Free IT desktop, helpdesk, and network management software

Posted on August 28, 2007 at 8:00 am

As an IT Professional, I’m constantly on the lookout for free desktop management, inventory management, network monitoring, and helpdesk/ticket management software. Usually, to get a complete software package for Windows with all the features mentioned above, you would have to buy something like Microsoft’s System Management Server or SMS, which is costly and mostly only used by large corporations.

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, open-source or cheaper third-party software is usually the solution. However, I just ran across a piece of software called Spiceworks IT Desktop that looks too good to be true! Spiceworks is a IT desktop and network management software that is completely free. The feature list is just incredible:

Inventory management for all of your company’s hardware and software assets automatically with detailed reporting capabilities
Software and hardware monitoring and troubleshooting info for all of the computers on your network
Complete Help Desk package for easy ticket and solution management. Users can create tickets, which can be prioritized, assigned, and escalated as needed.

So why is it free you might ask? Because the software is sponsored by technology companies who will run small ads on the side bar for their own products and services. The ads are unobtrusive and help pay for the creation of the software. Personally, I’m fine with a few ads if I can get a great piece of software like this for free! Also, if you really don’t like the ads, you can contact SpiceWorks and they can actually replace the ads with your company logo, etc if you pay some money.

The inventory management module of SpiceWorks is quite advanced. It has the ability to discover not only Windows computers, but Macs, Linux PC’s, servers, routers, printers, and anything else that has an IP address! It’ll also grab the technical data on each computer such as RAM, Processor, software installed, patches installed, services running on the machine, etc. You can also enter your own information such as purchase price, location of the PCs, licenses you have, etc.

Using the Help Desk software, you can keep track of problems, projects, or tickets easily. Once all computers and users are in the system, you can create tickets that are “attached” to either entity. The cool thing is that users can create tickets via email or through a web portal. Users can see the status of their tickets and will receive email notifications of responses. Detailed reports are included and you can easily search all tickets created in the system.

You can also use SpiceWorks for monitor your network for such critical issues as missing Microsoft security patches or when unauthorized software is installed. You can be notified via email when new users are created, when you exceed the number of licenses for a piece of software, if a computer’s anti-virus is out of date, if the hard disk space is low, if the ink or toner is low on a printer, or if a server goes offline!

Other really cool features of SpiceWorks include the ability to troubleshoot issues on your network such as seeing what is causing a machine to run slowly, the ability to remotely control another computer from within SpiceWorks, and the ablity to compare two machines and see what is different.

And finally (if that’s not already enough), you can colloborate with the other 120,00 IT Pros who have already started using this software by asking questions, providing solutions, getting tips, etc.

This is a crazy cool piece of software that I had to write about. There is no way any IT Network or Systems Administrator should pass up such a great and feature-rich piece of software. This is certainly going to make my desktop management life much easier! Check it out!