List and review of desktop auditing tools

What would you do if Management has a big push coming up to do an asset and hardware/software audit and would like to automate it as much as possible. Below alternative desktop auditing tools you can used. Any more opinion?

1. Alloy Navigator
Alloy Navigator is a comprehensive IT infrastructure management suite offering two major areas of functionality: service support and asset management. Alloy Navigator can be used right out-of-the-box and customized to meet any organization's unique requirements. With Alloy Navigator, you can establish tight control over IT operations, meet increasing infrastructure standards, empower end-users, enhance service delivery, and unlock true value of your IT organization

Second Opinion:
We've been using Asset Navigator from Alloy Software. We can inventory machines via login scripts and the backside is a SQL database, so we can then customize reports w/ Acccess or Excel. It also has a help desk component which we've just implemented and so far so good. The real nice thing is that it provided basic asset management and helpdesk requestes w/o the large overhead of Zen or GPOs on AD.

2. Novell ZENworks
Novell ZENworks, a suite of software products developed and maintained by Novell, Inc. for computer systems management, aims to manage the entire life cycle of servers, of desktop PCs (both Windows-based and Linux-based), of laptops, and of handheld devices (such as PDAs). ZENworks supports multiple server platforms and multiple directory services. As of May, 2008, the current version of the ZENworks Suite, version 10.0.3, offered support for Windows Vista.

3. System Management Server
System Center Configuration Manager, formerly Systems Management Server (SMS), is a systems management software product by Microsoft for managing large groups of Windows-based computer systems. Configuration Manager provides remote control, patch management, software distribution, operating system deployment, and hardware and software inventory.

There have been three major iterations of SMS. The 1.x versions of the product defined the scope of control of the management server (the site) in terms of the NT domain that was being managed. Since the 2.x versions, that site paradigm has switched to a group of subnets that will be managed together. Since SMS 2003, the site could also be defined as one or more Active Directory sites.

I know we have discussed this in this forum before, but I need some recommendations for a desktop auditing tool, other than ZenWorks or SMS. I am probably not searching for the right terms/words to find the previous discussions, so any and all help deeply appreciated. Management has a big push coming up to do an asset and hardware/software audit and would like to automate it as much as possible. SMS and Zenworks are known contenders, but they want to know what else is available.