Hey everyone,
I'm part of a small IT team of three, and we support about 45 staff and around 8000 guests. Currently, we're heavily using Office 365 and storing a lot of our information in individual Excel spreadsheets, along with a few other tools for different purposes. Here's a quick list of what we manage:
- Backups and scheduling (in Excel)
- Resource access control tracking (also mostly in Excel)
- Services utilizing SMTP accounts for notifications (Excel)
- Network diagrams (using Visio)
- Network Device IP tracking (Excel)
- Mapping for physical network cables (Excel)
- Mapping for physical power cables (Excel)
- Changelog management (Excel)
- Phone system IVR recordings/mapping (Excel and MP3)
- Monitoring contract renewals (Excel)
The issue is that keeping track of these numerous spreadsheets is getting overwhelming. We don't update them frequently, so it's hard to remember what changes have been made and when. We're also planning to automate certain aspects (like on/offboarding) in the future.
I'm curious to know what tools others use to keep track of similar kinds of information without juggling a chaotic number of Excel files. I'm looking for budget-friendly options that integrate well with Office 365.
Thanks in advance!
4 Answers
We primarily use Google Sheets and draw.io for most of the diagrams and tracking, alongside some Confluence for documentation. Previously, I also used SharePoint to manage our random spreadsheets and network diagrams, which really helped keep everything organized.
Honestly, Excel is a staple in every IT job I've had. No matter what tool you choose, someone will likely have to manually update it at some point. There’s no perfect solution, but at least you can streamline things.
For the stuff you listed, we usually only rely on Excel when exporting data from a monitoring system that handles most of those tasks for us. What monitoring tool are you currently using?
Have you considered a combination of SharePoint, Lists, and Power Platform? They can work really well together within the M365 suite, making it much easier to manage your documentation without losing track of multiple files.
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