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What is OCS Inventory ?

 

Open Computers and Softwares Inventory is an application designed to help a network administrator keep track of the computers configuration and the number of copies of software that are installed on the network.

For instance it can be used to find out how many PCs have Office Professional or Standard, this is an important difference as far as licensing is concerned.

At the begining, OCS Inventory was just a Visual C++ port of the Visual Basic Stealth Inventory (http://www.castleinfo.co.uk). But now, the product is so different and has so many more features that it cannot be seen as a simple port. Also, the database is not compatible with Stealth database.

The application is build on an Microsoft Access 97 database which stores the applications to search for and the results that the inventory agents return.

The inventory agent is a small (about 300 K) executable that can be run from the login script for each user. This agent scans the users hard drive for any recognised software, query the Operating System to determine computer configuration and stores the results in the central database.

Performance is better than most products on the market because of the limited search scope, the more applications you search for, the slower it gets. But up to 500 should cause no noticeable problems.

OCS Inventory is GPL software, i.e. free to use & copy (see the GPL or http://www.opensource.org). OCS Inventory is also Open Source ! This means if you want to modify the sources you can !

Development libraries are included in the executable so that it does only require an up to date MDAC and Jet/Dao 3.5 components on client computers. However, if client computer doesn't have up to date MDAC or Jet/Dao components, the agent now uses CSV files to temporary store inventory check results. The Windows Management GUI will import this results to the database when you open it.

The application is a no frills solution, but it works well and OCS Inventory Agent "OCSInventory.exe" and Manager "OCSInventoryManager.exe" has been tested on Windows 95 OSR 2, Windows 95 OSR 2.1, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows NT4 SP 6, and Windows 2000 SP2.