Software Asset Management Phase 1 – Software Publisher Identification And Normalization

The first process in any software asset management (SAM) project is the identification of a “normalized” software publisher and this can often be a challenging task. Software publisher that will be installed in your environment literally cross all industry lines. The list includes:

   1. Traditional software publishers, such as Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, etc. (The biggies)
   2. Shareware/Freeware publishers, some of which don’t even have their own web site.
   3. Vertical market publishers, such as construction, healthcare, medical programs designed for a specific industry.
   4. Computer hardware manufacturers, which produce and distribute programs that support their hardware peripherals such as a printer or scanner.
   5. Financial institutions, which produce and distribute programs so their customers programs to access information about accounts.
   6. College professors and students, which produce and make available programs for their students.
   7. Students, which produce and distribute programs to satisfy educational needs or just for the fun of it.
   8. Equipment manufacturers, which produce programs to support the equipment they manufacture.
   9. Federal, State and local governments (foreign and domestic), which produce programs to assist tax payers to calculate and pay taxes, and the list goes on.

Software publishers identify themselves in a myriad of different ways which we call a “Publisher Alias” and that information about the publisher of a given program can be stored in several areas on your system that can be collected by your quality discovery tool.

Those areas are:

   1. System registry, Add/Remove programs section. You can view this information using “Regedit” and navigating to:

      Registry FolderHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
        Registry FolderSOFTWARE
          Registry FolderMICROSOFT
            Registry FolderWINDOWS
            Registry FolderCurrentVersion
              Registry FolderUninstall (aka Add/Remove)
                Registry FolderKeys

Information contained in these Registry Keys often, but not always, include a publisher “alias.”

WARNING: Editing information contained in the Registry can stop an application from functioning properly or at all.

   1. Information embedded in an executable file header can include a publisher “alias.”
   2. The folder (directory) containing an executable file can include a publisher “alias.”

Our database contains 148 ways to identify Microsoft; 51 ways to identify Computer Associates; about 80 ways to identify Symantec and so on.

Here are a few of the Microsoft representations that would need to be normalized to a single publisher:

Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Corporation, AssetMetrix, AssetMetrix Inc., Microsoft Inc., Cirel, Microsft, and so on.

Discovery tools have not done their job to normalize this data. Licensing our Knowledge Base will save you a significant amount of time that you would otherwise spend.

For the first time ever, SWident has decided to license its Publisher Knowledge Base of over 11,500 software publishers to companies with over 24,000 different Publisher Aliases.

This is NOT what you would normally expect in a database of this nature. We provide you with two tables:

   1. Publishers Table; including the following fields; name, website, member of SIIA or BSA?, publisher Licensable and Commercial applications?
   2. Publisher Alias Table; which contains the text strings needed to normalize publisher information for you.

Stop struggling and wasting valuable resources identifying software publishers and installed software.

About the Author

With our database for efficient software/”>http://www.swident.com”>software identification and our assistance in identifying the few publishers that even we don’t have you will save a lot of time and money whwn you are completing  your SAM process

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