WMI: Get a list of installed applications

Have you ever needed to get a list of applications that are installed on a workstation? I can think of a number of situations where this might be useful… Maybe you’re trying to get an application count as part of a Software Asset Management (SAM) project, or maybe because you’ve been tasked with determining the popularity of something inside your organization, say RSS Bandit (keep in mind that this list only includes applications installed by the Windows Installer).

Personally, I’ll be adding this as a function to my inventory script - because right now, I need this list for an audit I'll be conducting at a customer site.

Let’s just quickly review how this works…

First we declare a string (strComputer), and assign a value to it (ComputerName). Next, we connect to the \root\cimv2 namespace, query the “Win32_Product” class, and get a collection of items (colItems). Finally, we loop though the collection and echo the objItem.Descriptions and objItem.Versions.


strComputer = "computerName"
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Product")

For Each objItem in colItems
wscript.echo objItem.Description & " (v." & objItem.Version & ")"
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