Automatically Uninstall Unused Applications

If you’ve been following my blogs lately you may have noticed a commonality between them. Yes, it is the time of year where management asks for true-up reports. Having previously blogged an example of performing a true-up report I’d like to expand that a little further to show how to save dollars during this process.

Obviously from my previous blogs you know that I am running Normalize CM from BDNA. One of the cool features of Normalize CM is that it provides me with a simple “IsUsed” flag, as well as “IsLicensable”. I can use these two values to determine if my company is paying for an application that is not being used. This is good information to provide to management and Normalize CM ships with many built-in reports to provide that information.

Just knowing that I have unused software that I am paying for is nice, but I want to do something to save money for my company. I will use this information to automatically remove the unused software; there-by reclaiming the license allowing it to be used elsewhere.

In this blog I’m going to show you an extremely simplified version of this process using just Configuration Manager. Keep an eye out for later blogs that take this process to an entirely different, fully automated, level.

I’ve chosen Adobe Acrobat Professional Pro X as my target application that will be uninstalled. I don’t deal with licensing so I can’t tell you the exact price that my company pays for a copy of this software but a quick Google search shows that it runs about $399.00 per copy at full retail price.

I’ve gone ahead and manually create a package with no content, the program inside simply contains the uninstall string for the product I’d like to uninstall. That value is available many places, and soon will be included in the Normalize CM data to assist in automating this process. It’s not my intent in this blog to show how to create an uninstall package so I won’t go into any more detail on that subject.

Here’s an example of what a report containing the information would look like. I mentioned above just a couple of the nice-to-have pieces of info gained during the normalization process. As you can see from this report, at off-the-shelf pricing, I’ve just saved $11,571.

Next I will create a query based collection using the same information as described above. Here’s an example of what the collection rule would look like.

Once the collection has been created using Normalize CM data we must translate it using a right click tool which is installed as part of the normalization installation process. That’s all there is to it. Any computer which has Adobe Acrobat Pro X installed and unused will automatically be placed into this collection thereby having the unused software removed.