Retirement of Product Key Scanner
Very disappointed in the retirement of the product key scanner. While I understand the amount of effort taken to expand and keep it up to date, it has been very useful for us so far.
I frequently use it to audit our AutoCad and Solidworks installations on the domain, can use it to manage our licensing and see who is on a standalone and who is on a floating license.
Would be nice if at least there was integration within Inventory to use a third party tool and have it report back into Inventory (Say keep the Product Keys category but use ProduKey with command line switches to export a CSV file that is then collected with the rest of the scan results)
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I have done some research, ProduKey should work for this.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html
You can copy the portable exe with the scanner and launch it on the machine via command line. From there you can export it as various file types. You could then have the scanner grab the results from the file and directly import that into the product key portion.
Actually, you could even have the person specify the exe on the local workstation like you do with the VNC viewer and passthrough the commands for it to run remotely. I just tested and on my workstation you just need to do produkey.exe /remote %workstationname% /sxml results.xml and could then have the console grab that.
So many options, please consider this!
I didn't know it was retired .. That is sad though. That could've been very useful. I like the above app though. Good suggestion!!
Any word on if this is being considered? Would VERY much like to see this, as the license key portion is amazing for managing and tracking various licenses on the network.
Very disappointed this has been removed. I want to know what licenses are installed on my remote machines and now have to use some sort of 3rd party interface to query.
Why wasn't development just stopped as opposed to removing the whole feature?
Can I install an old version of PDQ Inventory, scan the network for the latest keys and then import that data into the latest PDQ Inventory?
We utilise this feature to ensure appropriate license usage and was a major reason for choosing PDQ Inventory.
Jon, I can understand them discontinuing it as it would be a labour intensive option that would detract from elsewhere. What I dont understand is why they are unwilling to incorporate the ability to use a free third party tool to do it then import that back into the Inventory database.