RAIV is a new project and young project. Currently in version 1.0.

What is RAIV?

RAIV is a flexible tool for inventory management and monitoring. It is a web-based application for tracking inventory and any information associated with that inventory. This includes dynamic information that is always changing and updates frequently.

Some of the main features are:

• Inventory - The inventory system is built with flexibiliy in mind. The goal is system flexible enough to track whatever the scenario demands. For example, one system should be able to track racks and servers for one group while tracking fruits and veggies at Mom & Pop's local grocery store.
• Rackview - Rackview provides a graphical representation of the inventory. The graphical model is scalable, so the user can view a single rack, an entire floor of racks, or even multiple locations in different geographical regions. Again, flexibility is the goal as different scenarios require different inventory layouts.
• Changelog - A changelog is critical when you must find out when and where something went wrong. RAIV's changelog provides a place for users to store messages about when and what they changed.
• Tagging - Inventory can always be broken up into useful sub-categories. The tagging feature provides this option. Users can tag any item with a meaningful category. These categories can be extremely useful for search queries and browsing.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - Often inventory has strong ties to different customers and contacts. A CRM provides a means for tracking people associated to the inventory. For example, if a server goes down, you immediately need to know the correct people to contact. The CRM provides immediate and organized access to this information.
• Other features include role-based access control, search and query, import/export functionality, and customizable look & feel using the Smarty templating system.

RAIV is open source

An open source license (GNU GPL) means that RAIV is freely distributed and supported by its community. Community contributions are the air in RAIV's lungs. So if you enjoy RAIV, please get involved! There are plenty of ways to get involved and there are always tasks for all experience levels.

Modules are your friend

One of the biggest goals of RAIV is to be as flexible as possible to different use scenarios. A modular system is an important step in reaching this goal. A modular system means that different modules can be easily plugged into RAIV, providing the functionality to suit your needs.

Visit the contributed modules repository for a list of RAIV modules.

Can't find a module with what you are looking for? If you would like write the module code, then RAIV's extensibility should make it easy for you to create your own module. If writing a module seems out of your reach, then please share your idea with the RAIV community and maybe someone will help you create the functionality you are looking for.

History

The idea for RAIV was born out of the ever-growing OSU Open Source Lab data centers. A large amount of hosting requests, a data center exploding in size and inventory, and a frequently changing student employee staff demands proper organization. A good inventory information system means less downtime, a lower learning curve for new employees, and numerous other benefits. Many organizations, including the OSL, have some sort of temporary solution in place, but nothing that will scale well, be robust, and supported.

Corey Shields and Kees Cook began toying with a solution to this problem with a merging of the OSL's temporary Ruby On Rails CRUD app and the OSDL's Rackview application. Later the idea was proposed as an OSL community project and so RAIV was born.