Ramp Up Video #2: Asset Tracking with GLPI
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Do you have a reliable system for tracking assets within your company? If you’re using a spreadsheet for this task (or worse, no system at all) you stand to benefit from using an asset tracking system like the GLPI application. GLPI gives you a single view of hardware and software assets in your company and allows you to:
- Maintain an accurate inventory of company assets
- Receive alerts on expiration of support contracts and software licenses
- Ensure proper software licensing compliance for an audit
- Generate a spreadsheet of assets to create a depreciation schedule
- Run basic help desk infrastructure within your organization
- Integrate with an existing user authentication system like LDAP
- Locate any item by various criteria like name, department or location
This tutorial is intended to give you the motivation and instruction you need to get started with GLPI. In the next twenty-five minutes we’ll run through the basics of GLPI using our fictitious lemonade stand company. We’ll use the JumpBox for GLPI to demonstrate the above capabilities and you’ll come away with an overview of the application and everything you need to get started using it within your own organization.
Below is the video, a time-coded table of contents, the widget to launch your own private instance and the backup file that contains the final state of the application used in the tutorial. Leave a comment if you have questions.
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Get the state of the system at the end of the tutorial here. |
How do you view this? I am using Firefox 3 and I don’t see anywhere how to view this.
I even updated my flash player to 10.0.15.3 for Ubuntu, still no go.
Derek,
that’s odd indeed. Are you able to go here and see it on the vimeo site:
http://vimeo.com/2898251
I’m assuming you are able to view other flash media?
Could you send a screenshot of what you are seeing to info -at- jumpbox.com?
thanks
Sean
Sean,
I did see the video at vimeo.com and now I see it here. (Maybe I needed a reboot after updating to version 10 of flash)
Anyway, the video is a good intro. I would challenge you to use glpi and ocsinventory for about a month as your main IT tool, then do some more in depth videos on it. I have been using glpi for over 2 years along with ocsinventory. Since I don’t know French, I have struggled with it. The English documentation is not up to snuff and not everything is translated well. Some of the rough points are the financial tracking, activity reporting and planning, and with ocsinventory the software cleanup. (99% of the programs are actually just windows updates)
They are in beta for version 0.72. I will give it a try when it comes out, but I am also keeping my eye on Spiceworks (yes, ad supported and has to run on windoze).
I would challenge jumpbox that for open source programs like these that don’t have a commercial entity (or at least an English speaking one), to really bridge the gap on good documentation.
If you want me to be more detailed about the rough spots, let me know.
Derek
Derek,
glad the video worked and re: doing a more in-depth video: “challenge accepted.” The short-term issue is we’re trying to release videos for all new apps and with only 2 days exposure to GLPI and access to limited documentation (as you pointed out), it’s tough to get a thorough enough understanding to be able to do an in-depth video. My goal with the videos for now is to show the app doing something useful and give people a basic introduction to how it works to flatten the learning curve as much as possible so people can jump in and get started quickly.
I plan to do more substantive videos once I’ve gotten greater depth with each application. Apps like Trac and SugarCRM that I’ve been using for awhile now will have meatier first videos once I get around to making them. If you have good experience with GLPI it would be great to get a demo sometime of the concepts that you think would be important to convey in the next video.
thanks again for the feedback.
Sean
I transferred my printer/toner inventory from an in-house, python/bash/php mess to this jumpbox. We may or may not use it for anything else, but as it’s included in our JBOpen subscription, I certainly feel like I got my money’s worth. This is a lovely tool! Very easy to get useful basic info in there and then refine it as you go on. Also, it integrated with LDAP, no fuss.
Thanks for the vid — I especially appreciate you pointing out the couple of ‘weird’ bits. Saved me some head scratching, I’m sure.
Sean,
I thought about it some more for the in depth videos:
1) OCS inventory usage (if you are to include it with the glpi jumpbox) This could be separated into a basic for general software/hardware inventory and linkage with glpi, and then a more advanced one for package distribution. (I punted on that one)
2) Software assigning/licensing and vendor contracts and hardware financial data. These can get a little hairy as there are different ways of handling this and the costs associated. And then reporting on this.
3) Most popular plugins overview and usage
4) Final run through video actually showing a wrapup of a months or so worth of usage. Walk through a day in the life of an admin and a few techs and how they use glpi for doing their daily planning, projects (though you have to use a plugin for this), and then the reports on the techs activities (I use the activity plugin for tracking non ticket items and for project items), and reports on a breakdown of tickets, and reports on both time and $ spent on certain software/hardware/vendors. In here you can put the “best practices” that you have gleaned to really streamline this.
You may also want to do your day to day usage with glpi 0.72 beta. (It will probably be released sometime in March) Version 0.72 is supposed to have many enhancements. BUT, to really do effective in depth videos like these, you will have to use glpi as your main IT tool for a month or so. That is the only way that you will start to notice the sticky points and can generate a list of “best practices” to smooth over those. It would really help if you have someone on your staff that knows French
If you do that, then that is worth it to me to get a jumpbox subscription.
Derek
Derek,
thanks again for your feedback and suggested curriculum for the advanced GLPI video. I would love to get that level of depth with GLPI (and every app we package). It would be great to be able to put out advanced, truly meaty screencasts for all of them. The unfortunate reality though is that for me to get that degree of familiarity and understanding with each app to do the videos from scratch would be a full-time job unto itself.
We’ve considered commissioning experts to do them but a) it costs money b) there’s something to be said for having a consistent experience for all the vids. Here’s a random thought I’ll throw out there though for how this could work:
We identify a resident expert on each app and I work with that person for an hour or so via a screen-sharing app to grok the most important aspects. I’m talking power tips that come from years of working with a piece of software and having seen it evolve over time- the guts of what make it valuable, where the pitfalls are, the non-intuitive parts and the “wow, i wish someone would have told me that” tidbits. I distill those years of experience into a 30min video that we make available to the public and in return attribute that wisdom to the expert in multiple places (in the video / blog / app page). For an hour of his/her time volunteering to share experience, the expert gets steady exposure, credibility, consulting requests, etc. Our visitors get invaluable expertise and avoid the mistakes learned via months of trial & error so they can be instantly productive.
Seems like it could be a worthy exchange for everyone involved and frankly an arrangement like this is about the only feasible way I see for us to keep pace with delivering in-depth videos at the pace we’re planning to put out new apps.
sean
[...] table of contents to that video on the post. The other videos include intros to SnapLogic, GLPI and KnowledgeTree for data integration, asset tracking and document management respectively. Let us [...]
I am currently using this program it is great!!… I am looking for a way to use a barcode reader/printer integration with GLPI.. has any one done this??
I agree the video is a great resource, but you might be able to stop more people from head scratching simply by promoting links to other resources.
People using Jumpboxes aren’t totally hopeless at solving problems, but when I went to the GLPI Wiki and selected English, the information I expected was um, missing. As in hadn’t been written yet.
The forums aren’t much better because you can’t easily search. The other solution we were looking at was OTRS which has beautiful, in depth instructions. Unfortunately we couldn’t use it because the Jumpbox did not include the ITSM module, a feature we needed.
my contribution is this, which I have just doscovered
https://wiki.lepp.cornell.edu/lepp/bin/view/Computing/GLPIFAQ
oops, my bad. The Wiki exists, however the information is ridiculously basic….