Purging Software from Unmanaged Software

Products

• IT Management Suite
• Software Management Solution

Issue/Introduction

In the Symantec Management Console, under Software > Software Catalog > Software Catalog > Unmanaged software, there is a list of software that is no longer used.

Is there a way to remove them for clean up as there is not a right-click > Delete option?

Environment

ITMS 8.6, 8.7

Cause

This is by design. Currently there is not a way to clean up this automatically or by a right-click > Delete option.

Resolution

This Use-case scenario has been shared with our Broadcom Development team. A change to this behavior will be introduced in our ITMS 8.7.2 release.

There is a temporal workaround that can be used. We have prepared a view showing the "out of use" components. With this you will be able to apply right-click > bulk delete action in that view.

Overview:

Attached to this article is the "Unused_Software.xml" file.

Note that the SQL query behind returns results also containing Software Components, that 

1. Have associated packages and/or policies
2. Not YET been rolled out
3. Not yet been reported by inventory 

The only condition that is checked by SQL is that fact that a component does not appear in the "Inv_InstalledSoftware" dataclass which is filled by Software Scan or the fact of Managed Deployment Policy (MDP) installation.

Apply the fix for manual use:

1) Import the attached "Unused_Software.xml" file under Software Catalog folder (right-click the folder->import->select file). It will add a new view called "Unused software":

2) In the view select the set of components (big enough) to be deleted and run the delete action.  Probably several iterations will be required

Presumably if there assigned policies or tasks for the components in the "to be deleted" list, then the deletion of the selected set will not be allowed.