Patent ID: 7937430

Claim:
A method for collecting information comprising: installing a data collection program on a workstation; establishing a connection between the workstation and a central server to collect data from the workstation by the data collection program; receiving user identification from a user; in response to a verification of the user identification from the user, receiving a system name for the workstation; determining, at the workstation, whether the workstation includes an email message folder file configured in an authorized format; in response to a determination that the workstation includes the email message folder file configured in a format that is different than the authorized format, sending an error message to the user; and in response to a determination that the workstation does not include the email message folder file in a format that is different than the authorized format: collecting data from the workstation by the data collection program, wherein collecting data from the workstation includes retrieving available user information based on the received user identification, displaying available user information in a pre-populated form, and prompting the user for corrections to data in the pre-populated form, wherein the user is prompted to correct a user email address when the user email address is determined to be in an incorrect format; writing the collected data to the central server, wherein a user directory is created at the central server for storage of the collected data based on the user name and workstation computer name and a mounted drive is determined to be either a remote drive type or not a remote drive type, wherein for a not remote drive type, files in the drive are transferred to the user directory at the central server and for the remote drive type, share drive information for the remote drive type is saved in a text file and transferred to the user directory at the central server; severing the connection between the workstation and the central server; and after the data is collected and written to the central server, deleting by the data collection program files related to execution of the data collection program.