Software for a One-Man IT Department? 84
skywalker107 asks: "I am a one man IT department for a small Company (~100 PCs 4 Servers). I know that the bigger companies use alot of admin tools for inventory, documentation and management. Right now all of my information is spread out over documents, spreadsheets, and diagrams. The software I have tried has been poor at best and only covers one of the areas I need. What do the other small IT departments use to bring this information together and help manage the madness? Is shareware/freeware a good route? Does the open source movement have anything to fit a small scale setting?"
Use WebGUI (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.webgui.org/ [webgui.org]
It has versioning and workflow so you can set up complex processes. You can store your documents on it and access them from anywhere. You can set up privileges to allow other users to publish/download anything you want. It can handle incident tracking so you can keep track of support requests. It integrates with Active Directory or any other LDAP store so you can use your same user accounts/passwords. And it's used by companies all around the world (from multi-billion dollar companies down to mom and pop shops) to do exactly this kind of thing.
Scripts (Score:2, Interesting)
Wiki: the horror story. (Score:5, Interesting)
Our group used a wiki extensively for posting meeting notes, keeping priority lists, documenting open issues, posting reference data etc. The Wiki was good for us because it was simple, easy to learn, and we could adapt it to a wide variety of uses without having to go through a major requirements analysis and software selection. If we thought we might be able to track, say, outstanding customer issues by giving them a wiki page, we'd try it and see if it worked. By in large the simplicity and flexibility of using a wiki instead of a aresenal of special purpose software was a win for us. Until a certain manager got wind of what we were doing. In fact, we invited him to use our wiki to track what we were up to, instead of buttonholing an engineer and giving him the third degree every time he felt a twinge of anxiety on some issue or another.
The problem is that this manager likes to edit things. At first, it started with his changing fonts around and putting cute little animated gif icons of flames for items he thought were "hot". Then it proceeded to wholesale reorganization of the wiki, in the process breaking about half the document links. Finally he began to use the wiki as his private "brain dump" area, and started to demand that everyone know everything that was in it, which was impossible because he works 80 hours a week, and any time he got a hankering to edit something at a night or on a weekend, he'd satisfy it by spending a few hours shuffling wiki's content around.
Pretty quickly, everyone gave looking the wiki on a regular basis; they only went there when he browbeat them into it. This left him perplexed. He complained that we "advocated" using a wiki (which we never did, we just used it because it was convenient), and then we dropped it. When we point out that a system that changes too rapidly is useless for documentation and tracking, he's completely unable to see how what he's doing might pose a problem for other people. From his perspective, he's just making things "better organized". The more time you spend organizing, the better organized you'll be, right? Sure. And if you spend most of your time in a rush, it must mean you're punctual.
Eventually, what we did was set up a CRM system. Since this is a database application, and we've "neglected" to give him admin privileges, he can't alter the framework of the information at least. He does pelt us with regular "trouble tickets" in which he suggests all kinds of feature enhancements we should add to the CRM "if we have time". We quietly close them and continue taking care of the customers.
Re:Wiki: the horror story. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's really a people problem though - someone needed to throttle that dude.
Something every wiki should do is be able to send out nightly change reports (a la Confluence - it does this, not sure if others do). That way everyone can see nightly changes if they want. Many now are also allowing you to subscribe via RSS to updates etc - this also helps mightily.
Combine that feature with search, and you can update documentation easily, but you also solve the "where did it go?" and "what changed?" problems that updating documentation quickly causes.
Unless someone is changing things 80 hours a week, of course
The PC's have to go! (Score:2, Interesting)