Article ID: 941461 - Last Review: December 4, 2007 - Revision: 1.8 How to manually determine the license and sale origin channel information for a software product when the Asset Intelligence reports in SMS 2003 with Service Pack 3 do not report the correct channel informationImportant This article contains information about how to modify the registry. Make sure that you back up the registry before you modify it. Make sure that you know how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up, restore, and modify the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 322756
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/
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How to back up and restore the registry in Windows On This PageINTRODUCTIONThis article describes how to manually determine the license and sale origin channel information of an installed Microsoft software product. You may have to determine this information when the Asset Intelligence reports in Microsoft System Management Server (SMS) 2003 with Service Pack 3 (SP3) do not report the correct license channel information for that product. Note The information that is provided in this article is only for license channel identification and for reporting. This article describes a method to manually extract the channel information for the software products that are installed on the computer. MORE INFORMATIONThe Asset Intelligence code in SMS 2003 parses the DigitalProductId registry entry in the Windows registry to extract the sales channel information by using a predefined offset. For example, the sales channel information may indicate whether a software product was sold by using the retail channel or by using an OEM channel. The Asset Intelligence reports use version 3 and version 4 of the DigitalProductId registry entry to extract license channel information from installed software products. However, in some cases, the Asset Intelligence reports may report the license channel information incorrectly for certain installed software products. Whether this issue occurs depends on how the products store product ID information in the registry. For example, an enterprise product that is a select Volume License Key version may be reported as a retail version product in the Asset Intelligence reports. This issue generally occurs when you use software products that use the ProductID registry entry instead of the DigitalProductId registry entry to store product ID information. The names of the Asset Intelligence reports that provide the license and sales origin channel information are as follows:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion The DigitalProductId registry entry contains the encoded REG_BINARY value of the product key that was used to enable the software product. The entry contains the following information:
Name: DigitalProductId Type: REG_BINARY Data: data How to manually extract the product ID of an installed software productWarning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.To manually obtain the channel information for an installed software product that uses an earlier version of the DigitalProductId registry entry, you have to first extract the product ID information from the ProductID registry entry. After you extract the product ID information, note the channel ID value in the product ID information, and then use the table that is provided in this article to find a matching channel description for that channel ID value. To manually extract the product ID of an installed software product, follow these steps:
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