I just installed it yesterday to play around with it and thus far, I still like Open-AudIT better for my purposes.
It's definitely full of cool ideas and has a good framework in place, but the auditing portion, at least, isn't quite as good. I heard one guy describe the system as a "Jack of all Trades, Master of None" and I think that's pretty accurate. It attempts to squeeze Inventory, Monitoring, Alerting, Helpdesk ticketing, and even an online IT community all in one.
The ruby app installs itself on your local machine and runs as a webapp on
http://localhost:9675. It keeps running as a service and performs scans from your machine as well. I'm not sure if it's intended to live on a dedicated scanning box elsewhere (not your desktop). You log into the app with a user/pass, which also logs you into the discussion groups.
I've really only played with the inventory portion so far, and couldn't understand why the scan didn't go as well as Open-AudIT. It would seem to query via WMI just the same, yet it missed some machines and others came back as "unknown". These were boxes Open-AudIT had caught just fine the same day, so I know they were turned on/WMI/DCOM/whatever accessible. Can't imagine why. The reporting displays arent as useful either and it lacks some cool things we have here such as CD-KEYS (my fav).
Still some things are kindof pretty and the ticket system might be ok, I need to play with it more. The community forum sports active developer participation, listening to probs/feature requests, so there's the potential for it to improve more in the future.
Oh, it's also free because it integrates a non-obtrusive vertical ad banner along the right side.
Anyway, I'll keep playing with it, but won't be getting rid of Open-AudIT anytime soon.
--Brandon