New IT Job, need suggestions

[DevMekha]

Hello community!

Let me give a brief background here. I have 5+ years of over the phone technical support experience and a brief stint working with a company as an IT Tech. In none of these jobs did I have to build the IT infrastructure from the ground up... which is the situation I have now.

The company I work for now has the makings of a very efficient and robust system but have not had any form of IT support... ever. So I am tasked with building the support system from the ground up. The one requirement is that I have to be able to support both PC and Mac systems as our design team uses exclusively Macs and everyone else is Windows based.

Things I've decided to start with.
1. Asset Tagging - This will allow me to get an inventory of what is here.
2. Uniformed PC Network Names. Right now we have things like "Tom-PC" and "HP Laptop" as network names. What I am trying to do is get them to be named using the department code (4 character abbreviation) and part of the Asset Tag number.
3. List of standardized Software - Trying to figure out what each machine should have on them as a standard. Will let me identify outlines and find out why those exist.
4. Updated Password policy. Let me rephrase -- Implement one.

I'm freaking myself out though. There is so much that is not here that I am used to working with and I don't even know where to go from there. Do any of you have experience building these systems from the ground up? My boss has no problem spending a bit of money to get these systems in place but I have to have direction.

I may have bitten off more then I can chew here but that doesn't mean I am going to not do it right.

Thank you for any help/suggestions.

 

[mudpuppet]

We use KACE from dell at my company for some management, organization, and deployments.

1. Most hardware we have (pc, monitor, printer) gets an asset tag. The SN and the tag number are put in to KACE and logged under the type of object it is, like computer or monitor. We can add information about it such as the vendor, make, model, the date it went live and the termination date. Great for record keeping and having things stay up to date (OH and who is using that equipment and where it is like cube etc).
2. Naming conventions aren't too hard. Lets say your company name is Tigers Unlimited and you're based in new york, go with something that includes the users extension or a cube number like TU-NYC-1234.
3. KACE can be used to set up builds, idk about macs, but for PC yes. Through it you can look up what machines have what installed on them as well as push out updates or schedule install software.
4. Are you asking for what sort of policy to have like when a password should expire? or you mean how to set it up?

It's the only real thing I can speak to myself as it's the only thing I really have any experience with and even then I didn't set it up. Hopefully its a starting point and if you get a quick google search going I'm sure you can find a number for a DELL rep to talk to and see what options they have available and how it might work with some of your systems.