Network Inventory and Asset Management with NEWT Professional

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IT professionals have always had to deal with the increasing difficulty that comes with keeping track of an increasing number of computer systems as a business grows. This type of need is commonly referred to as network inventory or PC auditing. Long ago, if one needed hardware and software inventory across a network, it meant physically visiting each computer on that network and documenting everything in a spreadsheet by hand. Thankfully, over the years, software and operating systems have greatly improved, making network inventory easier. NEWT Professional is one such software product created to reduce the work involved in asset management. Developed since 2003, NEWT has evolved into a high speed PC inventory tool, capable of scanning every 100 computers in less than 5 minutes, saving time and money for organizations of all sizes.

In the world of network management products, there are several methods used to inventory computers. Two main divisions are tools which use an agent and those that are agent-less. Many agent-less tools can be excruciatingly slow and/or have numerous issues with computer and security configuration, such as WMI (Windows Management Interface), thus they still require visiting those computers to "fix" problems before they can be audited. This can be very frustrating. Using an agent can circumvent these problems, but often requires hours or days of lengthy deployment.

The wizards at Komodo Labs dedicated a solid 6 month period to developing a solution to these network administration problems, resulting in their newest version 2.5. NEWT Professional now only requires read/write access to the ADMIN$ (pronounced "admin dollar" or administrator) share, which is exposed by default to all network administrators by Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. This allows IT professionals to obtain the same information in just minutes that previously took hours or even days. Not only has scan speed increased, but network bandwidth was greatly reduced, making it possible to perform network inventory over slow connections such as WANs (Wide Area Networks) with little impact on traffic.

NEWT Professional is useful for just about any network where a total network inventory is needed, and many MSP (Managed Service Providers) and consultants use NEWT Pro to effectively gather configuration information for their clients. It detects all the normal hardware and software inventory information, including CPU info, system serial numbers, OS Product Keys, etc., but also goes a step further, gathering CPU, system and hard drive temperature, USB type (1.x or 2.0), correct hard drive type (IDE vs. SATA) & serial number, monitor type (LCD/CRT), detailed RAM Slot info and many others.

After performing a network audit, data is available in an easy-to-read spreadsheet-like view, with options of saving to NEWT's proprietary format, exporting to Excel, HTML, text or even a fully relational MS Access (MDB) database.

When it comes to fast network inventory, NEWT Professional meets the needs of network professionals everywhere, all without breaking the bank.