Like many network managers, David James has a lot of IT projects on his plate.

Yet with one initiative in particular the network administrator for Piedmont Plastics in Charlotte, N.C., says he didn't know where to start. James says he was asked to document the operating systems, patches, updates and applications running on more than 200 Windows servers.

"You walk into an environment you have been running for years and think, 'I have to document this!'" James says. With tight staff and tighter budgets, he says he knew he'd have to "come across a miracle" to avoid investing a lot of cash and labor to get the server documentation project under way. "It was something I knew would take forever and a day."

That is until his Web searches for open source and freeware tools turned up a commercial software product - available free for download. Like some 5,000 others, James downloaded the free application to automate the manual process of server documentation.

"I can't imagine doing manually what this product automates," James says.

Configuration-management vendor Ecora this summer quietly made a scaled-down version of its enterprise Auditor Professional software, called Auditor Lite, available at no cost from its Web site (free download here). The company next week plans to announce it has extended the availability of the free version through year-end.

Auditor Lite, the brainchild of new Ecora CEO Joe Fiorentino, "carves off" some of the company's enterprise-level technology and makes it available as a downloadable software application.

"It provides a snapshot, inventory or baselines of server information, which can be used in many cases for disaster recovery," Fiorentino explains.

The software can sit on multiple server platforms and collects configuration, operating system, application, patch and more data residing on servers it has been directed to audit. Unlike products from competitors BindView and Configuresoft, Ecora's technology doesn't rely on agent software for data collection, Fiorentino says, and it doesn't require extensive configuration to get it up and running.

"I downloaded it, ran the install, and two clicks later I could see what was running on the server," says James, who wanted to be able to get a "bird's-eye view" of systems at any given time and has no plans to upgrade at this point.