Caputuring Application Serial Numbers with Altiris Inventory Solution for Windows

I'm always surprised to find how few customers take advantage of Altiris Inventory Solution's ability to inventory an application's installed serial number. This information can be invaluable when trying to tie copies of applications installed in your environment back to software license agreements.

Each time Altiris Inventory Solution scans are run, the serial numbers for installed applications are captured and stored in the Inv_AeX_OS_Add_Remove_Programs table.

It is impossible for us to list every single application that will report back a serial number properly, but testing in large environments has revealed at least 500 business applications that return this information properly, including most of the business applications from Microsoft, Adobe.

The following SQL query can be run against the Altiris database to find out which applications in your environment will have this information:

Use altiris
Select distinct [Name], Version, [Product ID] 
From Inv_AeX_OS_Add_Remove_Programs 
Where [Product ID] != ''

Armed with this information, you can use this to create better contracts and gain more visibility into the applications in your environment.