Slashdot Mirror
Software for a One-Man IT Department?
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?"
How about a good wiki with version control? Also, a versioning system like Subversion can be very useful for maintaining source code and configuration files.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
There are a whole lot of things that you can mean by "manage." Are you looking for asset management? Configuration management? Security? Software upgrades? All of the above?
I think if you can decide what it is you want to manage, you'll be better able to find tools that you need. Yes, plural; because what's a kick-butt asset management tool may suck at making sure all your servers are patched.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
I have a similar situation on my hands. Though I'm not given much of a budget. I either make (aka program) or use open source. I've found a great tool for documentation is a Wiki - especially if other people interact with it (but mainly cause its simple and has history). I use KeePass for passwords - also a great tool. As for asset tracking, I dont have a suggestion on cause I use my companies own product for that.
snowulf.com
Check out the HelpBox and AuditWizard offerings from Layton Technology.
Not free, but very affordable, and very knowledgable and helpful helpdesk staff. My company's using it, and I'm quite happy with it.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It may not be a popular answer but some kind of simple Database is likely the way to go.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
You're going to get 50 posts telling you to just use a wiki. That's decent for documentation but hardly the answer you need.
My suggestion is to try something like Plone. Set up document types for inventory and any specialized documentation you may need. You can set up simple workflows for processes if you want to get fancy (e.g. track computer order status). You can easily attach documents like spreadsheets as well.
I think you should look at one decent open source package you can customize a little (in Plone's case with no programming) which would encompass as much as you want to manage in one place.
Developers: We can use your help.
Solitare can be played for hours alone. If you get sick of solitary gaming, you could try Battlefield 2.
I kinda like MediaWiki as a searchable documentation dump -- to at least capture things and have a decent format.
Benefits:
- auto-generated table of contents at the top of each page, from very simple headings format
- can make links to flat files (html, PDFs, images, documentation that came with other software) in a separate space
- popular format for How-To's and Wikipedia provides some consistency with what users might see elsewhere
- automatically keeps track of when things were edited, which provides a rudimentary way of logging
what you've been up to day-to-day, week-to-week
- easily searchable
- users can provide their own information
- separate "talk" pages for discussion
- can see the whole history of changes
- nice presentation format for verbatim text, such as you would use to display a series of commands
- easy for users to navigate
Drawbacks:A trouble ticket system for users to request help is a must (e.g. Request Tracker).
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The only software you need is Half-Life 2 and an intern to play against. Just make sure you get OWNED by the intern, especially if she is a girl, or your reputation in the company will be ruined.
What exactly are you trying to do????
For yourself, for your users?????
Specific solutions require specific details!!!!
But in all seriousness, you need to say (like the other posts have mentioned) what you are trying to manage. This is way too open ended of a question. I wish the editors would pick up on these rediculously open ended questions and ask the submitter to provide more details before posting.
WebGUI is an intranet in a box, it's free, and it can handle all your IT needs.
http://www.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.
Solitaire! :D
Use bat scripts, VB scripts or Perl, Python, Ruby scripts to automate tasks. Automate _everything_ you possible can (app installs OS installs, firewall configurations, etc). Put your computers in a AD domain! We do this. We have one sys admin for each 300 systems/users and it works rather well. The one downside is that finding and hiring IT guys who are _good_ at this is a bit difficult. Most of them deserve higher pay than what we typically want to spend, but for the right person... it's 50 - 60K per year.
I'm currently interning at a company with a one-man IT department. When I arrived, their hardware/software inventory was spread over a half-dozen excel spreadsheets and (even worse) some pen-and-paper forms. I set up a server with the OCS Inventory tool and bam, it was as simple as adding a line to the network logon script -- now the hardware and software inventory of every computer is updated each time a user logs onto the network. It's absolutely the best inventory software I've ever encountered, and it's saved our IT guy a hell of a lot of time previously wasted on visiting each station to perform inventories.
I'm not sure what other information you want to 'manage,' but for hardware/software inventory, OCS takes the cake.
http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/
With 100 PCs and 4 servers it sounds like you might need an installation of one or two of the two-legged kind of software.
At the (small) company I work for, we have been using http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/service -desk/. It is a pretty nice tool, with some pieces that we will probably never use. I used to work for a couple really big companies that used really big (read: expensive) tools, and this one covers most of those bases pretty well. For small installs (25 pcs) you can use this one for free.
The combination of these things keeps everything in line. In particular, I'll point out that each part works together in such a way that there is only one place to check documentation (the wiki), one place to check for a work queue (the issue tracker) and one place to check for state information and discussion (the mailing list). That makes it easy to deal with, easy to delegate etc.
Also, you'll note that on a day-to-day basis, unless something breaks, there is no work required. That's huge. If the status quo requires any work at all, you'll eventually hit a scaling limit. The only thing that should require work is either a migration, an upgrade, or an expansion. And of those, upgrades should be easy to (nagios, yum and version control help there)
Right now I keep track of all of my hardware, software, and users with a spreadsheet and if I need to see who uses what, I have to cross reference this stuff manually. I also have to make changes for one thing in two or three places. I would like to consolodate this. I have Diagrams Outlining out internal networks / external networks. (not a must for include but would be nice). I have work instructions for everything from tape backup to router changes. I keep a journal of what i worked on, why and how i fixed it. I would like my users to submit problems and i would like to be able to access most of this information from anywhere in the building. My final request is that it doesn't require me to spend tons of time managing it. The Free (as in beer) software route is my only option at this point unless I can't find anything.
I never thought of using a wiki for that type of application.
My new title at the office is "Vice-President of Everything Else"
an interesting way for you to venture into software development inyour spare time. Find a niche and scratch it
...so I hope I can help. I use VNC for any troubleshooting with the users. In smaller shops, you have a chance to educate your users a little more. Therefore, I do simple things (like OMG my shared folder is not connected!) with them so they know how to fix things and do not bother me with the same things twice. Trouble tickets are handled by a little Access database I created to keep track of things. I handle an inventory of vending machine and I created another database for that. I use thunderbird and the calendar extension for my day-to-day tasks. If my boss asks me, I just refer to the calendar and ask if I should shift my obligations. I could also create a "To do" database and assign levels of importance based on need, but I dont got much time for that. I automated antivirus and patch distribution on the servers. I installed firefox to all the users. That way they dont mess with IE. I gotta go now, but if i think of more, I'll post again.
--MaxPowerDJ
If I were you, I wouldn't write anything down. I'd keep the root passwords in my head only. I'd not keep track of laptops or any other IT value besides in my own notebook, in illegible or coded notes. I would by no means diagram the network topology--especially that, because if you don't have a diagram it's nearly impossible to track without doing a manual survey of the IPs of all the jacks.
Cause if you do that, you'll never be replaced. You won't get promoted, either, but you're not likely to at a 100 person shop. Usually you have to worry about a manager getting worried about no docco, but if you're solo you don't really have to answer for it. And if a bus hits you, so what? You've been hit by a bus, think Peter at the Gates will hold !docco against you?
I wish I were kidding. But if they're going to send our support jobs to India, we have to defend ourselves with locking up our value. But my boss reads /., so that's why I'm anonymous ;)
When I was in college I worked for the Dorm network support team - it was 5 student workers managed by one full-time employee who was busy with other stuff. I convinced him to hire me on as a temp-employee and build a web-based system. I had to use ASP and SQL Server 2k since that's what the college officially used - even still it wasn't that hard and I put together a solid system within a few months. It's still being used and has worked out great. Since then I've seen some open-source systems, but it's really not that hard to build your own basic system that will do what you need. As far as documentation goes - a little Wiki will do it.
For monitoring, if you have managed hubs and switches, use the software that comes with the hardware (3Com Network Supervisor). Same for the servers, as most servers come with some kind of server management software (Dell OpenManage). Quite often it is just a matter of education about the included software. You can build a basic trouble ticket system in Microsoft Access or OpenOffice Base.
Here's a tool that we use that has saved us a lot of time for inventory. It is called EZ Audit. For a company your size, it is around $200-300. You put an entry in the login script and it makes a hardware and software inventory of every machine on your network. I looked at this a few years ago, but I was not impressed. However, they have improved the product and its reporting tools are very useful. We are much more productive now than we were, because no matter how good our intentions were, we still struggled with documenting changes and software. Now it happens automatically, without the hassles that we had when we tried to use things like Systems Management Server.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
Well, Wikis are a rich-get-richer-poor-get-poorer proposition with respect to organization.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's hardware, not software. Well.. unless you're Johnny 5 :) "Nice Software Stephanie"
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
The care and feeding of software takes time. Either: you're in a tiny organization which doesn't justify it, or you're stretched horribly thin and don't have time to muck with things unless it's getting user off your back.
I suggest: (1) You learn how to track and manage priorities using a simple manual system, e.g. one file for things that are on my plate for right now, but I'm sure when I sit down to do something on something else in the same file will interrupt me; a chronological tickler file; everything else in a single alphabetical file system, with cross refernces if need be. Don't get fancy here, you don't have time and you'll just confuse yourself later.
(2) Keep a comprehensive backlog of everything everyone wants from you.
(3) Emphasize face time over screen time. Look for places where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, and sit Mr. Right and Ms. Left down and show them how the pieces. This organizational antipattern, if unchecked, is probably 90% of your backlog.
(4) Learn how to conduct an effective meeting. This means making sure everyone is prepared before they attend, keeping the meeting on track and going at a brisk pace, and making sure nobody gets out without at least some token commitment they'll be held to.
(5) Learn how to use the system you devised in (1) and (2) to follow up on the results of (4).
That's it. Follow my advice and you'll outperform departments five times your size or more.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We're a similarly small IT department and have fiddled with a variety of software for things like patch installation, system audits, helpdesk, documentation, and availability monitoring. The only piece of software which I'd say has been a sure fire winner is Nagios, which we use for monitoring server availability. It was "fun" to set up, but it's worked nearly flawlessly for many moons without any hand holding on our part... and to me... in a small IT shop, this is probably the number one requirement. I'm not even sure if the nagios system still has a keyboard/mouse/display attached to it.
I set up Plone at our office, mainly for IT, but in the near future other departments may end up using it too. You can choose to keep notes in a wiki, or in more structured forms like a documents in folders. Everything is searchable too.
I ended up writing a plone product for tracking the inventory of our machines. I used archetypes to create a PCInventory and PCInventoryFolder products. Together I get a top level view of where the machines are, the important hardware stats, etc. in a table, and each row links to the more detailed view of the individual hardware. And the web forms dovetail nicely with the old paper forms we used before.
Other nice things Plone gave me was integration (via LDAP) with our Active Directory, so no need to keep two sets of passwords, a nice product for discussion boards, and it was easy to change the look of the site to match the official company website.
They'll think I've lost control again and leave it all to evolution. -- Supreme Being, Time Bandits
Unattended (http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ is a very nice automated desktop deployment package. I have limited experience with RIS, but this one won my heart. Easy to maintain, works on a shiteload of PC hardware, and it's based on open software. Highly recommended.
I am in the same boat. ~50 ws and 5 servers. I was recently pointed to Ilient Sysaid and am currenlty using the free version. I haven't utilized every aspect of it yet becasue I will soon be moving it to a production server, swapping out some hardware, rebuilding PCs, etc. So far I like what it does.
It's just me.
If that's all you currently posses of value, I'd fire you. Seriously, if all you know is passwords, topology, and a little bit of notes you're not very important. Passwords are easy enough to remove/fix with physical access to the box, nmap and htping will tell me all I need to know about the abstract topology, and a fluke will reveal the physical topology. Then all I'm short is a warm body to figure out a better way to do things than you.
So in short, All I'd be out is a few grand for the fluke because whomever I decided on to replace you will probably be cheaper to employ.
(and the moral of the story is, the irreplaceable game is terribly overrated)
The Geek in Black
I know my BCD's (when I'm Sober)
I'm going to go against the grain here and suggest that you not worry about finding specialized tools for various activities. The important thing is that you do document everything and if you have to spend much time learning new tools and trying to fit your existing data into them you'll find yourself putting it off. There's nothing wrong with having an array of text documents, spreadsheets, pdfs, diagrams, etc and in fact the real power of a PC is that it CAN deal with all this so why not take advangage of it? Just make sure your stuff is all in one place with descriptive names and a reasonable number of sub-dirs and you'll be fine.
If you think about it, you actually *do* want your one-man IT department reading Slashdot. This means that everything is fixed, and nobody is complaining. Of course, this is generally when I get fired -- because everything works, and I am not needed anymore.
Oh, and I'm looking for some project work, for those of you who need some assistance from a veteran.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
We're primarily a linux shop, with a tiny sprinkling of Solaris, Windows and Mac. About 65 desktops and laptops, a compute farm, about a dozen servers and filers.
We use Linux on all desktops except upper management and admin staff.
I used MySQLCC and phpMyEdit to create a simple, web-based inventory app.
Documentation is plain text, HTML, or simple diagrams in xcircuit or xfig (converted to JPEGs where necessary for public perusal), all available on the intranet. Mostly public, some dirs require a web login. I handcode HTML; I've been doing that since there were no HTML editors back when most people belived in the internet as much as they did the tooth fairy (or less in some cases, eh, Mr. King?)
Someone had done a basic cubicle/floor map in Excel and exported it to HTML. I've hacked that up into a web page that accesses the employee database (hand-written before I came here to use LAMP); that's about to be expanded to include wiring information and tie in the equipment inventory.
I use Nagios to monitor systems, network gear, printers, etc.
I use mrtg and SNMP with some custom web pages to monitor switch data.
I have perl scripts to monitor the compute farm, PBS, etc.
The one thing I *don't* have is a graphical net explorer that wlil also show me the net in real time in a format that shows the network structure with traffic, etc. 3M has a tool, but it is only so-so (last time I tried it) and rather slow on the older Windows laptop I have available. I'd love to have a good FOSS app for this, preferably for use under Linux, but Windows is aceptable.
I also did a simple task list app with MySQLCC & phpMyEdit. Not really a trouble ticket system. We have both gnats and bugzilla here for the hardware and software guys, but I wasn't really happy with either of those. (I haven't looked at either one closely in some time.) So anything that isn't just daily operations goes on the task list. Daily operations stuff is all handled through email. I wouldn't mind recommendations for a good, *simple*, easily customizable touble ticket system (gnats was a pain to customize, and bugzilla seemed like overkill).
A couple of our software tools developers have put together some scripts around apt or yum to handle OS upgrades the way we want them handled (we have to be picky about which updates we grab).
Lots of perl and shell scripts for everything else.
We tried a wiki for some thing a long time ago. Never worked very well for us.
I completely disagree about using PC-specific tools. I agree that tools should be simple, but if you use fat-client-based, opaque documents to store your information, you will not be able to easily grow your department (even temporarily), you will not be able to take vacations and hand off tasks to other people, you will not be able to deal with things remotely, and you'll have all the versioning problems that you normally get when you have unstructured data in big blobs.
There are great free/open tools out there that are trivial to install on whatever platform you want, and you are really doing yourself a disservice if you don't use them.
I mean, just a barebones setup of bugzilla, mediawiki, mailman and cvs/viewcvs and you're distributed right there. You should be able to get those going in a day or two. Throw nagios in (along with a few days to get everything monitored...) and now everything's on the network. Hand the passwords to someone else, and take a vacation, and things don't crumble
If it fits your environment, I can't recommend cfengine enough. Your PCs probably run Windows, and I'm not sure how well cfengine is supported on Windows, but in all the UNIXy environments I've used it in, it's a godsend.
It's incredibly powerful and very easy to combine with a version control system like Subversion or CVS. So, your entire network can be defined descriptively, with change control, and the ability to push out updates or rollbacks with ease. It's really beautiful.
I use IRM http://www.stackworks.net/view.php/irm/index.html for inventory, you can use also for ticket tracking. For misc. docuemtnation I also use TikiWiki http://www.tikiwiki.org/
All of these are open source, built on LAMP, and run great on Windows.
e ). The Anonymous Reporting Form is a time saver.
a in_Page). Mind maps are a FANTASTIC tool for documentation and you can publish them easily on a web server (get 0.8.1 beta3).
HW & SW inventory: Winventory (http://winventory.sourceforge.net./
Trouble ticketing: Eventum (http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag
Cacti (http://www.cacti.net./ Graphs all parameters on your servers and routers.
Documentation: TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php). It has articles, FAQs and LDAP integration.
FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/M
These are free, and get the job done.
SysInternals's tools (http://www.sysinternals.com./ Process Explorer and TCPView are the most useful, and there are many other great utils.
KiXtart (http://www.kixtart.org./ The best language for login scripts, and just about all your scripting needs on Windows.
Network Notepad (http://www.networknotepad.com./ Draw your nework diagrams here, and then publish them on your web server.
http://inet-sciences.com/
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Role
I work 60-70% of my time as a member of the core consulting team here and the rest of the time on "IT" administration and management around the local office. I should note though that I am a software engineer first and fore most, but it so happens that in small businesses one must wear many hats. Last year I was also heavily involved in accounting activities and managed a marketing program.
Scale
I only have 30 workstations and 27 servers (only 2 are publicly accessible and 8 are in a RCF) to worry about presently:
Culture
It should be noted that my users are technically very competent, which is a totally different can of worms to you (I assume from your comments), but there are plenty of issues to guard against with too competent a user as well!:) The issues are just different.
Environment
Server OS: RHEL 3
Workstation OS: Fedora Core 4 and 2 MacOS X (those damn graphic designers/marketing folk!:)
VPN Server OS: NetBSD 3 (runs on an Alpha box)
Software Tools
SCM: Subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/
Issue Tracking: Trac, which integrates nicely with Subversion http://edgewall.com/trac/
Internal Documentation (for future growth): Trac's built-in wiki http://edgewall.com/trac/
Web Server: Apache, mod_python, mod_ssl, mod_dav, and all that good stuff http://apache.org/
Knowledge Base: OpenCyc (but looking for something better that is still open source)
Intranet Framework: Python 2.4/TurboGears/Apache/mod_python http://python.org/ and http://turbogears.org/
Authentication: Fedora Directory Server (LDAP)
Updates: Yum, up2date
Server Monitoring: Nagios http://www.nagios.org/
[Internal] Remote Access: ssh and Gnome/VNC for the rare visual task
[External] Remote Access (i.e. VPN): OpenVPN
Internal Tools
Fixed Asset Management: Rolled my own TurboGears Web/AJAX application that hooks into our accounting system (it took 3 days part-time).
Backups: Rolled own Python backup mechanisms including scripts
Deployment Tools: Using Python's autoinst http://autoinst.tigris.org/
Continous Integration: I have started using Bitten instead of using cron and shell scripts to launch Python distribution builds and tests on a nightly and "continuous" basis for immediate feedback - something I find invaluable.
Office Software
As mentioned in a previous posting using a good calendaring tool is a very good idea. My recommendation is the Calendar extension for the Mozilla suite of tools.
This is not really a tool per se, but the faster you can convert your users to thin clients on a terminal server platform, the better off you'll be. If you get 70 or 80 of your users to use TS, it means less hardware to manage, less time patching systems, high availabilty by backing up and/or RAIDing the data, faster response times for user's problems, less power and HVAC usage, etc. It's not an answer for everyone, but it can make your job a lot easier if it's done right.
Because teenage pranks are fun when you're about to die!
I write this software. http://winventory.sourceforge.net/ Next version is coming "soon", and will be called Open-AudIT - also on Sourceforge.
What's On Your Network ??? http://www.open-audit.org/
System Images. I don't troubleshoot software issues with desktop/laptops. If the amount of time to fix an issue looks like it's going to be > a re-image and moving a person's data back to the new system, then the system get's re-imaged clean and data restored. May seem wasteful, but it's a fixed amount of time as opposed to an open ended "troubleshooting" session. Also keeps the time per problem consistent amount the lower skill set admins.
In a Windows environment, Google Desktop does a good job indexing Word and Excel documents. In my world, these contain a significant part of our hard to find information. Get in the habit of using keywords in the text of your documents, combine it with some reasonable directory structure and you can keep track of things pretty well.
I've used this for years for my personal project and problem-tracking notes (not the formal company doc) and I can reach back and find things from years ago.
Oh yeah, and make sure you've got a regular backup
I'm yet another one-man IT operation, and there's no question switching to some kind of remote access system eases up the petty problems. At my company, we're moving all 400+ users to the Citrix Metaframe system (remote access; they run Office from and save their stuff to the server). We keep a couple minor applications and web browsing client-side, but everything else is remote. The servers are sitting in a dedicated room we're leasing. I no longer have to clean out the client machines regularly. The downside to all this, of course, is that when the Citrix system goes down all hell breaks loose. Today, the print services in Citrix locked up and all printing was down until somebody got to the room to reboot the problem server (remotely rebooting failed of course).
Plus you can't beat the price of free software from VMware(Player/VMServer) or Xen if you don't need to run Windows
The company enteo provides software which will do what you want. Look at their Inventory and NetInstall products. You may find the others interesting too!
It's not open source, and it costs money to buy (I think it's licensed per client). It does save a lot of time in the long run though. The demo licence will let you try it out for 90 days.
It's also the only solution of this type I know of that supports Citrix.
-- Steve
I'm half of a two man IT team, smaller business and less machines than you're talking, about 50. We just bought an inventory system called EZ Audit and I have to say it's unreal. Attach the command line to run the inventory to either their login script or a GP and it will scour the machine for every bit of info. Serial numbers, hardware, drive space, memory, programs installed, even tells you how many mp3's someone has. And it's not terribly expensive either.
I use a tool I built to manage all the problems and solutions that I run in to. I kept running into a problem every few months, and forgetting what I did to solve it last time, so I built my knowledge base.
meh
If you want to want manage your documents and other data, you may try software like Analyst Pro. It is a simple and cost effective tool. You could find more information and download a free full evaluation copy at http://www.analysttool.com/
Dude has a pile of documents, spreadsheets and diagrams, no support staff and basically no budget. Sounds to me the first order of business should be to properly tool the _existing_ system and a "database" is obviously the biggest piece of that.
At a former company, we built our asset management system into our LDAP database and put a pretty web interface on it. If you wanted to know where anything was in the company, be it a telephone, a server or a secretary, voila, go to the "directory." Duh, right?
Certain things need to be thought of in simple, broad terms like that in order to come out with an elegant solution, rather than looking for a shrink-wrapped product that will increase your duplication of information rather than streamline it.
I am in a similar postion, there is a piece of desk software called sysaid, i have found it very useful. Best thing is, it's free. http://www.ilient.com/