I have a problem. Hardware hasn’t really been tracked here before, and I’d like to start doing that. At least at the level of desktop and/or LCD monitor, the two most costly and most likely to be “lost” items. I’ve never really found a solution for this that I like. For one, I like free, and I haven’t found a free option. I’ve tried Spiceworks, which is an excellent program, but I’ve run into enough issues with getting all machines entered in and tracking exceptions manually that it’s not a total solution. I’ve started making notes about new systems in an encrypted OneNote 2007 notebook, which does keep track of information well and is a good memory jog, but unless I create some templates (which are easy to create in OneNote), the information fields will vary, and it doesn’t fit the idea of a centralized store that I would prefer, although right now it’s just me. We’re working on our IT volunteer program, though, and I’d like whatever ends up being the final solution to scale well and function as a central repository. Trouble ticket tracking would be a good bonus, or at least a “system history” where a log of changes or issues encountered on each system can be centrally stored and associated with the system and/or user.
I’ve considered a Wiki, which is still an option, but other than the lack of being web-based and multi-user accessible, I like OneNote’s UI better and it seems similar. Did I mention easy-to-use and flexible is my number one requirement?
I’m still without a good, long-term solution.
I doubt this will be everything you want, but it’s a great start at a very low cost (free). OCS Inventory. http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/
I have been testing Spiceworks and have found it excellent for scanning all items on the network EXCEPT for windows machines. There are issues with WMI/RPC.
make sure to check out http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/opmanager/ . I had similar issues with WMI/RPC but they seemed to have been more easily overcome.
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I would look into scriptlogic’s desktop authority. This solution has very powerful software and hardware inventory reporting features. You can use some predifined reports, create your own custom ones, schedule them. We have a quite big network and this reporting can save time when we emmediately need some statistics. Mostly we use detailed by component hardware inventory reports. There are also some interesting reports like “Computer missing for days” where you can recieve a list of computers that no longer active for defined amount of days.
I took a quick look at ScriptLogic’s stuff Barry, and I’ve been keeping an eye on them in general since I’ve heard some good things about it both from some church blogs (which one(s) I don’t recall at the moment) and from the Casting from the Server Room podcast. I don’t think we’re going to switch to their entire solution right now, but I can see it happening in the future because they seem to have some really nice management and reporting features!