out there?" Without a complete understanding of your existing infrastructure you cannot make good decisions around where you need to go next. Workstation Auditor obtains a comprehensive snapshot from your workstation estate and presents it using a dynamic console with a full reporting engine within an integrated auditing application.

Why Audit?

Auditing is generally not a voluntary activity, and is definitely not something that IT staff do for their enjoyment! Auditing is most often needed to answer legal, commercial or project planning questions, often thrust upon an IT Group from other parts of the organisation. There is often little or no enthusiasm for the process and some may even see it as threatening.

The main reasons for Auditing would often appear to be:

• Establishing Software License Compliance
• System Change Planning
• Standards Conformity
• Estate Valuation
• Asset Management

Whilst there may be arguable cases for a 'Return on Investment' model that could potentially find savings when in performing certain types of audit, the bottom line is how accurate, effective, accessible and useful the audited information really is. So, rather than trying to build a nebulous RoI model to attempt to draw value from a process [that is never going to rate as a pleasurable experience in the life of an IT person], Lanboss has rather focussed on delivering the broadest and most complete audit capability. With the Workstation Auditor, the ultimate benefit is an audit of the estate that is efficient, insightful, accesible and continues to be pertinent for many different IT decisions.

What do you need to know?

When it comes to Workstation Auditing, the answer to this rather straightforward question will be different depending on:

• What your job role is
• The prevailing project objectives
• Other IT staff and their needs
• What stage of the project has reached
• The disposition of the IT estate
• ... and a host of other factors

Almost invariably, what starts out as an audit for one reason ends up diversifying into a multitude of further requirements. Lanboss has been aware that the use of an auditing product may well change over time and for this reason, we have made the core of the product a high powered database that feeds a totally customisable summary and reporting engine.

Software License Compliance

The most recent major enhancements to the Workstation Auditor have been the addition of FAST and BSA compliant Software Licence Compliance capabilities. These can roughly be broken into four distinct requirements being:

• Discovery - including installed applications as well as scanning executables
• Identification - background research tools to identify applications
• Organisation - logically group applications into suites and licensing types
• Proof of Purchase - hold detailed information about all of your purchases

The Software compliance functionality of the product combines the aspects above into one seamless process that does away with the need for multiple applications to perform the above. It allows for the importation of your existing software asset lists, held in external databases or spreadsheets, to minimise the amount of effort it takes to get up and running with your Proof of Purchase data. Once 'taught' it reconciles the license databases a live basis and is able to report over or under purchase information on demand.