Track-It comes in three flavors, with varying levels of sophistication: Standard, Professional and Enterprise.
The product is aimed primarily at helpdesk and asset management roles, although it also boasts a set of auditing features. We skipped a lot of helpdesk, purchasing, support and training features, but it was clear customers are unlikely to purchase this for just the auditing tools.
Installation was easy, including the MSDE database service that hosts the data locally, although you can use an external database. The technician client (the frontend GUI) is installed next – a web frontend is also provided.
Access to the client is controlled by username and password, and users can have strictly restricted rights among the various components. This is easy to set up.
Every action in the system is well documented, with helpful wizards and guides on how to accomplish common tasks.
The only problem we had was the idiosyncrasy of the interface itself, with individual MDI windows on top of a perpetually-maximized "organizer-style" window which made navigation unnecessarily complex. Better use of sidebars and panes would have made things a lot easier, although familiarity quickly overcame any real problems.
To conduct auditing, the inventory database needs to be seeded, which would be laborious by hand, but can be achieved more quickly by using remote audit tools. We would have liked better integration into Windows networks, but an executable can be created and pushed down to workstations which, when run, creates an XML file with a rundown of hardware, software, performance and user activity. The XML files can then be merged back into the inventory.
Periodic reauditing provides change controls, which can be done automatically using the audit tool or across a network if you have client software installed (and the relevant ports open).
Although there was no specific security audit provision or compliance reports, we liked the depth of information in the default reports – plenty of data on unknown software and unexpected changes. Custom reports are easy to build, too.
As a part of a much larger tool, this is a good product with plenty of basic capabilities for security specific requirements.
