Review: Easy Assets .NET

Easy Assets .NET 1.01, hosted version $30 per user per month
Easy Web Applications
http://easywebapps.com/

Asset management is one of those things that just about every business bigger than a one-man show should pay attention to. In my experience as the finance guy for a couple of medium businesses (nope, you don't know everything about my checkered work history), though, there's often no systematic asset management plan in small firms. Easy Assets .NET is an ASP .NET application that's designed to correct this by providing an easy way to track your fixed assets (fixed assets are basically things you can kick and curse at, like cars and computers) in your Web browser. Developer Eric Wise recently made the application available on an open source basis (current download here) so I downloaded a copy to have a look.

Though the source is all included in the download, you don't need it to try out the application. Just run the included database install script, copy over the Web application and hook it up to IIS, and you're good to go. I lost a few minutes because my SQL Server was in Windows-only authentication mode and Easy Assets .NET wants to use a SQL Server login, but other than that, I didn't hit any snags. After a login screen, a clean menu shows you the major areas you can manage: assets, company, contracts, locations, products, reports, issue log, administrator (for user management). There's also an alerts area that comes up immediately, warning you of things like open issue tickets, scheduled maintenance, and expiring service contracts. As you drill down into the individual areas, you'll end up at grids for most of the data management, coupled with forms for searching and for some of the more complex tables (like the assets themselves). The design is all quite clean, and you don't even need to read the included quick start guide if you've got a rudimentary grasp of the subject.

In general, the application seems to be quite well thought out. The database captures what I'd want to know about assets were I back in a Finance Manager job, but doesn't require a lot of extra make-work data entry. The issue tracking module is a nice addition, and the ability to report on which assets have generated the most issues is a key factor in deciding what needs to be replaced. Some other obvious reports, though, are missing from this iteration of the product - for example, getting a full list of all the assets in the system in some format suitable for printing isn't yet baked in.

There are some other areas where some managers will feel a gap. If your organization wants to extend the description of an asset with custom fields, for example, you won't find that here. In that case, you have two alternatives. The first is to download the open source version and make the modification yourself (and, hopefully, contribute it back to the community). The second is to contract with Easy Web Applications for customization to fit your needs. It will be interesting to see whether this hybrid open source/commercial approach is financially viable in the .NET world. In any case, this is a nice example of a .NET application that fills a business need at a reasonable price.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.