Software Asset Management (SAM) With SCCM 2012

In this post I want to explore managing licensing within using only SCCM 2012 SP1.

Neil Peterson created a fantastic 3 part blog post that shows how to remove unused software from machines using Orchestrator here: http://bit.ly/1162RqF

In this however he does not cover the very basics of importing 3rd party licenses into configuration manager so that is what I will cover here.

Firstly you must manually create a CSV file that holds the licensing information you wish to import.

In an ideal world the procurement department would create this file, upload it to an internal webpage along with a few basic details and orchestrator would take it from there, but here I am focusing on SCCM and SCCM alone, lets assume we have neither the luxury of time nor orchestrator :)

The CSV File

The csv file must be structured in a certain manner, below is a basic example:

However there are a few caveats with this, these are:

• Name, Publisher, Version and EffectiveQuantity columns must contain information the rest are optional
• Any dates entered must be in the format mm/dd/yyyy
• Name and Version must also match what is in the site database for that piece of software.

To obtain the vales for 7-Zip that you see in my example above I logged onto the SQL server that held the SCCM database, right clicked on the database and selected New Query and then entered the following

SELECT * FROM V_GS_INSTALLED_SOFTWARE WHERE ProductName0 LIKE %Zip%

This returned all of the database rows containing ZIP (1 in total) shown below

Now the information the query returned I was able to build my license file.

Once the file was ready I saved it as a .CSV file and opened with notepad to check the formatting, then went ahead and imported into SCCM.

Importing A Custom CSV file into SCCM

Open the console and navigate to Assets And Compliance -> Asset Intelligence. Right click on Asset Intelligence and select Import Software Licenses, run through the wizard ensuring you select General License statement when given the choice. Once complete navigate to Monitoring -> Reporting and run the report named License 15A - General License Reconciliation Report
This will show you a basic license count and usage and most importantly the difference between the two.

That's all for this post, obviously this can be expanded upon greatly, this is merely the foundations for anyone just starting out with SAM via SCCM.

Cheers
Wayne