For a helpdesk application, Track-It 8 from Numara Software is unusual in that it’s very much aimed at the smaller company looking for a complete solution.

Despite this, it doesn’t try to do too much, concentrating on the delivery of core helpdesk and asset management features.

The latest Track-It 8 release is available in several formats, from an entry-level standard edition (from £295 ex Vat) able to support one technician and 25 assets, to the enterprise edition we looked at, which can accommodate five technicians and 100 assets.

The same base set of asset discovery, inventory and helpdesk tools come with each version with other optional modules also available to, for example, distribute software and add barcode scanning facilities.

Initial installation begins on a Windows 2003 server and is fairly painless. An SQL database is required, but a copy of SQL Server 2005 Express will be loaded if this isn’t already available. The same setup routine will also configure the optional web front end and the technician’s console, after which additional consoles can be downloaded and iinstalled on demand. The latest console has also been optimised to work better over low-bandwidth Wan links.

Once installed, the software can quickly be set to discover network users and physical assets on the network. Any device with an IP address can be added to the management database, including switches, routers and printers as well as PCs. However, for a more detailed inventory of PC hardware and software a custom agent needs to be deployed with another agent required to support remote control. Agents for Windows PCs and Apple Macs are provided and can be pushed out by the management server as required.

It can take a while to get to grips with the console which, for reasons best known to themselves, the developers have chosen to make resemble Microsoft Outlook in this release. By itself the new interface doesn’t appear to add much, but is a lot more customisable than in previous versions. Grid-like views are the order of the day, and these can be endlessly re-ordered and labelled.

You can also print the contents of any grid, and reporting is very well catered for with a copy of Crystal Reports XI included as standard. Predefined reports cover most common requirements and custom reports are built as required.

It’s all very impressive and you can more or less start using Track-It 8 straight away. However, a fair amount of configuration work will be required to get the most out of it. For example, work orders are used to drive and track helpdesk activity with email used as the principal communication channel. To this end most companies will want to customise the associated templates and rules to generate automatic replies and apply standard escalation procedures to suit their needs.

There was a lot we liked, including the dashboard homepage in the console and the newly added ability to locate and report on ‘missing’ assets. Skills-based routing of work orders is another key facility, plus you can now automatically apply service-level agreements (SLAs) to work orders. The documentation, however, didn’t impress us, especially when it came to getting started, which meant we had to spend a lot of time experimenting to find out exactly how things worked. The licence management module is pretty basic too, and a lack of IT Infrastructure Library framework (ITIL) verification could be an issue for some customers.