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I need to find a way to determine what version, if any, of Microsoft Office is installed on every computer on our company network. The best idea I've had was just running a script that searches for the install directory on all machines that are currently connected to the network. I don't think this method is accurate enough and there is probably a better way.

Any ideas?

Neil
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You can try Microsoft's free Software Inventory Analyzer

Microsoft also maintains a list of third-party vendors that create software asset management and auditing applications.

One notable vendor missing from Microsoft's list is Novell's ZENWorks

Kenneth Cochran
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  • That's probably the singly most buggy bit of software yet produced by Microsoft. I've had a number of instances where it couldn't even detect which version of Windows was running, let along correctly enumerate the software installed on it. – John Gardeniers Feb 03 '10 at 22:55
  • Oh I agree with you. I lost count of the number of time it froze on me while gathering information. It depends on rpc and remote registry features which are typically either disabled or blocked for security reasons in a corporate environment. – Kenneth Cochran Feb 04 '10 at 21:50
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The registry key below holds a list of installed applications:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

You could write a script using the registry command line tool to search for versions of Microsoft Office. The tricky part will be specifying what machines to scan, you could feed your script a bunch of IP addresses but that might not be ideal.

Another way to go would be to install a tool which will automatically discover machines on the network and audit the installed software. Spiceworks is a good example of this and is easy to install and use.

John Rabotnik
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