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?"

Comments

Wiki

[Neil Watson]

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.

What exactly are you trying to manage?

[rah1420]

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.

Re:What exactly are you trying to manage?

[VitaminB52]

I think if you can decide what it is you want to manage, you'll be better able to find tools that you need.

Another questions that needs to be answered is: "what's your budget?" - both for the purchase of said tools and the training needed to use these tools.

A common pain in some business outfits is a mismatch between requirements and the budget needed to match these requirements. I hope you don't have a PHB ....

MediaWiki

[stanwirth]

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:

• not all html tags supported
• needs a nice calendaring interface with minimal installation fuss

One-Man IT dept and still have time for slashdot?

[licamell]

One-Man IT dept and still have time for slashdot? Now that would be the first thing I would fix.

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.

Excellent Suggestion

[rRaminrodt]

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.