If you’re a regular Network Inventory Advisor user, you’ll want to check for updates today, as we’ve released Network Inventory Advisor 3.8. This .8 update brings quite a few fixes, operational improvements, and advanced new features to our popular network audit software. As usual, we concentrated on your most important requests and tried to extend the list of features we offer for professional software inventory and network management. Here’s what we were busy with:

NEW: Shared grouping templates for your software

Shared grouping templates in "All software" report

On the new features front, widely-used “All software” report (which is BTW the central part of all software audit processes in Network Inventory Advisor) gets shared grouping templates. These are the same old (hmm… not so old) groups that you can create to join several software titles on a network level into separate units. An example would be: Adobe Reader (all versions or just version 6 or 7), MS Office group, etc. Since version 3.8, these groups can be shared. Once you create a shared grouping template, it 1) appears in your list of available groups, 2) evaluates every software title in your report against its regular expression, version and other parameters you specified, 3) creates a separate group in the report and includes all matched software titles, 4) and is shared online to our server (only template parameters are sent online, all your network details are stored locally). Once a day we review all templates our users share with us and include the ones we find extremely useful into the database available to other users of Network Inventory Advisor.

What this means for you: whenever you update your shared templates database or reinstall Network Inventory Advisor, you automatically receive the most up-to-date list of shared templates which can be immediately applied to the list of all your network software titles. This shared knowledge lets you sort and manage your network applications in the way you never could!

As a result we hope to have a thoughtful database of groups that help you analyze and visualize the list of network software in a very usable way. We need your help. By sharing your grouping templates you donate a little part of your IT knowledge to the whole community of thousands of Network Inventory Advisor users.

We still plan to have a separate tutorial on this feature to be posted some time soon.

NEW: Active Directory integration and lists of nodes

Import nodes structure from Active Directory

Another important news about the new release is Active Directory integration. In version 3.8 you can create groups of new nodes from your Active Directory OUs structure. Additionally, you can import a list of nodes from a text file, which will be parsed then and used as the source of new nodes. Many clients asked us about this small feature, so we hope you find it helpful.

NEW: Group summaries

Build group summaries

Network summaries are automatically compiled on every network scan to help you analyze your network at a glance. They provide an effective way of having everything important about your network in one place and immediately available. However, network summaries always include all scanned nodes, while there’s no similar report available for customization in the Reports tab.

Since Network Inventory Advisor 3.8, the same report can be built for any group of nodes in the network tree. Simply select the group and click “Build a group summary”. A new report will appear in the regular place and will feature everything network summary has including snapshots. You can always get back to previous page with multiselection tools by clicking “Manage this group” on the snapshots bar.

NEW: Tabular reports improvements

Tabular reports got templates

Tabular reports are now more flexible: you can save your selection of fields in templates, easily load them later, and even share with colleagues, who also use Network Inventory Advisor.

Other improvements

There are many other small changes and enhancements, including:

• nodes that were not scanned can be automatically added as “manual” ones
• Internet Explorer, Windows Firewall and Windows Defender details are now collected
• you can easily find out whether your nodes are ready for 64-bit Windows OS
• nodes can now be exported into internal format for easier backup, copying, etc
• PC description added in tabular reports