MicroNugget: How to Eliminate Unused Software

In this video, Greg Shields covers how to eliminate unused software with ConfigMgr 2012. An obscure use of ConfigMgr is to meter the usage of any and all programs by all users. With that, you can measure whether you're paying the right amount in licenses.

Some applications are like zombies — they spread rapidly and never quite die off. It's not uncommon for copies of powerful and useful — but obscure — software to find its way somewhere into the cube farm and replicate themselves onto everyone's machine.

What happens then is that even though two or three people out of a hundred might need or make use of the software, it's installed by default on everyone's machine.

And not paying careful attention to what software gets distributed and installed can be an expensive mistake. Depending on how the master agreement looks, you might get charged for every instance of expensive pieces of software, even if it never ends up getting used.

If you could quantitatively analyze how many minutes every user spends with a piece of software each month, you could potentially save yourself a lot of money. With Configuration Manager 2012, it's possible to do just that — you could even end up saving enough money to pay for your ConfigMgr infrastructure outright.

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