Ah, The Distinct Add/Remove Programs Report.
Most of the information our organization is looking for relates to applications. Who has what application installed? How many versions of application X do we have installed?
Besides usual culprits like license compliance, we have some more esoteric reasons for leaning on the Add/Remove programs report to do the heavy lifting: I'm talking things like application upgrade viability, and holistic application patch management (Adobe anyone?).
So we love this little Distinct Add/Remove Programs report. It's one of the first reports you hit with glee after turning Inventory Solution on in your enterprise. Slowly, as your eyes adjust to the light, you start to get a glimpse into the power and breadth of the Altiris solution suite. More importantly, you start to get a look at what exactly your enterprise looks like.
So why, WHY would I write an article explaining ways to tweak this great report? Because all great things - the constitution, for example - sometimes need amending.
General Tweaking 101
In breaching the 'report tweaking' frontier, we need to lay down a few ground rules:
A. Never Modify an existing report. Never. Ever Ever. You shouldn't need to.
B. System Reports that CAN'T be modified CAN be cloned. Make Cloning a habit. Rather than Re-Creating the wheel, clone it. (To clone a report, highlight it in the tree, right click it, and choose 'Clone'. Give it a new name that makes sense.)
C. Take notes after you complete an insane reporting feat. Or a better idea: why not put your notes here on connect, where you can get valuable swag for storing them AND share with your peers?
The Power of The Right Clickable Open In A New Window Report Modification (It sounds more complex than it is)
Making a report right-clickable in a new window saves time, effort, and processing power. Take the following scenario:
Your marketing director wants to know all workstations that have Grabbbit, SellingShop, and PointBreaker installed at YourCompany.
Without right-clickability, you're going to run the Distinct Add/Remove Programs Report for All Computers in your company. You'll find Grabbbit in the list, right click, choose View Computers by Application and Version, and more than likely you'll copy it into a spreadsheet for your Marketing director.
Now you're going to need to re-run that report, because your results window killed what geeks like me call your first level query results.
To make this hum, and make your life easier, wouldn't it be great if you could pop the list of computer names (your second level query) in a new window, leaving the first window behind to go back to for additional results?
You can do it. Here's how:
- Follow Rule A, and clone your Count of Distinct Add/Remove Program Applications report.
- Give it a differentiating name.
- Click on Edit this report.
- On Level 0, click on the third icon from the left. It's the one with the magnifying glass in the lower right.
Remember how I was talking about different query levels? These reports are separated by queries and global parameters. The queries are where we're going to make our change. The change we're making is really simple, but really powerful. More specifically, we're Configuring Drilldowns. Drilldowns control the behavior of the panels when we right-click within reports.
- On the Configuring Drilldowns screen, Under Open drilldown in: we're simply going to change the radio button from 'Current Window' to New window', as you can see below:
- Click 'Apply'.
- Click 'Apply' again, on the main report window.
You've done it! You now have increased your productivity while giving your Notification Server a well-deserved break.
Let's go back to our scenario now with your marketing director, and your new improved right-clickable CoDARP report.
Running this new report, you find Grabbbit, open the results in a new window, copy your computer data, paste it into Excel, close the results window and move on to the next application in your list, right click it, grab the data, etc, etc.
You've entered the land of right-clickability.
My next article will focus on something only slightly more complex, but equally as powerful - adding another level to your existing reports.