In seek of IT Asset Managemtn Solution

January 24, 2008 5:36 AM

I need help finding a good, easy to use IT asset/inventory tracking software for my company.

I work in the IT department of a medium sized financial company. When I started the company was about 150 people and inventory wasn't really managed. Now we're about 3 times as big and there's a lot of inventory around and we really don't have a very good way of tracking it. Our current system is through emails and a spreadsheet. I would like something that is a bit more robust.

Things I would like:
- Web interface
- Customizable reporting
- Ease of use

Basically, I need to tie assets to users so that the accounting department can bill them appropriately. Being able to tie a user to a location would also be nice. The most important thing is that it be easy to use as if it isn't it's just not going to be used.

I don't necessarily need software that can probe the network for items, though that wouldn't be bed. Price isn't that big of a concern to a point. I don't think I would get approval to spend $100k on this.

An available demo would be nice too.

Any ideas for me?

posted by bDiddy to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

This is where one might expect to see FileMaker Pro getting into the game. Everything you asked for, you can do with FileMaker Pro.
posted by drstein at 5:48 AM on January 24, 2008

ocs inventory. ties in quite nicely to glpi ticketing system. the fact that both are free is good, but the fact that they work and work well is better.

I've used the combination of the two to good effect in the past, supporting ~60 users. most of the effort will be in setup and configuration. once you've got it working, it basically just works.
posted by dorian at 5:53 AM on January 24, 2008

Response by poster: I will give both a try. I've never used FileMaker before, so there's going to be a learning curve there. I guess the same goes for OCS and GLPI. I'll have to scrape up a Linux box to install GLPI on.
posted by bDiddy at 6:05 AM on January 24, 2008

you don't even need linux, there are things like xampp that are easy to install and serve perfectly well. (in fact this is exactly the environment I used for ocs and glpi... even better: previous releases of ocs came bundled with xampp, it was really a 1-click thing; altho I can't verify that's still the case)

having worked extensively with filemaker: it is nice for users in that it is a visually oriented database, but there is still going to be lots of manual work and little automation.
posted by dorian at 7:05 AM on January 24, 2008

I experimented with an open-source product called openIT for a while. I even ran it on a windows box using xampp, and it worked well. It's a little bit convoluted though, and doesn't look like it's been updated recently. It went to the wayside when he higher-ups bought the correct plugins for Novell to do ZENworks Asset Management, but that would require running a Novell network.
posted by pete0r at 7:21 AM on January 24, 2008

This question gets asked at least every other month.
posted by k8t at 8:58 AM on January 24, 2008

i had read amazing things about Spiceworks back when I was in search of helpdesk/IT management software... unfortunately we're primarily a mac shop and they were still working on their OS X build. check out the inventory section here.
posted by hummercash at 9:00 AM on January 24, 2008

I use Spiceworks at school and it works pretty well. It finds everything on the network except of my old HP JetDirect cards or printers networked through LPT ports. My main concerns are its initial job of classifying objects is spotty and the classification methods are cumbersome. I'd prefer if the program used tags instead of only being able to use one category per object. It's not the most customizable program in the world.
Best of all, it is free and very easy to set up on any Windows machine as a web server. Just run the setup, and you'll be able navigate to localhost in no time.

This question gets asked at least every other month.

True. I think I answered a question about this last month, too. A search for IT inventory might yield some more results.
posted by jmd82 at 9:26 AM on January 24, 2008

Response by poster: I searched, but nothing really answered what I was looking for. Maybe it was how I was searching. Sorry to cause you to re-read a question.

Thanks for the advice with Spiceworks. At a glance, it appears to allow for monitoring of hardware, but I am looking for asset allocation. Just to say that a particular user has this particular PC and these monitors, this Blackberry, and this particular printer. I'm not so much interested in monitoring the hardware. At least, that's not what I am looking for in this particular software.
posted by bDiddy at 9:52 AM on January 24, 2008

If you are a Windows shop, you can use the free Inventory Tracking template that MS makes for Sharepoint Services. It's a fairly basic, but easy to use Inventory system. If you have a Windows Server license, there's no cost.

There's a demo of the site here.

Once you have a Sharepoint Services server running, you can download the template from here.
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:00 AM on January 24, 2008