You might have noticed that we haven’t written much lately. One of my main projects lately has been to implement some inventorying software to keep track of the numerous computers, laptops and other equipment. Over the coming months we will be increasing the quantity of laptops, tablet PC’s and handhelds in our organization by at least 3 fold. Up until now we’d been keeping track of equipment using an excel spreadsheet and it’s quickly gotten un-manageable using that method. So, I began looking at inventorying software. I installed several differnet packages, so many that I lost track of the different offerings. There were a number that stood out, but the ones I really liked were way to expensive for the budget I had to work with.
I ended up going with Track-It! 7 from Numara software. One of the bonuses to the Track-It software was the fact that it has help desk software built into it as well. We had been using Microsoft Outlook tasks to keep track of the numerous requests and such. The help desk component to Track-It works very well and has helped us get organized. It also has a self-serve feature that give you an intranet web page where people can submit work orders and such. We actually aren’t using that as much, but we are using a feature where you can setup an email address that the software monitors and can create work orders from new email messages. Since we’ve started using this software and making our users submit requests using this method has cut down the number of phone calls to our department by a huge number. This means we can spend more consistent time working on projects which results in lower stress and better productivity.
The inventory part of the software works well also. It has an automatic asset discovery which will go out and look through your active directory and find computer accounts. It also will scan ranges of IP address finding assets that way. It’s taken several weeks to go through and get our computers, printers, laptops and other equipment setup but it’s extremely beneficial.
There is a library section that allows you to setup resources that can be “checked out.” For instance I setup our 4 LCD projectors in our library and when someone comes to us and gets one I check it our to them, thus helping us keep track of floating assets. The users part of the software can pull your users and sync the users’ active directory info like phone numbers, departments etc.
Overall I’ve been extremely pleased with the Track-It software and can say we highly recommend it for implementing an IT inventory and help desk strategy. There is more to the software that I haven’t explored just yet. One more feature is the ability to add remote control to your inventory allowing you to take over a desktop of a user to help with troubleshooting and pointing out what your end users are doing wrong! :)