Client Management Suite

I am curious on how you managed your applications when several users don´t need them anymore. I know “all” about ‘application metering’ but from my perspective it´s only useful when measuring the usage of the application over a periode of time  – so action will (best pratices) only happen like over 3 months (I know you can change the trigger). Obvious you can do a manually uninstall and get machine-ID´s by running reports, but how do you secure that applications will be removed when users don’t need them anymore.

My colleague have made a solution with uninstall policies that checks if machine is in the Application filter and if not….runs a uninstall on the machine. Actually not a bad idea but the disadvantage of this solution is that you need to make filters for every application you got and assign every machine (how needs the app) to the filter. Also every machine will be assigned several uninstall policy and this seems not to be “Best practices”. Previous we had general filters for standard-application (flash, java….) and this was quite easy to use as every machine when deploying image was assigned to the general filter (General filter and x86 or x64 filter). In this way all our standard applications used the same filter and the machine-number in this filter was the same. What we see now, when making a unique filter for every application,  is that the machine number is not the same – although it should be the same (same type of machine) and we have to export machine-names to new filters with the risk of importing a incomplete list.

So finally my question is: “How do you handle uninstall proces when several machines need to have a application removed……some might be ‘online’ so don’t like manually uninstall as you have to follow up securing 100% compliance”.

Thanks to everyone who spends time on replying my post…..

I'm imagining that you're only doing it for licensed software, since you get no benefit from uninstalling an unused copy of Adobe Reader or Mozilla Firefox.  The approach you mention is a good one.  The other is that someone goes through all licensed software every month or every quarter and runs a clean-up process to remove unused copies of the licensed software.

Hi mclemson,

Thanks for your answer. Yes it´s only licensed software we want to "manage". I think we will setup some reports and then do it manually every month.

Hope to see some other replies - if not I will mark your reply as solution.

Thanks again.

/Kenneth

What I've been working on lately is a Workflow project that identifies machines which haven't used the software (VIsio, Project, etc) for over XX days, then when that condition is met sends an email to the Primary user of the machine notifying them that the software will be uninstalled.  It then adds the computer to a collection for Uninstall, and the next configuration request (or immediately if you force a config update as part of the Workflow) the software is removed.

I am also planning on extending this to a sort of "uninstall portal" that the user can use to request software from our catalog to be removed.  We may be in a bit of a different situation as we have monthly software-specific chargebacks for each application which we bill back to the user's cost center each month, so it is in the users' financial interest to not keep a copy of Visio they haven't used for 6 months (particularly when they can re-request it from our Software Portal easily enough).

If you don't have any bill-back method in place, I don't think there is much interest by the user to remove the software, since as far as they're concerned it isn't hurting them to have it "just in case".  In my opinion, a Metering-driven approach is much more beneficial.  We just went through our Pilot of this workflow and uninstalled over 300 copies of Visio (Std. and Pro.) and replaced it with Visio Viewer 2010 SP1; this saved over $11,000 in software licensing.  That's a real value-added service you can provide, and a number you can give to Management to show another benefit of your investment in Altiris.

You mentioned manually executing your planned process...this is just wasted time and effort which could be better spent on other work.  Automation is the name of the game (at least at my company), and anything that can be reliably automated should be as long as it makes sense.