SCCM 2012 SP1 - Vendors or Publishers with multiple spellings or formatting

Question

Hey all,
When trying to do reports by Vendor for example, how can we deal with the fact, for example, that the employees at Adobe are not applying the company name incorrectly.
When I go to the All Software Companies report I find that there is
  Adobe Systems Incorporated
  Adobe
  Adobe System Incorporated
  Adobe Systems
  Adobe Systems Inc
  Adobe Systems Inc.
  Adobe Systems Incorporaetd [Realy, it is spelled incorrectly]
  Adobe Systems Incorporated
  Adobe Systems Incorporated.
  Adobe Systems, Inc
  Adobe Systems, Inc.
  Adobe Systems, Incorporated
  Adobe Sytems Inc. [Another mispelling]
  Adobe Sytems Incorporated [Another misspelling]
Heck, even Microsoft has this issue.
And ever duplicates that may or may not be there.
How has anybody been dealing with this? It's annoying to have to deal with this when trying to do any sort of drilling down through various canned reports.
I was thinking about creating a little process that goes through the registry in attempts to find the typographically incorrect names and if found replace with with something more commonplace.
Thanks for the discussion on this issue.

Answer 1

Hey Jason,
Got to say, I looked over the link and it took me a while to finally grasp the scope of where that "Set Names" was it. I tend to leave anything that says "Default" in some areas of System Center alone; mostly because there may not be
an option available to reset back to default. I would have hoped that when I made a client policy, as suggested in the documentation that all settings would be carried over to it, much like creating a group policy. Is it normal to edit the Client Default Settings? 
As the documentation says "You can also configure custom client settings, which override the default client settings when you assign these to collections. For information about how to configure client settings, see
How to Configure Client Settings in Configuration Manager."  I guess somebody in the user interface department missed that bit about overriding default client settings with custom
settings because custom settings do not have all the settings; such as Set Names.  And hey, I found a post
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/41285bd4-e5b2-4a75-94ce-02669e5df592/sccm-2012-how-i-can-reset-default-client-settings-policy-?forum=configmanagerdeployment" So it would appear that there is no way to reset to default settings should
something get way out of hand.
Why inventory EXEs? I thought about that and wanted to know what EXEs are on a computer, from what I understand about software inventory, and perhaps this is from my scripting days. I saw lots of people, in the past, ask how they can use VBS or WMI
for example to do software inventory, the usual stock answer is something like "wmic product"; which only returns products installed by an MSI source, while non-MSIs usually end up in the registry in either Install or Uninstall area, or both
as well as MSIs ending up there.  Perhaps I don't need to inventory EXEs, but it's there, and I would like to know what computers potentially have an EXE on them that I might want to look for. For example there are plenty of applications that install
without an install method; they just simply get themselves copied by the user or some hack of an installer.  I don't go trolling through the reports, but there is an occasion where I may want to see if a computer has an EXE, and if I'm lucky the path
to the EXE is also captured so that's a bonus, right? I could potentially use that information to find an EXE that is in a user's AppData folder, for example. Right? A virus, or a bit of spyware that the AV product may not know about.
For example; here's a script that claims to inventory software -
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Software-Inventory-of-f66b5bdc
- The  Win32_Product
WMI class represents products as they are installed by Windows Installer. A product generally correlates to one installation package. (from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394378(v=vs.85).aspx).
What about products not installed via the Windows Installer? Pointless. Is that what SCCM does as well? Or does it look in the registry combining both Win32_Product and what is in the Uninstall/Install registry hive? Working with a school district I've installed
a lot of software that doesn't use the Windows Installer.
I did find these posts interesting -
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/23c875b4-0e1e-406d-b28f-ee082a20bbf2/default-software-inventory-not-collecting-any-data-from-client?forum=configmanagergeneral
It was interesting in that I was having a similar issue where nothing was showing up until I added scan the exes, but maybe that's a coincidence.
And finally -
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682067.aspx#BKMK_SoftInventoryDeviceSettings
Taking note of the option to inventory file types within Microsoft's own documentation. A useless feature? Hmm. And why not? Take a look at this -
https://www.grc.com/oo/program.htm. You will notice that it says there is nothing to install, just run it. Okay, so what there applications follow the just download and run, no need to install it. Sure GRC is
a security site, but if some user thought it might be good to have it, and they ran it, and started having issues with something that doesn't do traditional installing then we as IT don't have a real clue as to what is really on a user's system.
You'll have to forgive me, but if Microsoft created a feature, why not use it? It's like the age old debate as to - Should I keep my computer on, or should I turn it off.  Should I deploy images via SCCM using multicast or not.