What about WMI?

Yeah, what about it?

Oh, wait...what is it?

WMI stands for "Windows Management Instrumentation". In a nutshell, it's a great way to access a lot of information provided by Windows (NT 4.0 SP4 and above) systems. You can access WMI through VB or VBScript, but I prefer to do so via Perl.

Some of the neat things you can do with WMI include getting hardware and software inventories of systems, while never leaving your desk. Linux systems have a hardware lister called lshw...with WMI, you can write a tool that will reach out to all the systems you can connect to and gather up the same information. Want processes, patches, installed applications (inventory of software licenses) instead? No problem!