Recognition Overview
Recognition is the bridge between what discovery finds on a machine and what xAssets can license. Discovery reports raw strings — "Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019", "Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2024.001.20604", "AutoRunsToolHelper" — and recognition turns those strings into a classification: Primary, Secondary, Free, Banned, or Unknown.
This chapter covers how recognition works, how to keep it current, and how to handle titles the engine has not seen before.
Why Recognition Matters
Without recognition, every install is just a string. With it:
- The engine knows whether a title is licensable
- It knows which Software Catalog product the title belongs to
- It can produce a meaningful licensing position
A title that goes unrecognized falls through the cracks: it does not appear in compliance reports, even if it is a paid product that needs a license. That is why keeping the unrecognized list small matters.
The xAssets Recognition Service
xAssets operates a centrally managed recognition database that classifies software titles for every customer. As part of a SaaS subscription, xAssets ensures that every software title in your database is recognized — when new titles appear, you submit them and they are classified centrally, and the classification flows back to your installation (and to every other customer's).
This is the recommended workflow for almost all titles. The reasons:
- Central classification benefits everyone. A new product recognized for one customer flows to all customers on the next update.
- Consistency across installations. The same product is classified the same way everywhere, which matters for vendor audits and benchmarking.
- Less work for you. No need to manually research and classify titles that other customers have already submitted.
- Better recognition over time. The central database accumulates rules from every customer's submissions, so coverage continually improves.
DIY recognition (creating recognition records locally) is supported and documented in Creating Software Titles Manually, but it is rarely the right choice. It makes sense for genuinely internal software (in-house tools that no other customer would have) or in rare cases where your organization classifies a product differently for policy reasons. For commercial software, submit to xAssets and get the benefit of central classification.
The submission workflow is on the Unrecognized Software page.
What's in This Chapter
| Page | Covers |
|---|---|
| AI Software Recognition | How the engine classifies titles, including version-independent and fuzzy matching |
| Unrecognized Software | What to do with titles the engine could not classify |
| Software Updates | How recognition data updates flow from xAssets to your installation |
| Creating Software Titles Manually | Manual entry for air-gapped or non-standard environments |
How Recognition Fits Into the Workflow
Recognition runs every time discovered data is loaded — typically immediately after a network discovery run, or as part of a scheduled integration with SCCM, Intune, or Active Directory. You normally do not interact with it directly.
You only need to think about recognition when:
- A new title appears that the engine could not classify (see Unrecognized Software)
- You suspect the recognition database is stale (see Software Updates)
- You have software that discovery cannot see and need to enter manually (see Creating Software Titles Manually)
Related Reading
- Concepts: Free Products — why classification matters for compliance numbers
- Software Catalog — what recognized titles map into