Quote Originally Posted by max_carpenter View Post
2: Use Remote WMI to get the information you want. Note you will need permissions to access the other machine. I have used remote WMI but only within a Domain Environment and I have Domain Admin rights.
Yeah WMI can be a little unreliable because a lot of admins don't allow it through their workstation's firewalls or simply disable the WMI service.

The other method that I have used in the past is a variation on your first method - rather than having a piece of software actually installed and always running on the workstations, we just run the program from a network share via logon script that is assigned to all users. This way it runs whenever anyone logs on to a PC (so we also get a record of when anyone logged on and which PC they logged on to) and updates the general system info in a central SQL database