Dan Cunningham

The Software Compliance Tool is a small application designed to reduce the overhead in managing unwanted applications in a business environment. While Windows Vista and Windows 7 have made a lot of headway in easing reduced user rights into the Enterprise, it’s still very common that Local Administrator rights are given to end users. The reasoning for this is usually to work around application compatibility (both external and in-house). However, this introduces the ability for end users to install whatever they want on their computers, including games, peer-to-peer software and security vulnerable applications. It is the company’s responsibility to ensure that copyrights are not infringed, and that their network is secure.

The Software Compliance Tool will try to automatically remove any applications which are contained on your custom-built “blacklisted applications” policy.

Some niceties:

• Can automatically remove most Windows Installer (MSI) based installations
• Uninstall Strings for non MSI-based installs can be supplemented with switches (ie, “/S” for silent)
• Blacklist allows partial name matches (ie, “Mozilla” will blacklist all Mozilla applications)
• Blacklist allows version matches (ie, allow all versions greater than v1.6.5, remove all previous versions)
• Blacklist, but allow exclusions based on Active Directory Users or Groups
• Blacklist policy is encrypted to prevent tampering or reading by users
• AD Exclusions list is cached and encrypted, to allow running SCT off-domain
• Simple SQL logging to allow tracking of policy breaches (and potentially further action for repeated breaches)
• Extremely fast execution. Can be run from your AD login script

Download

This application requires the .NET Framework 3.5 to be installed on your workstations in order to run correctly. In addition, it needs to run with Administrator privileges to successfully remove applications.

Latest Release: 1.072.0 (14th January 2010) - Download

Change Log

1.072.0 (14th January 2010)

• Initial Release