Suggestions? IT asset/inventory tracking solution?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Probably better suited on ServerFault or SuperUser, thought I’d ask for what people recommend as a quick and easy solutionf or slapping barcodes on our assets (PCs, laptops etc., printers) and what to use in terms of software/hardware to track them?

2

If you’re a Microsoft house, System Center Configuration Manager is a possible solution.

3

We have that running – what to use for barcode tracking?

4

I was lead to believe that it was built in functionality.

5

Um, what about Remedy?

6

we use BMC for incident and change management.
i was asking for more along the hardware/software solution for scanning, not the reporting afterwards.

7

I thought in addition to the network scan, it had other inventory scanning capabilities.

8

Remedy’s a great recommendation for the asset management/tracking portion. It tends to be expensive and you’ll have to hire a developer, though.

9

Yeah, that’s true. We have all our assets (10k PC’s) outsourced, so I hadn’t considered that.

10

Not for barcodes, but it’ll collect everything including serial numbers of PCs. Spiceworks. It’ll scan the whole network, and tell you everything on it. If you have Dell machines, you can even initiate a trouble ticket with Dell by clicking the service tag in the program.

11

We went with the KACE KBox system that Dell just bought, though it’s not inexpensive. Didn’t take long to get it to identify everything about a Dell system you could possibly want including of course the service tag. Also applies all patches for MS , Dell, and some other apps like Firefox, Flash, Acrobat, and Java automagically (with great results, at least so far).

Plus if a user really screws up I can flag their machine for a wipe. After a reboot it will format the system, install xp or w7, join the domain, install software, and then patch it all up. Takes a couple of hours but it’s all hands off and much easier to configure than the other solutions I have tried. Nearly cried tears of joy when I got it all working for the first time.

12

I like spiceworks too - it’s totally free and it’s really slick. I’ve been using it as my help desk ticket solution for some time now, though I’ve barely touched the inventory controls as yet.