Unofficial Spiceworks

The SpiceBlog is still alive!!!

Spiceworks seems to have woken up and realised that their blog could provide vital marketing…

With their recent reach of 65,000 IT service providers using Spiceworks they quickly blogged about it.

Strike up the Depeche Mode — Spiceworks is bringing Managed Services to the Masses.  Yesterday we announced that over 65,000 Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IT Service Providers (a distinction I’ll get into later) around the world are using Spiceworks to manage client networks.  That means that nearly 10% of the 700,000 IT pros that use Spiceworks are using it in some form to provide Managed Services to the world’s SMBs — simplifying IT for them and making money for the IT consultant.  How cool is that?

And it seems people are still finding it hard to believe Spiceworks is FREE

An Iraq War veteran who had just returned called me up asking if he could use our software to start an IT business in rural Indiana.  He loved our software but he was certain he would have to pay to use it in a commercial situation.  Nope. $0. Go ahead and get as many customers as you can.  He was ecstatic and so was I: someone just became an MSP who couldn’t have done so previously.

The community is a great place for vendors like IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and well any company to get feedback.

The water cooler area is no expectation to this Justin Davison has just posted a great article (well a rant) about “What I want from the vendors I deal with”

So a couple of conversations I have had recently and a flood of invitations to seminars and meetings have gotten me thinking about what I am looking for when dealing with vendors at seminars, in meetings, and even in the SpiceWorks community.

<rant>

Please don’t read me the marketing brochure, I am very good at reading and if I am actually interested in your product I already have reviewed your marketing materials in literature and on your website. I want the meat, I want to know how your product or service does what you claim and I want to know how it will fit in my organization. Be ready for technical questions, if I have taken the time to meet, attend, or interact with you in the forums it is because I want that technical knowledge.

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Do you think you have what it takes to be a SpiceCorps Host? Well if you do that is a good thing because it really isn’t that hard.  The fine folks over at Spiceworks give you some great resources, but you have to ask. There are also other ways to promote your event outside of the Spiceworks Community to attract IT Pros that have no idea what Spiceworks is.  Here are seven ways to get you started.

First things First: What is SpiceCorps?

Jen Slaski (Spiceworks marketing maven) has written the following: “SpiceCorps are local Spiceworks user groups aimed at connecting you with your Spiceworks-using IT neighbors! The goal of SpiceCorps is to bring local Spiceworks users together in-person so you can help each other use Spiceworks, swap ideas and resources & expand your local IT network.”

Second: Does your City already has a SpiceCorps group?

Here is a list of the official SpiceCorps Spiceworks User Groups (as of 7-26-09):

USA:

• Boston
• Denver
• Central Florida
• New York
• Upsate NY
• Houston
• Los Angeles

United Kingdom:

• London
• Manchester

Third: Make an official (That is If you don’t see you City):

Generate Local Interest: Get other local users involved by posting in your Location group and asking other members if they’d be interested in a local meet-up.

• Contact Spiceworks: Once at least 5 people have responded to your posting & expressed interest in attending let Myshell know via a PM (Private Message) so they can start the wheels in motion.
• Pick a Date & Time: Post a meeting date, time and location for your first meeting in your new SpiceCorps group. You can choose this on your own or solicit user-feedback.
• Choose a Venue/Location: When choosing a venue/location you’ll want to find a venue that ideally has adequate space for your members, wireless access, is easy to get to, and has sufficient parking. Company meeting rooms are often a good (and free!) location if you or one of your members can get access & permission!
• Let Spiceworks Help You Promote It: Contact Myshell once you’ve posted the date & time and we’ll help you let others in your area know about the event by creating ads and sending emails on your behalf.

Scott Alan Miller asking other members if they'd be interested in a local meet-up.

You may be wondering who is this MyShell?  Michelle (aka MyShell) is the Community Manager at Spiceworks and she will be your new best friend while setting up your first SpiceCorps event.  This is what you need to get from her:

• Spiceworks Swag (Shirts, Cup Holders, Pens, etc.)
• SpiceCorps Kick Off Meeting  90 Minute Agenda Guide (word document)
• Spiceworks Logos (Zip File)
• Feedback on any flyers, ads or icons that you or someone make.

Fourth: Design a flyer & Icon with the theme of your choice.

For our fliers, I choose the Buildings of Downtown LA because locals can identify with that landmark. For example if your from Las Vegas you might want to incorporate the famous vegas sign (picture).  What ever you choose to do keep it consistent so SpiceHeads don’t get confused.  For our icon I choose to modify the “L.A. Dodgers” logo. FYI I used Adobe Photoshop but you can use any image manipulation program like GIMP.

SpiceCorps LA Icon

SpiceCorps LA 300x250 Ad for community.spiceworks.com

Fifth: set up a landing page using some sort of social media platform.

When choosing a landing page for your event make sure it is free of cost, fast and easy to set up and reliable. This will allow you to centralize all of the info for your event and possibly reach people who don’t already know what Spiceworks is all about (we had two guys come out to our event that found about our Event via Twitter!) Here is a list of landing page ideas:

• Netvibes Universe
• Tumblr
• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com
• Facebook Page/Group
• Spiceworks Forums

I chose Netvibes because they offer so many great tools/widgets that let me set up a great landing page in the matter of minutes.  Once you have your landing page go to TinyURL and customize a URL (ie: http://tinyurl.com/spicecorps-la-info) that way you and everyone else doesn’t have to remember something like: http://www.social-media-hosting.com/foo/bar/meh/spice-corps-my-city/pebkac.htm?forward=true&sid=010001111100100010101101010&you-get=the-point?

Sixth: Get Social.

If you have a Twitter account great, pick a #HashTag so you can pin point who is talking about your event. If you don’t have a Twitter account, get one, reach as many IT pros as you can.  Choose a flickr tag so you can find photos of your event. Provide RSS feeds so SpiceHeads can have the content you generate delivered to them. I am sure by doing this you will find a SpiceHead who is heavy into Social Media just like I did. I was fortunate to find Paul Wirtz (aka Paul_Maxim, @mogrith) who helped me test out the Ustream.tv feed, came early to help set up and went over the agenda to see if anything was meeting.

Seventh: Show Time.

The morning of the event you must pray to the ‘IT Gods’ that your Exchange, SQL, DC’s do not fail because you have an event to host! After that you need to get to work. Here is a list of what needs to be done (assuming you’re at the venue):

• Test your Video Stream (ie Test 1, Test 2)
• “Event is Here!” signs. (Add your Phone Number just in SpiceHeads can’t find the Venue.)
• Wi-Fi SSID & Password
• Name Tags (I added Avatars so we could put Faces to the Handles)
• Sign in Sheet for MyShell (So she can give attendees their SpiceCorps Badge)
• Cold Water
• Check  AC/Fans (want to make sure everyone is comfortable)
• Trash Cans
• Digital Camera (for Flickr/TwitPic)

And that is that.  Let me know how your event goes.

Regards,

Justin Dorfman
http://fr.ugal.it | http://blog.justindorfman.com

Spiceworks-News has its first guest writer, Justin Dorfman (Jdorfman on the community)

You may have already seen him around he has provided me with information in the past as well as leaving a couple of comments.

He will shortly be writing a post about “How to Host a SpiceCorps Event”

I would personally like to welcome him along and thank him for providing Spiceworks-News with a great article.

Wanna’ get some of the limelight you deserve on SysAdmin Day? Send some of these free cheeky eCards & remind your boss & users that they’d miss you (and your clever sense of humor!) if you weren’t around!

…plus check out all the upcoming Spiceworks events below – all of which will help you get even more out of Spiceworks!

Jen just posted about the SpiceCorps Houston meeting.

Wow guys we had a fantastic turn out! 20 people made it to our first SpiceCorps meeting. I was not so sure the SAM question would be answered as we all were given Scott Alan Miller name-tags upon arrival, but the man himself soon arrived. By the way, SAM and Talon63 are definitely two different people!

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The official Spiceworks blog ( http://blog.spiceworks.com/ ) maybe still alive?

Tragedy Of The Commons and Online Communities was posted July 20, 2009 – 11:53 am

In 1968 Garrett Hardin proposed the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons in an article in the journal Science. The basic concept is as follows. Let’s imagine back to the early days of man where a group of cattle-herders lived in a village. They shared a common pasture to graze their cattle. However a conflict quickly emerged. Each individual herder is motivated to profit from the common area for the benefit of his own herd. He has little incentive to ensure there is pasture left for his neighbor’s herd. When every herder behaves in this way the pasture fails for every herder. However, if the herders worked together a healthy pasture could benefit all of them greatly.

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Tabrez and the Spiceworks team recently did a great write up on how what browser you use affects how fast Spiceworks runs. Basically they confirmed what everyone knew, Chrome is super fast and FF just rocks but IE lags WAY behind.

Spiceworks makes extensive use of Javascript to build a rich user interface within your browser. This means that the performance of the browser has quite a lot to do with the speed of the system. We decided to run a few tests and share the results of what we’ve seen with the various browsers.

So what does this mean for you?

If you have a look at the graph below it shows that if you are using Internet Explorer (IE) Spiceworks is around 2 times slower than using FF or Chrome.

The full timings:

Give it a try yourself

Read the rest here