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Asset Tracker works nice for us and is integrated inside Request Tracker. The web site only has the download item and the software is a little old but it runs surprisingly well.

is RT at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ and RTx::AssetTracker at http://atwiki.chaka.net/

RT is a very powerful open source ticketing system, and RTx::AssetTracker adds adequate asset tracking to it. You would probably have to do a bit of work to get it to work with barcodes (or just use a barcode scanner with the
cursor on the right page - most just send standard keyboard type input IIRC).

It's all open source, written in Perl, and really just works very well. And if it turns out to be inadequate, you'll learn enough from the experience to have a much better idea of what you actually need.

Asset Tracker, a system which integrates wonderfully with Request Tracker is worth looking at, definitely. It has something of a learning and configuration curve, to be sure. Once you're over that, though, it works like a charm. Oh, and the price is right, too: Free.

"I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

It may be massive overkill for this, but I love using Request Tracker (RT) for ths kind of thing. It's primarily intended as a bug tracker / ticket tracking system, but it it's extremely featureful & flexible, and several other tools are built on top of it, including a FAQ manager, an incident response system, and an asset / inventory manager.

I for one find a lot to like about RT, which is why I currently use it at home for tracking regular household chores just as I used it at my last couple of jobs for tracking all the little projects I was involved with. One feature that may appeal to you is that it's very easy to set up queues for different problem areas. If you have 10 project teams to manage, you can set up one (or more) queues for each of them, and people using the system can be set up to have access just to their own queue / project or to multiple queues / projects. People can create individual tickets for individual tasks / to-dos, and tickets can be linked ("refers-to", "parent", "child", etc), so you can set up arbitrarily complex dependency graphs among a set of tickets -- one ticket might be the umbrella for a project, and any number of other tickets can be linked under it as children or grandchildren or ... whatever you like. And, of course, it's possible to add notes to these tickets either via going to your RT server's web site or via email messages to the RT system.

RT is all written in Perl and available under the GPL, and it'll run anywhere that Apache and mod_perl will run (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, etc). Because it's so open, there's a lot of contributed add-ons available for it, as well as a pretty good collaborative documentation Wiki for the system. It can, admittedly, be a bear to install -- it depends on a lot of CPAN modules, so getting them all installed & configured can take a while if you're not lucky enough to be on a platform with a good package management system -- but there are installation guides for most major platforms, so you should be able to find a suitable one to start from.

Now, all that said, some of the other commenters noted that for the truly disorganized, no tool is going to get you past your own habits. Certainly, that's true, and coming up with a system for keeping yourself organized is tremendously important. In my case though, I have found RT to be a very useful organizing tool for my own needs, both at work and at home. It is, admittedly, a pretty complex piece of software, with a large number of nooks & crannies to learn about. But for starters, you don't need to know about any of that. Just being able to install it and start using it is all you need for now. If you need to, turn to the maili

You should check out RTx::AssetTracker, an asset management extension to RT. Like RT, you can easily create custom fields to hold your router configs, firmware versions, etc.

Demo here.

You should check out RTx::AssetTracker, an asset management extension to RT. Like RT, you can easily create custom fields to hold your router configs, firmware versions, etc.

Demo here.