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.

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

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.