Inventory

You know, I take a lot of things in this life for granted. How well my family gets along during the holidays, the health and intelligence of my children, the fact that somehow my wife puts up with me…

But what I don’t take for granted is inventory. I’m currently tasked with creating such a system here at the jobsite.

Now, when you think of inventory, you think of lists. But lists don’t cut it in Life 2.0. No, what we need here is an object-oriented, web-based solution that hopefully incorporates AJAX, bar codes, and fingerprint scanners.

Or, at the very least, something more than an Excel spreadsheet.

Last week I went on the hunt for an inventory system that didn’t resemble said spreadsheet. Now there are a few ‘huge’ ‘solutions’ out there, but buyer beware—I don’t want something to do Asset Tracking, I simply want a list of what I have. If that can be expanded beyond hardware (computers, printers, etc) to stuff like software licensing, all the better.

But the trick is, where is this software? Off to Google I go.

I found two final candidates that I plan on installing and playing with.

The first is simply called, you guessed it, Inventory. It looks good, however, and even has the ability to keep up with licenses, just like I whined about above.

One of the most important facets of this inventory process is making sure I don’t find a Windows-centric inventory system.

That is, until I saw Windows Inventory and hope (hope hope) that it can be modified enough to add Macintosh machines as well. While the splash screen (for instance) is great, it’s also extremely windows specific.

Meanwhile, the quest will continue and the world will spin on.

On a latter software note, I’ve downloaded Quicken again and may actually use it this time.

I’ve only tried using it…um…a half dozen times or so before. But seventh time’s a charm…right?

I hear in my mind all these words
I hear in my mind all this music