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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
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: