Techucation - Lansweeper, A Great Inventory Tool

My name is John McMillen and I am the Chief Information Officer for Graves County Schools in Mayfield, Kentucky. It is my charge to build and maintain a state-of-the-art technological environment to support a world class education for our students and those who shape and support their education.

I also host of Music From the Front Porch on 91.3 WKMS in Murray, KY. The show airs every Saturday morning from 10 AM until 1 PM but I am only able to do every other weekend... so check in and listen to the stream at the above link.

I have a degree in Business Administration and Marketing from Murray State University.

johndmcmillen@gmail.com

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Mar
28th

Sun

Lansweeper, A Great Inventory Tool

Our district has struggled with computer inventory for years. We just never could get the right process in place for the actual inventory of fixed assets. I was determined to find a free or very inexpensive automation tool that would help us with our task.

We tried Spiceworks and loved it… absolutely loved it! However, every time we would hit about 1200 to 1300 devices our server would bog down and become so slow that we couldn’t use it. We had suggestions to place the inventory piece of Spiceworks at the building level but we no longer have servers in the buildings so that was not an options for us.

We then found Lansweeper. We first tried the free version and we were really happy with it. After looking at some of the features that the premium version offered and because we loved the tool so much, we decided to pay the $199 per year price.

For those of you familiar with inventory tools you know they all do a lot of the same things. Lansweeper does have some features in the premium version that were not in Spiceworks and vice verse but it really came down to the fact that Lansweeper never bogged down the server and yes, it is running on the very same server that Spiceworks was running on with no added hardware.

I have created a video below to kind of give an overview of Lansweeper. Now, this is my very first attempt at creating a video like this. I used Jing to capture the videos and I used a free 30-day trial of Camtasia to do some editing and render the video into a size that I hope is a fair balance between quality and size. I wanted the video to work for both the desktop and for smart phones. I went out and bought a $40 headset to record the audio. I created a screencast.com account to upload and share the videos.

Once again, this is my “getting my toes wet” attempt at screen capture/tutorial video production. I hope to provide more of this type of interactivity in the future here on Techucation.

For more information and to get the free download go to http://www.lansweeper.com.

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