The Software Manager feature stores information (that you enter into it's database) about your computers and software products, and which products are installed on which computers. For example, you may have Windows 2000 on one computer and Windows XP on another, with different software products, device drivers, etc.
With a database of computers and software products, H2OS can bring this information together to give you much of the information you'll need if you ever have to recover from a problem or attack later. Be sure to always have printed copies of the Software Manager report handy and not only stored on your computer (obviously!).
The 1st release of the Software Manager is included with the H2OS product installation. We will consider your requirements for future enhancements to this feature on our online bulletin board
Click Librarian -> Software Manager to launch the Software Manager
The software manager screen with test data on a lab computer
The Software Manager is launched from the Librarian menu. It's screen looks like this:
The Software Manager is used to store an inventory of purchased and acquired software, with details about each product, and information about your computers to relate products to computers.
For each computer, the Software Manager uses information stored in the computer and software products tables to create a table that shows the products installed on that computer, and the installation order of the products.
The operator sets up the Software Manager by entering inventory of software products and computers in your installation. With this information loaded, for each computer system, the operator then uses drag/drop to "load" products into each computer from the list of products on the left into the list of products for the currently selected computer on the right.
Once the list of all installed software products is completed, use the "Mover" control in Column 1 to arrange the products in the order they are to be installed (e.g. Windows usually comes 1st. You may have other products with dependencies as well, so be sure to order them correctly).
You may insert comment lines into the sequence of software products to be installed for one of your computers, by click the INSERT COMMENT command, entering the comment, and then moving the comment into proper order within the list. Comments can be handy to indicate actions or reminders needed during the rebuild process, in addition to the installation of software products.
The products list with some comments added (and moved into place before the products referenced by the comments):
Reminder: always be sure to click SAVE CHANGES after adding comments and changing products in these lists.
The Software Recovery Plan reports printed by the Software Manager are an important component of your "disaster recovery" plan, and because the computer on which this information is stored might be the affected computer, you should print and store the Software Recovery Plans for each computer and store these printouts separately.
In summary, to use this feature:
1. Load information about your computers and software products into the Software Manager's tables
2. Print and save Software Recovery Plan reports for each of your computers in a safe place should you need to rebuild one or more of your computers