The business problem

Network inventory is a key part of the administration process. However, this step is often bypassed,  either because it takes too much time and efforts or simply because it is too expensive to invest in heavy computer management tools.

However,  this step is of prime importance to manage efficiently your hardware investments, to monitor the evolution of your network security, to know what are your network shares or TCP/IP settings…

Do you currently know if you have installed the latest Service Pack on all your computers? Do you know if you own enough Microsoft Office licenses?

Windows NT offers many standard ways to get remote technical information on your computers with software such as Microsoft Diagnostics[1] but there is no standard way to consolidate all the information in a single place and then to be able to query globally the data later.

WinReporter™ uses all these standard ways to get information about your network and to include it in a fully documented database. It provides you with many tools to help you query the information and consolidate it in a form.

Technology architecture

WinReporter™ mainly uses three technology domains:

1. Database access technology: all major relational database systems can be used including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Microsoft Access or IBM DB/2. The database is accessed internally by WinReporter™ with ODBC2 or ADO3.

2. Remote information access: it uses all the available technologies including WMI4, registry access, RPC5, NetBios6 API functions…

3. Multithreading: WinReporter™ is able to retrieve the information of thousands of computers at the same time using a customizable number of threads. In the case of multi-processors computers, all the threads are equally distributed to the different microprocessors in the standard Windows NT way.

Combining all these standard efficient technologies, WinReporter™ becomes the fastest tool to retrieve the information and the only one that does not need any agent to be installed on scanned computers.

Supported platforms

The WinReporter™ wizards run on all Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 computers. However, WinReporter™ can scan computers running under many other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 3.51 (Workstation and Server)…

You do not need to install any component on the computers to be scanned. This is the reason why the cost of the WinReporter™ deployment is just nothing !

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[1] WINMSD.EXE
2 Microsoft Open Database Connectivity
3 Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects
4 Windows Management Instrumentation
5 Remote Procedure Calls