AppUserList v2.0 – Application User List

Finally, after a few months of waiting, I managed to find the time to wrap up the second official version of AppUserList.

The first version saw the light of day on June 1, 2023 with this post: AppUserList v1.0

With this version in particular, I focused on fixing small functional issues and on adding features that proved useful while using the tool at our customers’ sites.

The application is still essentially very similar to the previous version: the components are the same, but some of them have been partly rewritten to optimize how they work.

In particular, the AULService component now relies on several different methods to intercept the applications launched by users. Previously it relied solely on scanning the “Compatibility Assistant\Store” registry key, a solution that, however, left all the executables and applications that are part of the operating system out of the data collection.

So AULService now gets more complete values, feeding the database with a more consistent and useful flow of information.

As a result, AULMonitor has undergone small changes to its tables, but above all several additional views have been added, which are used to generate the AULReport reports.

AULReport, the tool’s reporting interface, has been improved and made more stable, and it now offers more reports.

In particular, you can now generate a report called “AppUser Matrix”, which produces a Users/Applications matrix. It’s very useful for getting as complete a picture as possible of application usage within your environment:

From the application you can then easily generate an Excel export, automatically formatted as in this example:

As you can see from these images, the usernames have been masked in the reports too. As announced when version 1.0 was released, in 2.0 users’ usernames can now be masked, both in the AULReport interface and in the reports it generates, to protect user privacy.

Usernames are also masked in paths that relate to the user profile (e.g. C:\Users\utente1\Desktop\…), where “utente1” is replaced with the corresponding alphanumeric string of the masked user (only when the path can be traced directly back to the single selected user; not in the per-machine or per-Machine Catalog reports).

The per-machine reports have also been improved, and a per-Machine Catalog report has been added (in Citrix terms). You can now extract the list of applications and executable paths launched on a single machine, but you can also extract the same information consolidated by Machine Catalog. This report is definitely more useful in environments where users are spread across multiple machines, where reports for a single VM wouldn’t be of much use.

The application now really collects a lot more data than before, data that might not even be worth including in the reports. For example, we now also collect the execution of every executable in the operating system, data that wasn’t captured before. For convenience, there is now an option to filter these executables out of the reports when they aren’t needed.

You can exclude an application by right-clicking it (in the AULReport main window) and clicking “Exclude Application”, or by excluding individual paths in the “Application’s Name” window:

Any applications excluded by mistake from the main screen can be included again from the “Application’s Name” window by clearing their checkboxes in the “Exclude” column.

All the application’s reports are automatically filtered based on the time period set on the first AULReport screen:

Clicking “Reset filter” resets the From date to January 1, 2023 and the To date to today.

So the time filter applies to every report in the application. When you open a report window, the period is shown in the title of the window itself:

This is the unfiltered report of Edge executions over the whole period under analysis, while below is the same report for a time period limited to today’s date only.

I was really pleased to receive positive feedback and interest from the community in this tool. I hope you’ll keep sending me your suggestions and feedback, because I’d love to add new features that can help lots of people!

AppUserList v2.0 includes these component releases:

AULMonitor: v2.0
AULService: v1.2.17
TaskScheduler: v1.0.6
AULReport: v1.0.93

Below you’ll find the link to download the tool: