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Summary

In SMS 2003, software metering has been reengineered and streamlined from its counterpart in SMS 2.0. You no longer require the Software Metering site system role, and you can no longer actively track online license usage. This version of software metering allows you to monitor program usage and then use that information to extrapolate data about how programs are used in your organization, who uses them, how long, and so on. Together with software inventory, you can use software metering to determine whether you’re meeting the requirements of your software licenses. Through the SMS Report Viewer, you can view statistical information about the programs you’re monitoring.

More Info 

For more information about using and configuring software metering, see Chapter 8 in the Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 Operations Guide, available through the Microsoft SMS Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/smserver) and through Microsoft TechNet.

In this part of the book we’ve examined various ways to manage client applications. The package distribution process showed us how we can remotely install programs on our SMS clients and how we can maximize the package distribution process using collections. With the SMS Installer, we can fully script our packages to require little or no user input during the package’s execution. In this chapter we’ve seen how to monitor the usage of client applications. In Part 4 we’ll explore various ways to retrieve and present information from the SMS database, as well as site database maintenance and recovery.



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