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up vote 4 down vote favorite

My team is looking to build a rich inventory of servers at our enterprise. We are trying to consolidate several different excel documents into one database.

I found a great utility called AppGini (http://bigprof.com/appgini/) that can generate some pretty sweet material in short order. Our only problem is we might end up having 40 potential fields for each server...

Demo database here: http://bigprof.com/demo/employees_view.php

IE, it's a really wide spreadsheet, lots of columns. A lot of that data is not needed and would be annoying on a webpage (nobody wants to scroll left to right in a browser) The pages that AppGini generates can't give custom views.

For example; I might only want to see "Name", "Description", "Administrative Contact" but another person might need "Name", "Services", "Stack", "Ports" - I hope that makes sense. We all need to see something different.

What is the best way to go about this? Are there any similar programs to AppGini or utilities that I'm not familiar with that might be able to do this for me?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote

It sounds like you have two separate issues at play here. The first one is how and where to store the data. The second one is how to present it.

I suggest building a SQL database to store your data. That way you have full control over what is being stored, and where.

Once you have the data stored, you can use Microsoft Reporting Services to quickly build some reports based on templates. You can create as many reports as you like, hosting them locally and granting access to various users as required.

Heck, you could even just use Excel, and have "live" spreadsheets connecting to the database for their data, but that would not be web based. Reporting services can definitely deploy to a website.

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up vote 1 down vote accepted

I have chosen 2 applications to assist me. 1. AppGini and PHPMaker. Both are very affordable and worth checking out.

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Could you explain a bit how you are using these tools? –  Nick Chammas Nov 16 '11 at 14:43
    
I started out with AppGini... Check their site for a working demo. I used that to build my main database/tables/forms/etc. Because I wanted several custom views of the DB I used PHPMaker to build those. I attached it to the DB that I built w/ AppGini. (MySQL) –  AaronJAnderson Nov 16 '11 at 17:50

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