Centennial Discovery Web Edition (Audit group test) - product reviews

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Centennial Discovery Web Edition

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	Version:	4.5
	Vendor:	Centennial Ltd
	Website:	www.centennial.co.uk
	Price:	$23.00
	Date:	1-Aug-03
	Author:	René Millman

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This inventory application uses a technology called Lanprobe to meter software usage and discover devices on a network.

This version has a number of new features, including a client capable of deployment to a number of flavors of Unix and Linux (Sun Solaris, HP-UX, RedHat, SuSE). There are also a number of changes to the look and feel of the main console itself.

The installation requires SQL Server to be present, although a runtime implementation is included within the package.

The installation was about the easiest to perform in the whole Group Test, and once the console started there was a tip of the day that was actually useful. It told us how to get started on auditing a machine, and we followed its advice and installed the software on our test machines.

This was very quick to do, although we recommend that there is one domain where all computers are members of that domain, in order that there are no failed installations. Computers in other workgroups may not install the client first time around. It must be said that it was really easy to find a solution to this problem and the situation was overcome in seconds.

The server can communicate with its clients either via a shared message folder for use with machines that do not use TCP/IP (such as older versions of Netware), or by the standard TCP/IP. Clients can also be distributed in other ways using email, disk or login scripts.

The console was very clear and data was easy to browse and analyse. The console also featured a query tool, standard inventory reports and alerting facilities.

It must be said that the auditing software was about the slowest we had seen. The same network infrastructure has been used for all products and the remote server audit took a significantly longer time to finish compared to others.

The company were quick to point out that Centennial, used in a typical environment and not in a small testing environment, is fast in accomplishing 'Audit Complete' reports.

Once completed, the list of found software was accurate and detailed, with some minor errors in software usage reporting.

We found that, in general, this was by far the easiest and clearest of all the software tested.

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