Unofficial Spiceworks

Spiceworks not long ago started there Virtualization Buyers Club and it is growing stronger by the day, the virtualization buyers club is a lot like the backup buyers club it provides a great range off resources to help you decide what Virtualization solution is best for you.

The Spiceworks Community team have put together a huge amount of resources and sponsors together to help make your life easier and get that bit closer to being “Everything IT”. There are currently near 20 PDFs, 2 calculators, a zip and many web links to help provide YOU with all the information you need to help make a informed decision.

• Step 1 – Learn – If your just looking at getting more information on virtualization from companies like VMware, Microsoft, Sun, Citrix and even Oracle this is the place to start. There are great resources here from all the vendors as well as ones Spiceworks have made for you. Its a great place to start to look into virtualizing even if your a bit unsure about it. The buyers club will also slowly start to fill up with information about other peoples experiences with the different technologies. So jump on into the community and learn about the different types virtualization solutions available to you.

• Step 2 – Decide – So your ready to decide and using the resources in step 1 you have managed to work out virtualization is the way forward for your company? Good on you. Now comes the make or break bit, picking the solution that’s best for you. With 5 vendors and each of them having 3/4 solutions it can be a messy place to be, you could be looking at up to 20 different solutions. Checkout the Awesome Product Comparison Guide this is the first community powered or “crowd-sourced” comparison guide on the community with more planned. Martin9700 did a fantastic job kicking it off, but it doesn’t stop there more people will be adding to it over time and even you could contribute. Once you have check out the Comparison Guide Spiceworks have provided you with the contact details for all there virtualization sponsors. Pickup the phone, drop them a email, use the web forms. Fire your questions at them or just post your questions into the community.

• Step 3 – Buy – Don’t want to be flooded with LOADS of sales calls? Spiceworks broker the quote so you remain anonymous! Going to quotes can be the pain of the job, loads of calls to make then loads of people phoning you back never sure you gave them all the same information. Spiceworks are here to help, you can use their simple form to get quotes from VMware, Microsoft, Sun, Citrix and Oracle for their virtualization solutions. The form wont take more than 5 minutes to fill in.  Get your quotes now

What if I’m not looking to buy just yet?

What? Your not going to buy virtualization right now? Well that’s ok! The Spiceworks resources will stay up and around for as long as the community is there. You can pop over to the Virtualization Buyers Club any time you like to get the latest information. All the information from the Backup Buyers Club is still there waiting for people to read and use. Don’t feel pressured into buying now if you can’t. Just remember when the time comes it will be there ready waiting for you.

So what are you waiting for?

Jump on over to the Virtualization Buyers Club now!

Please note you have to be part of the Spiceworks Community to access some of the resources to sign up you will need Spiceworks, Download it here.

After talking to Craig M via PM for a bit, he asked:

Hope you don’t my my asking (and if you do you don’t have to answer)…do you actually make money off the two blogs that you run about Spiceworks?

My reply to this was along the lines off:

No problem…

The ads gain me around 50p a month… so no way NEAR, its almost pointless having them on there.

So nope… not a penny

So from this I took action and dropped the adverts. Well ok every now and then I may throw up a Spiceworks one or one for another of my sites.

Spiceworks-News is now held up out off my love for the peppers and the joy I get out of being able to get news up before Spiceworks can.

Just to make it clear though, unofficialspiceworks.com is not run or part of Spiceworks.com, its run independently by me (akp982) and just because Spiceworks-News has gone ad free does not mean Spiceworks will…

The ups and downs of working with social media my experiences with Spiceworks

First off… This isn’t really all Spiceworks related but just had the idea for a post along these lines and Spiceworks-News is about the only place I could put it. It is however all based on my experience with Spiceworks.

So everyone knows what social media is now days? And that big buzz word of “web 2.0” and companies like Spiceworks are starting to exploit it to market there products and IT conferences like Spiceworld. Places like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg and Ustream are regularly used.

So what do I think are the advantages and disadvantages of Social media and networking…

The ups (Advantages)

There are many pro’s to social media and well they do outweigh the downs.

A great example of this was at Spiceworld 2009 Austin, I (akp982) was about to receive a Spicies award when Justin Dorfman (from Frugal IT) had the idea of using Skype to allow me to give my acceptance speech. I ran around and got a microphone ready and he ran off to the Spiceworks Staff to hand him his laptop which got pushed onto stage. This was great, I was watching the live stream though Ustream and also talking live to the presenters. It was a very weird feeling I was in the UK and talking and watching people in the US. Without the Ustream chat to get me on skype with Justin and without skype for allowing us to make a “call” it would not have been possible. It was organised so quick the presenters were shocked to hear that I was ready to talk to them.

Social media mainly things like twitter can really help promote your products very quickly by telling lots of people instantly. When Spiceworks 4.1 was released it was mentioned by over 100 people on twitter and Spiceworks are expecting more people to spread 4.5 when it comes out. From this people will quickly write reviews to jump on the back off this and give their blog or website a boost in traffic and hope for some regular readers. Frugal IT is and example of a site that did well at this with there Spiceworld 2009 coverage (http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009) they were able to get multiple people to tweet, blog and just share their link. With this link spread all over the world, people would then visit the site pickup on the ads and information around the Spiceworld page and may then come back in the future. I know we (Spiceworks-News) jump on even the oddest of things. We often pickup on blog posts about or mentioning Spiceworks and re post the first paragraph in hope for a ping back. Posts like (Getting IT spicey at your church) got a ping backs out there and we may have got another 1/2 visitors (they all add up over time to now around 300 people looking at Spiceworks-News on a daily basis according to Google analytics… if only some of them posted comments).

Read More…

Its coming, its going to be big. Its Spiceworld London, it all kicks off in:

Spiceworks-News will be there!

Will you?

Lets make Spiceworks want to come back to London by making it a great event for everyone. Lets big it up on twitter lets get it up on google and spread it though the globe with facebook.

We can do this!

We can make Spiceworld London famous world wide.

Get your ticket and read more here

I know a bit tacky but hay… Got a better countdown we could use? Use the contact form to get in contact with us. I don’t have a great deal of Spare time so using something like above was quick and easy

Click here to checkout all our Spiceworld2009 posts.

Missed Spiceworld 2009? Why not checkout all off Spiceworks-New’s Spiceworld 2009 posts.

There are so many cool things going on, we tried to post about them, from the live streams to just funny tweets we got abit of everything.

Spiceworks-News is already setup ready to start posting about Spiceworld London (http://www.spiceworld2009.com/london/) want to help us out? Well be there but we want some extra tweeters and posters to try and make it bigger and better than Spiceworld Austin.

Some people on twitter said the virtual event was just as good as being there thanks to the tweets and chats. Lets do the same for London and make Spiceworks want to come back.

Our Spiceworld2009 posts

Checkout some of the feedback

“Not only were the sessions very informative and fun, I also enjoyed the opportinuty to meet so many amazing people. Coming to Spiceworld truly gave me a better understanding of how close our community is. Scott Abel’s welcome keynote gave me goosebumps and motivated me to want to be even more active.” merlinpr in the community

“Loved it! Great info, great food, great “peer interaction”. I loved getting to meet so many SpiceHeads in person. I have noticed that when I read posts now I do so in the voice of the person that wrote it. Definitely worth more than the price I paid to go. ” SCAdmin in the community

More feedback on the community here

3 off the Spiceworks staff have videos up on VARvid – “Video for Value Added Resellers (VARs), Small Business Specialists (SBSC) and other Microsoft Partners.”

• Scott Abel, Founder & CEO of Spiceworks

• Jay Hallberg, Co-Founder and VP Marketing at Spiceworks

and of course

• Tabrez Syed, Director of Products at Spiceworks

Just another great thing that came out of Spiceworld. Loads of new people have been introduced to Spiceworks and the friendly staff. VARvid or is read by LOADS of microsoft resellers and small business specialists as well as lots of Microsoft fans.

Below are the videos, checkout the read more links for the original posts or go to http://www.varvid.com/ to checkout other videos.

Read More…

AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today at the SpiceWorld 2009 conference, Spiceworks™, Inc. unveiled dozens of new free IT management applications and plug-ins that are now available to the more than 775,000 users of the Spiceworks IT Desktop software. Several of the new additions include Spiceworks Application Plug-in Contest winners, which were chosen by the Spiceworks user community of IT professionals.

Read more on Business Wire at http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20091023005019/en

It is late and I am finally at the hotel and heading off to bed. SpiceWorld is now officially over I guess. The after party at Highball went quite late. Great time. Just a handful of us lingering on. Only four of us at the bitter end.

Dont forget you can catch up with everything that happened thanks to Frugal IT over at http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009

Make sure you find out what other people thought and leave your feedback on the Spiceworks community http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/80206

Over the next few days more pictures and information about Spiceworld will appear and we will try to make sure we let you know.

Now the wait starts till Spiceworld London and Spiceworld 2010.