overview & history

Do you do IT?

Welcome to i-doit, the documentation and CMDB solution for your IT.

overview

Whether for technical documentation of the operational environment, modeling of IT services or consolidation of ITSM information, i-doit provides the tools for the control of your IT landscape.

Having been created during a client project in 2004 and further developed since then, i-doit is a tool that provides support to IT departments and companies through a variety of functions thus providing functional relief to those responsible for the IT administration.

With over 2,000 installations (as of middle 2011), many companies today are familiar with the tool and are now using i-doit with different focuses. The areas of use includes:

- The technical operational documentation. This means that all information can be organised, stored and maintained in one place. This allows simple Helpdesk, Support and Planning functions, provides the basis for quality assurance and certification (such as BSI, ITIL, ISO) and supports in complying with organizational policies (compliance) or legal requirements.


- The modeling of IT services. Based on the technical documentation, in which the detail can be flexibly adjusted, i-doit allows services to be documented as a logical grouping of objects placed in relation to each other. This provides the basis for (ITIL) processes such as Change and Problem Management, helps to control and manage the SLA (Service Level Agreement) or the communication with users.


- Consolidation of ITSM information. Due to its interfaces with other ITSM applications, i-doit allows the entering of data only once in the ITSM environment and maintains one holistic view of the operational situation. Thus providing links to an already controlled help desk system for a consolidated view at a reduced level of data maintenance. 

- Basic Protection of IT Documentation. In the 0.9.9-6 version, i-doit provides the opportunity to import the BSI Basic Protection catalogue and assign the components to objects or object groups. From this, measures can be derived and evaluated in the implementation. With corresponding views and reports, this data can be analyzed.

To find out more about the advantages of i-doit, please click here.

history

i-doit was first conceptualized in 2004 and has developed continuously since then. Since the original approach of an IT documentation system, it is now an extensive ITSM solution. Requirements these days for technical documentation, service modeling and data consolidation has grown and can be measured by many products, but due to the cross-section functions, there are fewer ways in which to measure this.

From the beginning, we have developed transparently and released it as Open Source. So the users not only have the opportunity to gain an insight into the internals of the programming, but also make user specific changes to the source code or develop extensions to the basic product.

Our commitment to Open Source is shown also by the development of i-doit as a central data depot, which provides data to various third Open Source Tools or receives data.

A further core focus for the development of i-doit, is the strong dependence on consideration of the ITIL guidelines. An example of this development would be the modeling and mapping of IT services and its components and relationships.

i-doit is being developed by a young development team at synetics. The software has evolved with the team and we can look back on the major milestones during the development:

2004 – During a client project, development of i-doit started purely as a IT documentation solution. During the course of the year, version 0.8 was released.

2005-2006 – Development of diverse functions, Import, Export and many more. Further object were types added and the depth of detail of the attributes during this time increased. The source code was completely rewritten in many places.

2007 – First public release of version 0.9.0. Followed by bug-fixing, bug-fixing, bug-fixing!

2008-2009 – Version 0.9.0 further developed to version 0.9.8x.  Diverse, important functions were added, for example Nagios interfaces, LDAP synchronization with the user.

2009 – Once again, complete revision of the basic components. I-doit is coupled with a Best Practical Request Helper (Helpdesk, Ticket system).

2010 – Release of version 0.9.9. During the course of the year, implementation of new cable and patch management, virtualization system and clusters.

2011 – Development of a new operational system and mapping of complex IT services with the help of schematic CMDB-Explorer.

In 2009, we introduced a flexible software development method SCRUM. Following a short introduction phase, it was apparent that this provided a significant improvement in quality and productivity in development. Since inception of the software, we release updates several times a year so that further developments can quickly find their way to the user.

In the future, we want the further development of products to remain as one of our core objectives. Not only the improvement of existing functions, but also the number of new features expected in the future. i-doit is and remains a dynamic and evolving system. The theme of data integration is an underlying area for improvement and development.