inventry custom hardware

[Homer]

Evening! Has anybody gone down the route of using their own hardware for their inventry installations? Our machine is getting very much EOL now, from what I know it's been in since around 2017 and is becoming a bit troublesome (and slow)

 

I begrudge the £1600 price to replace it considering the machines aren't anything special and that I could custom something together with a half decent touch display for far less.

 

Am I off my nut, or is this a viable option? Hoping for some guidance.

 

Cheers

Edited April 27, 2025 by Homer

[synaesthesia]

At that cost I'd be looking at moving to something modern and get rid of Inventry completely, it's barely fit for purpose any more and their costs & support are amusingly bad. If you're not linking into Paxton or other door systems, SIgnInApp is a clear winner. If you are, Entrysign.

I don't know about Entrysign's costings but you could get a full new Signinapp setup for well under 1600 including the ipads, special mounts, MIS integration etc and a fraction of the annual running costs.

[Homer]

Yeah I'd be inclined to agree there, but the trust reprocured for 3yrs 😕 

[synaesthesia]

Inventry's support will have a paddy supporting hardware that isn't their own but they will still do it. If you can procure cheap enough touchscreens it shouldn't be an issue. It's a shame it has to run on Windows, otherwise there's a great Raspberry Pi project right there!

[Oaktech]

You'll be pretty much on your own...

 

I did it after a cleaner filled one of our screens with pink spray during Covid and InVentry wanted £1500 at the time to replace it. Initially I just had the HDD out and put it in another machine with a ELO 17" 4:3 touchscreen left over from an old catering system on it and their support didn't notice remotely. Unfortunately we had a lot of complaints that you had to poke the ELO really hard to get it to do stuff, so I bought a W11 compatible 'industrial' touchscreen PC from one of the Chinese B2B portals for £300 - they even customised the UEFI image with our school logo! 

 

I had an issue with a student with a duplicate admission number (thanks Bromcom)and whilst sorting that out they noticed the hardware had changed & threw their toys out of the pram. Since then InVentry have sent me an email with a link in it to download new software when it is released, they won't update it themselves and I have to fight with them and prove every time that it cannot be a hardware issue before they'll do any support.

 

Partially as a result of this as well as escalating costs, inflexible sales & support channels and the inability to sync 2 MIS into a single Inventry system we're moving to SignIn App in October this year.  

[DrCheese]

I wouldn't mind their own hardware, but it's bargain basement stuff now instead of the decent HP kit they had before.

I couldn't believe they were pushing out Windows 10 kit when we did a refresh two years ago - Doesn't even have the TPM/CPU to support upgrades either.

 

Inventry have turned into one of those companies that slapped a good product out years ago & then just... left development of it. Happens over and over again in Education & it takes a new company to sort it out. Cycle then tends to repeat...

 

 

Next renewal we will strongly look at Signin App.

[Homer]

35 minutes ago, Oaktech said:

You'll be pretty much on your own...

 

I did it after a cleaner filled one of our screens with pink spray during Covid and InVentry wanted £1500 at the time to replace it. Initially I just had the HDD out and put it in another machine with a ELO 17" 4:3 touchscreen left over from an old catering system on it and their support didn't notice remotely. Unfortunately we had a lot of complaints that you had to poke the ELO really hard to get it to do stuff, so I bought a W11 compatible 'industrial' touchscreen PC from one of the Chinese B2B portals for £300 - they even customised the UEFI image with our school logo! 

 

I had an issue with a student with a duplicate admission number (thanks Bromcom)and whilst sorting that out they noticed the hardware had changed & threw their toys out of the pram. Since then InVentry have sent me an email with a link in it to download new software when it is released, they won't update it themselves and I have to fight with them and prove every time that it cannot be a hardware issue before they'll do any support.

 

Partially as a result of this as well as escalating costs, inflexible sales & support channels and the inability to sync 2 MIS into a single Inventry system we're moving to SignIn App in October this year.  

Really helpful to know this, thank you! 

[RLR]

They tried supplying us with a new unit with a CPU that was end of life. Their kit is anciant and costs a fortune to replace. We're going to be looking at Sign In app as a replacement.

[DrCheese]

51 minutes ago, RLR said:

They tried supplying us with a new unit with a CPU that was end of life. Their kit is anciant and costs a fortune to replace. We're going to be looking at Sign In app as a replacement.

 

Yes, they've clearly cut corners and now supply what I consider "Aldi special" hardware rather than the business grade kit they used to supply.  Not future proofing them with TPM/Windows 11 CPUs clearly feels like an attempt to force schools to rebuy in future. Yes, they use the LTSC/IOT version of Windows 10 but... 

[synaesthesia]

They're ESS'ing it. Overcharging for old,nackered and bodged together systems and people are quite rightly taking flight as soon as they can. It still irked me that as recently as a couple of years ago it was standard practice for them to have plain text passwords stored unencrypted on those machines which all shared the same master passwords across any installation. 

[RLR]

9 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

They're ESS'ing it. Overcharging for old,nackered and bodged together systems and people are quite rightly taking flight as soon as they can. It still irked me that as recently as a couple of years ago it was standard practice for them to have plain text passwords stored unencrypted on those machines which all shared the same master passwords across any installation. 

Yep, had similar issue when i disabled TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on machines it broke Inventry. They are(?) still using obsolete TLS versions.

[DrBeaker]

With all respect ... Off your nut.

 

It was a fantastic product - over 5x years ago. Now it's clunky and unreliable.

Their hardware = their problem.

Your hardware = your problem. And they will MORE than happy to pass the buck to you/your IT team as soon as there is a SINGLE issue. 

We got told years ago - "you can install your own antivirus system on it". No dude, that's YOUR problem, it;s YOUR kit. That was years ago. It's gotten a lot worse now with them.

 

Go with someone else who has a modern system. Which is one of many reasons why we left.