Lansweeper is a powerful software that will help you in making a complete software, hardware, asset inventory of your windows network. It's an essential tool when managing a lan company network.
The free version of this software does not bare any annoying add pop-up or any other kind of nagging advertisement, and unlike most sharewares, the main limitations of lansweeper free version are the speed of your server and your bandwidth.
Lansweeper is actually quite simple to use, when somebody logs on for the first time at a new computer, their computer will be automatically scanned and all hardware and software inventory is done.
Lansweeper allows you to:
* Automatic inventory of all your Windows clients.
* Use with unlimited clients (no restrictions).
* No need to install clients on the workstations.
* Run the server application on as many servers as you like.
* Complete rewritten service and intuitive new web interface.
* Find unknown running processes, spyware, browser hijacks, ... running in your company.
* Reporting : over 75 hardware, software, network & server reports included.
* Export all data to excel from the reports in the web interface.
* Software and operating system licensing reports and cost calculation.
* Launch custom commands and programs from the web interface to support your clients (remote control, ping, event viewer, remote screenshot, ...)
* Win32 Gui to make easy configuration changes.
* Use the webconsole or custom queries to use your gathered information.
* Combine the information found with active directory details.
* Optional scheduled scanning.
* Query and store the registry keys you specify from all your clients.
* Lansweeper stores all information in SQL server (or in the free SQL Express version)
Premium users features:
*Remotely trigger the scanning of your workstations.
*Create and edit custom lansweeper reports from an intuitive GUI.
*Explore and export all your lansweeper reports to excel/html...
*Take remote screenshots from your workstations.
*Take remote control over your workstations.
*Use the standard windows runas but with an encrypted password.
*Access to a support forum.
Runs on Windows Me / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008
Comments (1)
Going past the 15k assets made things a bit sluggish though. I might need to take a look at setting up dedicated database server.
There is somewhat of a learning curve. I'd recommend reading up on SQL if you're not that well-versed in it. It will open up the reports as you can do very advanced stuff if you want to. There are a lot of options both maintenance- and setup-wise. The AD integration works like a charm. Have yet to fool around with any of the other ones apart from some Ip ranges.
They added a deployment tool quite recently as well. It works great and again, you can pretty much do whatever you need to do if you know how to work the cmd prompt.
For me it's one of the most price effective solutions out there. You get a ton of functionality, flexibility, scalability and adaptability. It does require you to be somewhat creative from time to time though.