Adobe is one of the first movers with the new ISO standard for software tagging. According to a 3rd party website:
"Software tagging is the process of maintaining a set of tag files (.swtag) on a client machine to determine the install and license state of various software products. This tagging process can be used to assist in Software Asset Management (SAM) tasks and there is an ISO industry standard for this which is denoted by ISO/IEC 19770. For asset management purposes an administrator can run any SAM tool that will scan the .swtag files on the client machine and parse them for analysis and reporting purposes.
Software entitlement tags (.swtag) are files that provide authoritative identifying information about software licensing rights. These entitlement tags taken together with 19770-2 software identification tags, which accurately identify installed software programs, facilitate conducting software audits, reconciliation, and license compliance management with ease."
Attached is a vbscript that selects all *.swtag files from the wmi cim_datafile class, then uses xml parsing logic to pull out pertinent elements and report those to the NS in a specific dataclass.
In the case of this vbscript, it is very general and we were only working with Adobe swtag files. Hence, there are a few limitations to the logic, especially if this were to process swtag files from multiple vendors. So, the assumption is that we will only find Adobe swtag files.
Update May 2012: Symantec is now shipping Software Tags with SEP, NetBackup and Enterprise Vault with more product coming out soon. The attached updated custom inventory script provides support for software tags that are in the full compliance with the ISO/IEC 19770-2 standard. Additionally, we have attached a set of reports that leverages this inventory data. These reports can be imported into the SMP console.
A new swidtag custom inventory vbscript is attached.
Also, a set of SWIDTag report xml files is attached. These reports can be imported into the SMP console.
Note that the attached scripts are custom inventory vbscripts, meaning that they only apply to Windows clients. All other custom inventory setup must be completed in order for these to function, including creating of matching data classes in the NS/SMP console.