Hi all,
I've been racking my brain for a couple of weeks trying to find a decent solution to a problem that plagues a lot of IT professionals. I work for an IT consulting firm that handles multiple clients. As part of our services, we maintain and monitor the usage of licenses in our customer's environments. Unfortunately for us, the one problem we continuously run up against is monitoring the MS Office licenses. The reason this is an issue, is that when you uninstall some versions of Office, the registry entries aren't removed along with the software. Sure, we can make sure to remove old registry keys when uninstalling, but this truly turns into a nightmare when we take on a new client and we know minimal about their environment. So, my question to all of you is, what would be the easiest way to narrow down which computers would need their registry cleaned up? I thought about exporting the registry keys from HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office and comparing that to Office folders found in C:\Program Files\ and C:\Program Files (x86)\ and export any differences to a text file for review, but I'm not sure if that would create a false positive due to other registry keys being created for backward compatible options. Anyone got a better idea?