Inventory tools offer numerous benefits. First and foremost, you save wear and tear on your feet because you no longer have to run around your company and fuss with each and every computer in order to list what hardware is sitting inside, and what software has been installed.

In addition, you have a good tool for tasks such as listing all the workstations with less than 256 megabytes of memory, or those that are pressed for hard drive space. That is information that is good to have during the planning stages before you roll a new OS out onto your desktops. A third benefit, and one that is at least as important, is that you gain control over the number of installed copies of a given piece of software. A quick check against your licenses will show whether you have bought too many or too few. If you're lucky, a good software inventory can save you money.

At the starting line
At the starting line we find six hungry contestants, all of whom offer fast, accurate and comprehensive inventory functionality. Scandinavia is well represented with Snow Inventory (Norway) and Vidamic Netlog (Sweden), both of which are pure inventory programs. Snow Software also has more to offer in its product portfolio, for those who are interested in adding on.

Two of the products are intended to be more than just inventory programs, even though that is the functionality that was the focus of this test. The classic PC-Duo is a complete client administration package, with functions for the network distribution of software and remote control. However, according to information from the Swedish distributor, it is possible to purchase individual modules, so we thought that we were justified in looking at just the inventory section. Enterprise Directory Reporter (EDR) from Aelita Software is a tool for gaining complete control over all aspects of Active Directory and Exchange Server. Inventory functionality was naturally a part of what we looked at.

At their own request, Tally Systems entered their lighter product in the inventory field. Webcensus is a rather unusual creation that is entirely web-based. The administrator gets a private office at Tally,

and the inventory is then conducted in that agents that are downloaded directly by the users, or distributed on the network in some other way, send data over the Internet to the server. This system has both advantages and disadvantages, as we shall see.