Need advice for inventory management for school. Mostly Chromebooks.

[brentonwhite]

I started a new job two weeks ago at a small public school. I am a one man team.The inventory management is uncordinated.They have G-Admin, AssistTiger, and Google Sheets.None are really up to date. The only accurate acount of who loaned what Chromebook is a physical binder.AssistTiger does not have an up to date list of students and staff/teachersG-Admin obviously does have every student and staff/teacher since that is what everyone usesG-Sheet is kind of wild tbh and not up to date.I brought up the inventory management to someone at the school and they scoughed becuase they just use excell/G-sheets. I really dont think that is the best way to do inventory management right??We do have tags on the Chromebooks which make is easy to scan into a spreadsheet, but managing who has what chromebook, which are unasigned, and which need repairs or are getting repaired seems a bit much to keep all on a G-sheet?I am still navigating my way around AssistTiger. I would have to find a way to import all Students and Teachers/Staff. Then I would need to go through asigning it to the correct person or unasigned/repair needed category.I know G-admin allows you to asign chromebooks to students.Should I try to get both G-admin and AssistTiger all up to date?Should I focus on one?Should I consider G-sheets?Bonus question is anyone wants to help me find this out.If we have 404 students and have 101 assigned Chromebooks,How many extra chromebooks should be aim to keep on hand?I have maybe about 50 in good shape Chromebooks and 30 that need repaired.They are on warrenty, but we still get charged to repair, I am trying to figure out how much I should get repaired. Really I am not sure how to figure out the number of Chromebooks we need to have on hand.Any advice is welcome. Thank you!

[dapaulio]

Is this a primary or secondary,

 

So whilst not an official inventory system of your chromebooks, whilst they are enrolled and managed in google then admin will hold all the serials and asset tags for you.

 

I would aim to making google admin and the chrome books managed.

 

If you have on prem ad installing Gcds so that you are not doubling up your work with user creation in both systems.

 

I think there is a beta domain integration also but never really tested it.

 

Longer term I may be looking at intune the windows devices and migrating all shared data in to share point.

[jmak]

What do the other 303 students do who aren't assigned a Chromebook?

 

If you're managing devices that need to be available 100% of the time, I'd suggest around 10% of the deployed number. We also buy all of our devices with next day onsite repair contracts which means that the longest a loan machine should be out is one or two days.

[slugshead]

Snipe-IT is what you're looking for

[jthompson]

You could go up a notch from Google Sheets and use AppSheet, storing your loans data in Google Sheets still but with some database logic layered on top (kinda like Access, but web-based).

 

That's how we record our equipment loans, with the AppSheet app also making API calls to our actual inventory system (GLPI) to update records there automatically as required.

 

Neither AppSheet nor GLPI get enough love around here, imho!

[dapaulio]

Think I had completely misinterpreted/misread the thread. lol apologies

[jmak]

Think I had completely misinterpreted/misread the thread. lol apologies

FWIW your reply made sense to me [emoji16]

 

There was a lot in the OP - I just picked out a bit you hadn't covered

[slugshead]

Think I had completely misinterpreted/misread the thread. lol apologies

 

He posted the same query on either /r/sysadmin or /r/k12sysadmin (Can't remember which one I saw it on).

 

The formatting was easier to read

[brentonwhite]

lol, I'm sorry. I did share in sysadmin and I think I reformated it better there.

I am not able to post in k12 sub. even though they approved me. My posts get auto-removed

[slugshead]

haha don't worry, this is a more niche area and you'll certainly get more appropriate responses.

 

the k12sysadmin sub is toxic AF and the mods are using it as a way to pump traffic to their ebook/podcast.

[davinderkundi]

Focus on G-Admin for managing assignments since it has the most accurate data. Once that's updated, you can consider syncing it with AssistTiger.For extra Chromebooks, aim for about 10-15% of your student count, so around 40-60 extras should work.