My start-up company, http://www.easywebapps.com is nearing the final release of our asset management software.  This project has been long in the works, starting with just myself working nights and weekends around my full time job, and then taking on a personal friend who is a developer and another friend who is a validation engineer to help polish things up.  The only things left to do are to finish up the user help documentation and build some preliminary reports (we're counting on our users to tell us what additional reports they need).

Company concept is pretty simple, we are going to have some hosted windows 2003 servers running the asset application (ASP .NET) and each customer will get their own slot on SQL Server 2000 database.  Since the application is hosted, the customer doesn't have to worry about set-up, maintenance, patches, upgrades, back-ups etc.  We're really treating the product more like a service than an application.  Our subscription fee includes unlimited email tech support and any new modules/upgrades we create over time are free.  Alot of companies charge you per module but I've always felt that's a scam since the cost of deploying our upgrades to the servers is almost nothing.  In fact, it's more code/hassle to lock people out than it is just to let them have the world.

For those who don't need a host (ie have a strong programming staff and good servers) we will be offering a source-included version that you can install and modify to suit your needs (my company will also modify it for you at a consulting rate).  This option probably won't be released until the end of the year.

The product currently has the following features:

• Asset Data Tracking - Serial number, location, responsible person, purchase information, etc (there are more than 30 fields you can tie to an asset)
• Parent/child relationships - Assign assets as children to other assets (Like tying a printer to a pc)
• Service Contract/Warranty information - If something goes wrong, know what coverage the asset currently has.
• Help Desk/Ticketing System - Create tickets for problems and assign them to maintenance staff.  Tracks all the way from problem to diagnosis to resolution and stores the man-hours spent on the problem.  The history of each asset's tickets is stored and viewable and cost analysis/reporting will be available.
• Scheduled Maintenance - Schedule both recurring and non-recurring maintenance items on an asset record.  (example for a pc “Every 2 months remind me to defrag“)
• Purchase Orders - The system allows input of purchase order information and auto-generates assets from the PO Line Items complete with purchase information.
• Granular Administration - Role based security allows administrators to grant and deny access to each section of the application per user.

We just updated the site to show our free trial which we will be starting early next month.  If anyone reading this works for a company that has 20+ employees and doesn't currently keep track of assets or have a good helpdesk tool feel free to contact me via the sales team link on the website and I can hook you up with a free trial and perhaps a “dot net junkies discount”!

For price, I like to compare our product to Intuit's Track-IT!  The enterprise version of it starts at $3500 and they have additional modules you can purchase.  You have to install and administrate it yourself, pay maintenance fees, buy licenses for each asset you want to put in the system, buy licenses for each user, have sql server or oracle as a backend, and install their little tracking script on all your workstations.  It is mostly geared towards IT hardware.

In contrast, our product is installed and administrated by us, no fees beyond the yearly subscription, unlimited disk space/asset records, unlimited users, no license required for sql server, nothing to install on your workstations (the one thing trackit does really well that we don't do is it will auto-inventory your pcs after you install the script, we can't do that over the web), and our system is flexible enough to input and categorize any assets, not just IT.  Our subscription after release will be $3,850 /yr (we have a discount for education/not for profit companies, ask me about it).  Anyone who signs up for the free trial before we go live will have the option of getting their first year subscription for $3,000.

So yeah, check us out, if you're feeling generous recommend it to people you know.  If not then wish me luck!  If your company is a reseller of software, I am currently in the process of getting some reseller agreements going and I'd be interested in hearing about it.