Klaus

M$ SAM

 Mon, 19 Jan 2015 14:26:32 +0100 
We have to do a Micro$oft Software Asset Management verification at office. ;-) Great fun! No idea how they want to do it with the information we should provide them, but this will be interesting.

There exists a Micro$oft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit which should assist you with this task.
MAP provides secure, agentless, and network-wide inventory that scales from small and medium sized business to large enterprises.
Sounds good, but are you kidding me? Only one user can use this tool by default? :facepalm This is a wonderful example what M$ understands with "scales". Their marketing is really good in selling you all these nice features and functions and everything is so easy, integrated and automated, but when you want to use it as advertised you are left alone and you have to fix everything manually first.

#^A failure occurred while validating the MAP Toolkit configuration database?
By default, the MAP Toolkit will install SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB during setup. As LocalDB is specific to the user account that installed it, You will only be able to run it from the initial account that did the installation. The repair process is actually placing LocalDB on the second user accuont and creating a new instance for MAP to reference.
 Mon, 19 Jan 2015 15:08:46 +0100 last edited: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 15:09:29 +0100  
I remember doing those serial number compliance checks back in the olden days. It was a classic piece of bureaucracy (both time consuming and pointless), but in those times there wasn't much alternative to Microsoft on the desktop.