Automated inventory care of SIW

Due to a recent change in software, I needed to upgrade RAM in all of the older machines in the organization.  To aid me in upgrading 300+ PCs I thought it prudent to make a list of what hardware each PC had.  I have used many inventory tools in the past (the most prominent being SpiceWorks) but by far the best inventory tool I have used is SIW.  This software comes in both free and paid versions, the paid having more features.  The feature that caught my eye for the paid version was the ability to use command line to control SIW.  After reading through the documentation, I made this small script that will e-mail the results of the scan to a inventory e-mail address.

@ECHO OFF
set INPUT=
set /P INPUT=The owner of this PC is: %=%
CLS
echo Creating and sending %INPUT%’s System Report.  Please Waitsiw /log=”%INPUT%” /email=INVENTORY EMAIL ADDRESS/subject=”%INPUT%’s report” /smtp=EMAIL SERVER /silent /nologo
CLS
CLS
ECHO %INPUT%’s Report is sent
Pause

This script allows the user to input their name, which in turn becomes the name of HTML file containing system specs along with the subject of the e-mail.  This batch file also requires the SIW.exe and SIW.lic file along with it to work.  So I threw it all togeather using freeextractor and created an install file.  Keep an eye out on making install files with freeextractor soon!

References:

http://www.gtopala.com/ – SIW
http://freeextractor.sourceforge.net/FreeExtractor/ – FreeExtractor