I have worked in technology since 2001. My first job was system administrator for a school district, and from there I went on to do a little bit of everything. Senior engineer at IBM, network administrator, systems administrator across healthcare, banking, tech, and education. I have seen how a lot of different industries run their technology, and I always came back to schools.
Today I am the technology director for two smaller districts. If you have worked in K-12 you already know what that means. You wear every hat. You are the help desk, the network team, the security team, the device manager, the person who fixes the printer, and the person who sits in the budget meeting trying to explain why any of it costs money. I do all of that, and I do it twice, because I am doing it for two districts at the same time.
Edventory started because I needed to make my own job survivable. I was managing the same systems twice, keeping track of the same kinds of devices twice, answering the same kinds of tickets twice. I wanted one place that could hold all of it and not fall over.
Before Edventory I tried everything. I ran Freshservice, then Freshdesk. I used Snipe-IT for assets. I used spreadsheets, like everyone does, because spreadsheets are always there when nothing else fits. None of it made me happy. Every tool did one slice of the job well and left the rest to me. Nothing had the full feature set that a school technology department actually needs, so I started building it.
The name is just a play on words. Education plus inventory. Edventory. It is not a clever origin story, it is exactly what the product is.
I am building this in the open and I use it every day in my own districts. Every feature in here exists because I needed it on a Tuesday afternoon with a line of tickets and a budget due. That is the whole reason this exists, and it is the lens I am going to write these posts through.