Numara Track-It 7 Professional

Asset management and automated helpdesk functions are proving to be big money savers, and Track-It has been in this game longer than most. It's been through a few hands, as it once belonged to financial software specialist Intuit after it acquired Blue Ocean Software. This was then spun out as Numara at the end of last year.

Track-It combines asset management tools, including hardware and software inventory plus licence monitoring, and ties them in with extensive helpdesk functions. This is a capability few other products have, as the majority concentrate purely on listing your assets and not on who's looking after them and how they're performing. There are three versions, with the Professional on review supporting one technician and 50 PC audits. The Professional and Enterprise editions also come with Crystal Reports to augment the basic Track-It reports.

Installation is automated, and you can load the web services and SQL database on the same system or separate ones if required. The new administrative console makes light work of initial configuration. You can deploy the optional agents, which allow technicians to remotely control client systems and run audits as a service. Asset discovery is handled by a wizard that requests details of the domains, IP address ranges and Active Directory (AD) organisational units to be scanned. Nothing is done with the resultant audit information, as you need to review the newly discovered assets and decide which entries to transfer into database.

Work orders are fundamental to the Track-It helpdesk services, and these can be generated in a number of ways. To streamline the process, the primary means of contact between users and technicians should be email. Incoming messages can be converted into work orders and have a default technician assigned to them. Rules applied to the Track-It mail Inbox allow the responses to be fine-tuned, auto-replies to be generated and specific message types or content to be ignored. Users can also respond to auto-reply messages to request a status of the work order or provide additional information. We tested this function on our Windows AD test network and found it worked well, although you'll need to ensure users are aware that their subject line must be relevant and precise.

The main console provides access to all Track-It components. A new feature is the web service, which allows technicians to access these functions remotely. From the homepage, you can see the status of outstanding and overdue work orders, browse through the inventory, check purchasing information and fire up the administration console. We found overall inventory detail to be average, with Track-It identifying the main components of our test client systems but becoming confused with processor counts. Software licensing is also only a passive process, as it merely checks what's in the inventory to determine installed copies of a program and it can't monitor licence usage in real-time or enforce restrictions either.

The levels of integration between each component are reasonably good, although Track-It will take a while to customise. The asset management features aren't as good as those offered by point solutions, but are a useful addition to the already sophisticated helpdesk functions.

Author: Dave Mitchell