References and case studies

The Technical University of Crete (TUC) is a public university, founded in 1977 in Crete, Greece and comprises five Engineering Schools. Currently, at TUC we have more than five thousand undergraduate and postgraduate students, hundreds of permanent and adjunct faculty members or laboratory staff members, and hundreds of administrative staff members. The campus is located northeast of Chania and covers an area of 3 km2, with about 30 buildings.

The Directorate of Telecommunications, Networking and Computing Infrastructure of TUC designs, implements and operates the main IT & Communication services of the University, as well as the necessary infrastructure.

The increasing number, the diversity and the geographical distribution of the ΙΤ assets and systems (PCs, monitors, printers, servers, storage, switches, routers, networking sockets, wireless Access Points, etc) under the directorate’s responsibility has suggested the adoption of a solution to manage them in a centralized manner. Furthermore, aiming to improve the helpdesk services provided to the University end-users, we needed a solution that could smoothly extend our existing ticketing system towards a more asset-based approach.

We examined several software solutions that could be interconnected to our existing systems (i.e., AD/LDAP, ticketing system, building and rooms data sources, personnel data sources).

A few months ago, openMAINT was recognised as a flexible and interoperable open-source application and was chosen to be customized for the unique needs of our University, mainly focusing on its “Space & Asset Inventory” feature. Particularly, new asset classes were included, supplementary relations were created, more JasperReports were added, dashboards were modified, and localization to the greek language was prepared. We used the openMAINT REST services to implement the interconnection to our existing systems and data sources.

The project is still under development, but is already being used in production to manage the assets of the Directorate of Telecommunications, Networking and Computing Infrastructure.