Background

SOSOS gathers information about PCs including hardware information such as CPU, memory, hard drives, and serial numbers; software information such as operating system, installed software, and software components; configuration information such as IP address, running processes, desktop settings, and services; and security-related information such as shared resources, modems, account policies, security patches, and virus activity.

Note: SOSOS does not gather any personal information, look at emails, user documents, or track Internet activity.

SOSOS does not have a built-in database… instead it relies on a 3rd-party database application to store its information. A database is not absolutely required. However a lot of SOSOS functions are designed around a database and will be disabled when a database is not configured.

See the Setup and Configuration Guide for additional information on how to configure and deploy SOSOS in your organization.

Users can double-click on the SOSOS.exe program to manually scan their PC, save the data, print, or save a report. Administrators can do more…they can use SOSOS to poll remote PCs for their data.

Running SOSOS

The most common task in SOSOS is to collect data from the local PC. You perform this function by clicking on the Collect Data button (or from the File/Collect Data menu). The SOSOS screen will look like the following:

Main SOSOS screen

Click on the item in the left-hand list (i.e. CPU) to view the data for that item.

SOSOS supports three different methods of viewing the collected data.

After the data has been collected (via the "Collect Data" button), the user has the opportunity to:

File Menu

The File Menu is used to perform the most common tasks

File Menu

File Menu:

Data Menu

The Data Menu is used to import and export data

Data Menu

Data Menu:

There may be situations where you want to record data from PCs that are not connected to any network. To handle this, SOSOS can export its data into an XML file. An Administrator can take this XML file to another PC (that is on the network) import the XML file and save the data to the database.

Poll Menu

The Poll Menu is used to collect SOSOS data from remote PCs on a LAN. This operation requires the user to have administrator rights on the remote PCs. Typically this function would be performed by a member of the Domain Administrators group.

There are several choices as to the method used to generate the list of PCs that will be "polled".

Poll Menu

Poll Menu:

After selection of a polling method, the menu will look similar the following (using the Network Browsing method as an example):

Poll Example

Generate List by Network Browsing:

Note: The top portion of the form is dependent upon the polling method selected and may display different options from this example (using the Network Browsing method).

Poll Option:

Logging Options:

Note: The file name displayed is automatically generated using an embedded date format for the current day.

Status:

Note: During polling, the Close button becomes the Cancel button. It may take several seconds to interrupt the polling process… be patient.

View Menu

The View Menu controls the visual aspects of the application.

View Menu

View:

Note: Users can edit existing records in the Grid and Report View, but cannot add or delete a record.

Note: The selected view will be remembered and automatically used the next time the program is run.

Options Menu

The Options Menu allows the user to select view options and display fonts.

Options Menu

Options:

Note: The selected options will be remembered and automatically used the next time the program is run.

Setup Menu

The Setup Menu is used to configure the SOSOS options.

Setup Menu

Setup:

Viewing SOSOS Data

SOSOS does not have a built-in database… instead it relies on a 3rd-party database application to store its information.

You can use SOSOS to view existing records in the database for the current PC and for other PCs. However, distributing SOSOS to every user may not be in the best interest of security.

Administrators will probably prefer to use direct access to the underlying database to view, query, edit, and manage the SOSOS information. The real power of SOSOS is the ability to write queries against the database to quickly answer real-life questions of a system administrator.

A common deployment scenario is to use Microsoft’s SQL Server as the database server and to use Microsoft Access as the "front end". Modern versions of Microsoft Access support a "project file" (with an *.adp extension), which provides users with an easy way to interact with data on the SQL Server data without having SQL Server client software installed.

See the Microsoft Access help files for instruction on how to create a project file.

Below is a sample of a Microsoft Access Project file:

Access Project File