Inventory management and Help Desk in one!
I recently read David Szpunar’s post about Inventory management, and I’ve gotta tell you that his post was downright timely. I had been banging my head against a wall. How do I track all these computers? I started doing it with Excel manually, then realizing that I needed more dynamic information, I started playing with VB Scripts. There’s a lot you can do with VB Scripts, and Microsoft’s Script Center is a tremendously valuable resource.
David mentioned that he was experimenting with Spiceworks. I had never heard of their product before, but “free” always gets my attention. The product requires about 50 Mb of RAM from my server, a little more than I wanted to give up, but it requires no client software. Plus, the functionality it offers me is worth the price.
So, Spiceworks runs twice a day on my server polling each and every computer on the network. It picks up lots of useful information like the computer manufacturer, serial number, specs, and installed software. It even tells me when anti-virus definitions are not current.
The fun doesn’t stop there. Not only does it inventory computers, it also picks up printers, switches, wireless access points, servers, NAS devices, Linux boxes, and anything else plugged in to your network. It alerts you to problems like low toner in the copy machine, or low disk space on workstation hard drives. I have an alert set up to notify me when any user installs any software, and I can’t tell you how helpful that has been.
So, if you are a small to mid-sized church, I suggest Spiceworks to keep track of your computer inventory. I also suggest them as your HelpDesk software.
My first month at the church resulted in a $90 cell phone bill. Why? Because I’m never in the office, so people just call my cell phone. Well, the church reimburses $50 of my bill, but I still don’t like the idea of using all my minutes for computer support questions. I installed Spiceworks, and now I insist on every user entering support requests into the HelpDesk. It automagically sends me a text message (which is cheaper than minutes), so that I can quickly respond to the request. It has resulted in a lower cell phone bill and quicker response time. Plus, Spiceworks helps me track which users are needy and which machines are busted.
So, go over to Spiceworks.com and grab up the free download. I bet you’ll like it too.
June 1st, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Thanks, this looks neat. I’m gonna give it a try.