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Posted

Currently we do our asset management with spreadsheets however funds have been made available to purchase a solution or potentially. What is everyone experience of such software.

 

Not to sure yet if they would like to asset more than just IT but i am guessing that they would.

 

Cheers

Posted

Depends how many students you have, and how hard a bargain you can drive...

 

Our 500 pupil school is £999 a year based on a 3 year contract. That also includes a day of training and several hundred asset labels.

  • Thanks 1
Posted

Thanks, although I used to be an evangelist for Spiceworks I am coming to the end of my tether with an issue that has existed for ages but not addressed.

Looking for alternatives right now.

Posted

"Asset Management" comes up regularly on here, but we don't seem to have a standard definition as to what this means.

 

Asset Management, to me, is a finance related thing. It is keeping track of all physical assets in the enterprise - for insurance and accounting purposes.

 

Network Inventory is keeping track of the IT estate. Tracking things like software installed, hardware details etc... Used for managing the network.

 

The 2 have different tools to do the job generally.

 

We have now bought into School Asset Manager for our Asset Management here. We also use Spiceworks and SCCM for the network inventory.

 

School Asset Manager has a network scanner but it is very limited.

Posted
We are looking into it as a finance project ie for all school assets. And school asses manager are the company that are coming in. So do you have all your sccm data duplicated in school asset manager ?
  • 8 months later...
Posted

Take care with School Asset manager (from Results Squared Ltd)

There is evidence of some quite sharp practice from them, the annual cost for the licence is very high (eg £2k pa) contracts can be from 3-5 years with automatic rollover. It's a large financial commitment and they are quite happy to encourage a network manager to sign up to a 'free trial' where the small print ties the school into a very costly contract with no getout clause.

  • Thanks 1
Posted
Take care with School Asset manager (from Results Squared Ltd)

There is evidence of some quite sharp practice from them, the annual cost for the licence is very high (eg £2k pa) contracts can be from 3-5 years with automatic rollover. It's a large financial commitment and they are quite happy to encourage a network manager to sign up to a 'free trial' where the small print ties the school into a very costly contract with no getout clause.

I was going to take up the trial offered by them, but the automatic signup into a contract puts my guard up, so i declined!

Posted

You are correct that their trial turns into a full contract if you don't cancel, but this is a fairly standard practice across most businesses. That said, they are happy to cancel the moment you call them, so there's no risk so long as you actually call them up to cancel.

 

Personally, having used it for 6 months or so, I'd say its well worth the money we pay for it.

Posted

Hi folks. I don't want to hijack the thread, but as forum sponsor thought it would be reasonable to share news about our new IT Asset Management solution for schools, NetSupport DNA.

 

NetSupport DNA is a new suite of easy-to-use tools for managing and supporting IT assets across a school network or campus. Highlights include: automatic discovery of devices, SNMP discovery, hardware and software inventory; change tracking and software licence management. Building on the flexibility of a single solution for schools, NetSupport DNA also includes energy monitoring; power management; USB endpoint security; printer monitoring; application and internet metering; a flexible alerting suite; and an easy-to-use software distribution module.

 

eSafety and Safeguarding are supported with keyword monitoring to alert schools of any online activity that may place a student at risk, internet monitoring of websites visited and the option for students to report concerns directly to trusted staff. NetSupport also offers optional classroom management, service desk and remote control modules.

 

We have just produced a video explaining our thoughts and philosophy behind the solution if it is of interest and of course we will be showing it all week at BETT if anyone is visiting.

 

 

 

I hope it is of interest.

 

Al.

Posted

10 years ago we used a spreadsheet

Then we used wasp asset - that was naff

We then trialed school asset manager - good but still lacking in some areas

 

Now using Parago, highly recommend it. Costs us about £800pa but the school dictated to us a lot of requirements that we couldn't fulfil with the old free/cheap methods.

 

What system you go for depends on what you really need, parago isn't designed to be used just by your IT department, it's got functionality in there for finance, site team and science techs to all use it too. It becomes far more cost effective the more you use it for.

  • Thanks 1
Posted
For what it's worth, i believe this sort of product should be no more than £300 a year for primary schools for unlimited assets.

 

You're going to struggle to get a good asset management program for that I'm afraid!

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