Gustav Brock
gustav at cactus.dk
Wed Dec 17 11:41:51 CST 2003
Hi Erwin If you really wish to push this to the limits, have a look at Novell ZenWorks (for Desktops): http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/ A different approach - but closer to your initial specs - is Nettalk from Tekk. Here's a demo: http://www.tekk.dk:8080/nettalk/ I should note that I'm affiliated to this as the company is managed and partly owned by my son in law. Even though, I have no practical experience with Nettalk, so I can't help you much. It's aimed as an inventory tool for large organisations (80+ workstations) and features no help desk, but "that could be easily added" whatever that means. /gustav > Date: 2003-12-17 16:27 > The thing is I'm having big plans for next year. > I wanna spend some time in writing a tool to perform a better job and to > bind my customers to me. > As you know or may not kown, I'm mainly specialized in IT services > (network management, tailor made apps (access), security) day-by-day IT > stuff for SME's up to 50 users. > Well thats mainly between 0 and 25 users. Mainly in companies where no > IT staff is present or just a guy take does it half-time. > I deliberate want a small quantity of clients to provide deep services. > I prefer 100 faithfull clients than 500 more-or-less clients. > So I believe I can improves the updatime of ther computerparc by dooing > more pre-active jobs instead of post-active. > I want to have a database at my premisses of all computers, servers, > printers etc of al my customers. Every problem is logged in my database > linked with the appropriate device. > This database can be consulted by me and the customer over the internet. > Problems can be reported this way to. A mini KB is present to solved > re-occuring issues and specifi stuff for a customer. > This way I have more arguments if they need to move over to a new OS, > computer printer etc. Further more I do no business in supplies. I Loose > some money on that. So If a user could login, he can click on his own > printer and order directly some supplies for it. > My supplier (Techdata) has an XML system which I can use to check stock > and order directly and let it deliver directly at the customer site > (without any intervention of my side). > To commercialy startup this application, I need to do a large scale deep > inveterisation of all equipment (software) at all client premisses. I > have remote access to all of them. > So if I could automise the inventarisation from here saying that the > client only needs to login once to start on every computer I can pick > up those files to start my database. > If this can be automised (scheduled every two weeks or so), I would spot > when users installed forbiddden software, etc. > I would have an exact idea of how many licenses of office are running > and urge my client to buy adequate licenses. > Or if a user changes his hardware (theft). > Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. > So the inventorisation of a pc should be automatic and without the user > can disable or ignore it. > Thats why...