User Guide

How to classify software

This guide shows you how to assign a Software group classification — Required, Regular, or Forbidden — to products in your site's software catalog and control which groups are synchronized with Alloy Navigator.

Software classification is based on the product name. Changing the group from either Software view applies the classification to every discovered version with that product name.

Prerequisites

  • You sign in as a Site Administrator or Global Administrator. Users with the User role can browse the catalog but cannot change classifications.

After the first device audit, wait for discovered products to appear in the Software catalog, where they are easier to select and classify. You can also use Manage groups to classify product names before AlloyScan discovers them.

Classify one product

  1. Open Software from the left navigation.
  2. Select By name or By name & version. The view changes how the catalog is presented, but the classification always applies to every version with the same product name.
  3. Locate the product. Use column filters or Filter items to narrow the list. If the 1000-row cap banner appears and the product is not visible, click Load all.

  4. Open the row's Actions menu and select one of the available target groups. The current group is omitted from the menu.

    • Required — the product must be present in your environment. Use this for mandated tools such as a corporate endpoint-protection client or a baseline IT utility.
    • Regular — the default classification. The product is allowed but neither required nor banned.
    • Forbidden — the product must not be present. Use this for unlicensed software, decommissioned tools, or shadow-IT applications.

The change is saved immediately. The grid may take several seconds to show the new value.

Classify multiple products

  1. Open Software and select the rows to classify.
  2. Open Actions in the grid toolbar.
  3. Select Mark as Required, Mark as Forbidden, or Mark as Regular.

The classification is applied to the selected product names and therefore to every discovered version of each name.

Manage group membership

Use Manage groups to edit the Required and Forbidden product-name lists directly, including names that have not yet appeared in the Software catalog.

  1. On the Software page, open Actions in the grid toolbar and select Manage groups.
  2. In Classify software into groups, select Required or Forbidden.
  3. Add or remove product names in the editor, one name per line. Search locates text in the editor but does not change membership.
  4. Click Save.

The Regular group is the residual group: it contains software that is not listed as Required or Forbidden, so its membership is not edited as a list. Clicking Cancel or closing the modal discards pending changes.

Verify

After you change a classification:

  • The Software group column shows the new value for every version with the same product name.
  • Admin Center > Logs > Change log records changes to Software group membership as Added and Deleted events for the Software group entity, even when Change tracking is disabled.

To confirm the install map you are governing, click the product name to open its detail view and review the list of devices that have the product installed.

Choose which Software groups are imported into Alloy Navigator

If your AlloyScan deployment is connected to Alloy Navigator through AlloyScan Sync, you can choose which Software groups AlloyScan exposes to the sync. The control is available separately for Required, Forbidden, and Regular in Classify software into groups.

  1. On the Software page, open the Actions menu in the toolbar and choose Manage groups.
  2. Select the group whose import behavior you want to change: Required, Forbidden, or Regular.
  3. Select Track software from this group in Alloy Navigator to include the group in the next sync, or clear it to exclude the group.
  4. Repeat for the other groups as needed. On newly created Sites, all three checkboxes are selected by default.
  5. Save the modal.

The change takes effect on the next AlloyScan Sync run. AlloyScan performs this filtering before supplying software to Alloy Navigator. The filtering also applies when synchronizing with Alloy Navigator and with Alloy Navigator Express 2026.1 or earlier. The Alloy Navigator-side configuration of the sync job itself is described in Set up Alloy Navigator Sync.