Image

SAM Gold Toolkit

Open Source Software Asset Management PowerShell Toolkit

Every day we help clients gather software inventory, configuration and usage metrics. Every day we encounter a new product, a new configuration, a new challenge. I’ve yet to encounter a challenge too small or too simple for me to confuse and complicate further by attempting to automate it! Over the past couple of years, the team and I have been compiling a toolkit of PowerShell scripts to tackle some of these challenges and extract SAM relevant data from…

• Active Directory
• System Center Configuration Manager
• MAP Toolkit
• Altiris
• Snow
• LanSweeper
• SQL Server
• Exchange Server
• SharePoint Server
• Biztalk Server
• VMware vSphere
• VMware vCenter
• VMware ESX
• HyperV
• XenServer
• Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop
• Office365 etc.

Each script has a consistent interface – similar parameters, similar outputs. For simplicity, we wanted to choose a single platform for the toolkit and PowerShell was the obvious choice. It’s ubiquitous (well, semi-ubiquitous), powerful and well understood. Plus, there’s a wealth of systems management sample scripts available on the interwebs.

Historically, we’ve always been very happy to share our toolkit with our clients. It helps improve transparency and general quality. Clients are free to use, customise and improve the scripts and we’ve often integrated suggested improvements back in to our own version.

We’ve decided to go one step further and share the SAM Toolkit with the world. We hope that by sharing with the SAM community, we can help people save time and painlessly gather the hard data they require to carry out their work. Also, we hope that users will give feedback, suggest improvements and contribute to future development.

We’ve published the Toolkit on Github. Please feel free to contact us with a feature request, lodge a bug report, create a pull request or fork the whole repo! SAM Gold Toolkit

About Jon Mulligan

Jon is a data and automation nut. Armed with his weapons of choice - c++, c# and PowerShell and with his black belt training in Microsoft Excel, there is no task too small or too simple for Jon to confuse and complicate by attempting to automate it!

Jon is a founding partner of Sam360.