NetSupport DNA is designed to make software licence management as easy as possible for any enterprise
or organisation. By default, the product is designed to scan individual PCs and provide
a full summary of their software inventory. Let's select the Inventory component and have
a look at our summary. Perhaps most importantly to start with, is that NetSupport DNA scans
on three distinct levels for software data. At the first level, NetSupport DNA identifies
software programs that are installed on each PC. Programs being, for example, products
such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and so on; the typical entries you would find
in your "Add or Remove Programs" folder. At a second level, NetSupport DNA also scans
and discovers all applications installed. And naturally many applications will be a
subset of an over-arching program. And then at a final level, NetSupport DNA also can
be set to scan and look for individual file types - perhaps documents or music files - anything
where an organisation may be concerned about, from a negative point of view, disk wastage
- or, from a positive point of view, to ensure key documents don't miss server side backups
on a nightly basis. So let's have a look in the DNA Console at how all those elements
come together. Now we're on our software inventory summary, you'll see we have a breakdown of
programs that have been discovered within our workstations on this example database
and we can see the company details and, where appropriate, we can see if licence information
has been allocated against them. In this case, we have for NetSupport DNA. And we can also
see the count of installed programs. As we've seen with each of the components in NetSupport
DNA, this summary view is controlled by our View menu here. At the current time, we're
choosing to see programs that have been installed. We can switch to an Application view to see
all applications that have been installed on the enterprise and, of course, we can search
to suit our requirements. In this case, we can search to see the least or the most that
are installed: in this case, Skype - there are 12 copies installed on the network. We
can choose to look at files that have been detected on individual PCs - in this case,
.doc and .mp3 (and we will show you shortly how to configure that). And, finally, if we
wish, we can also see Hotfixes that are applied for each machine. So with those three levels,
what we need to do is manage our structure for licensing and how the components sit together.
So let's have a look under our software inventory menu. You will see we have our Program and
Application Manager. So let's select the Program Manager. The first view of the Program Manager
provides a brief summary of our definition of programs, namely: items that you would
typically find in your "Add or Remove Programs" entry - and applications being those individual
applications that are found across your PC. So within Programs, we have all the different
programs that have been discovered on the NetSupport enterprise. Let's make things easy
just by typing in here the name NetSupport. You can scroll down and see we have NetSupport
DNA as a program - and we can now review the licence information. You will see here we
have 1,000 licences; purchase date 14th October; the location in this case is the UK; the supplier
is NetSupport and we have a maintenance renewal scheduled in 12 months' time. Now, selecting
this entry here allows us to edit the licence information. You will see, as you'd expect,
we have key licence information; financial accounting - so invoice number, amounts, purchase
order and cost centre assignment. If we wanted to, we could also access and view documents
associated with a particular purchase. We can then identify the supplier - this was
from a third-party. We have third-party information in the list. And, if we wish to, we can pull
up information about that third-party. We then have details, if applicable, of any maintenance
associated with the software licence - in this case, an annual maintenance contract
and associated cost. And finally, we can also allocate our licences - either fully across
the whole enterprise or individually where we can specify which departments and licences
are assigned to. Now, we have that information, we have a detailed record of the licence allocation
for our organisation. Let's jump to our applications tab and look under NetSupport again. You will
see as we scroll down the list here, there are a number of components that are associated
with NetSupport. Here, the DNA Console, the database wizard and so on - that are all part
of the NetSupport DNA program. So, for each of these, we can identify the individual item
- let's have a look at the DNA Console. It identifies to us that it is a component we
wish to show in both our software inventory and metering views. So: is this relevant to
us? Perhaps a good example would be Notepad. We might not wish to show that in our summaries
as licensing issues do not really exist with Notepad. We can also look at the associated
application and revise that if we wish to. And we can also see which applications are
associated with this group. Typically, over time, you'll have a number of versions of
the same application that you may wish to report collectively under a single application
heading. Finally within DNA, we also provide - again, as an option - the ability to create
your own custom categories. In this case, we've chosen to assign this product against
our own custom category of Support Tools. Within DNA you might have categories of games,
multi-media tools, social media - whatever the different categories are that you might
find useful from a reporting point of view. So now we have our applications; they're assigned
against a particular program and our program is where we assign our licensing information.
As you can see here, we now see that against our licences for NetSupport, we have 1,000
licences and a fixed number that have so far been used. If we want to configure and adjust
our categories for software files that we are discovering, we can go to our software inventory
settings. You can see on our settings here we have the ability to specify whether we
wish to scan additional folders and whether we want to scan for certain file types. At
the current time, we've chosen to scan for .doc and .mp3 files. This can be configured
- and you will see there's a list of predefined types specified. You can add as many additional
ones as you require for your use. And we can choose where we want to scan for documents.
In this case, we're looking in the Documents and Settings folder for users, but we could
- rather than being inclusive, we could search for all areas except specific folders, and
we can apply conditional criteria if we are only interested in files beyond a certain
size. So once that is done and run and we come back to our software inventory view - we
can simply choose to look at files. If we jump to a department (perhaps the Channel
department here) and you will see we have 97 .mp3 files. We can drill down and see the
full details of all those files of the machines on which they are stored. So nice and simple
and easy to use. NetSupport DNA provides three levels of software management: licensing of
our software programs; detailed summaries of all of our software applications that are
installed - and disk usage and locations of all of our key files. In one of our subsequent
video tours, we will talk about application metering, where we can join the two parts
together and then we can identify not only what applications are currently installed,
but we can see when they're being used and by whom at any point in the day. Thank you
for viewing this tour. Please visit www.netsupportdna.com to find out more or, if appropriate, download
a free 30-day trial.