Last year (or the year before) Spiceworks ran a campaign to send out eCards to over IT pros, these cards are still available for you to send this year.

Were not sure if Spiceworks are going to do another different campaign this year or just update the eCards only time will tell but for now you can help Spice the Christmas joy and Spiceworks by sending your fellow IT pros a eCard.

Send them out to all the people in IT or that just have an interest, making it look like you care and spreading Spiceworks.

Send a Santa IT eCard out today

There are off course many other eCard designs and two more about Christmas

Jump on over to Spiceworks.com and give your IT eCard out today

P.S. If your sending this to someone who doesn’t know about Spiceworks make sure you add in your referral code to gain points for anyone you manage to sign up.

We have heard from Spiceworks that a SQL Server monitoring plugin will be out within a week!

There were talks started back in September about on the community here but we didn’t believe it would happen.

We currently have no idea what it will look like but so fair it appears it will include information like

1. Graphs of the server performance over time, things like the transactions per second, IO reads/writes per second, number of active transactions.
2. The current metrics, so you can see close to real time what’s going on, from disk space to long running transactions.
3. Static information like database names, host name, ip, version.

Could this be something Spiceworks have partner with Microsoft with?

I’m definitely going to be trying it out here. Just hope it supports the three main versions of SQL being used not just 2008.

This plugin will be something special, alot of SQL monitoring tools are very expensive. This will definitely bring Spiceworks even closer to being “everything IT”

When we hear more well keep you up-to-date

Unofficial Spiceworks have dug though the release notes and done some quick one line notes on the key new functionality as well as some cool screenshots.

HTTPs for User portal

The User portal for logging tickets as checking progress on tickets now support HTTPS making the user portal more secure and useable by a wider range of companies requiring encryption for their helpdesk.

Read More…

The fourth build of the Spiceworks 4.5 beta is now available for you to try out. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

• 4.5 Testing Guidelines
• 4.5 Testing Plan

Screenshots coming soon

Read more and download on the community http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/82849

Wasn’t sure what to do for a post this week so had a look on the community and settled with the feature request section… Don’t fully know where this post will end up but I’m just going to start writing.

Their are currently 564 feature requests some of which are just plain crazy others are really good. The feature request section on the community is one of the more recently overhauled parts off the community going from a mess of different requests to a cleaner meaner section. The Spiceworks staff can now combine multiple requests as well as mark them as implemented or closed. This helps them find out what people want quicker.

Checkout the feature request section here

It is designed to allow SpiceHeads to get the product they want by giving new functionality and changes a spice rating. The higher the rating technically the more change the feature request has off being implemented. Every member of the community can spice up and down requests helping Spiceworks work out what things are wanted.

Read More…

Did you know Spiceworks was demoed last year well on September 10, 2008 on Hak5 talking about how its a great at network inventory.

In this episode of Hak5 Matt shows us how to map our networks with Spiceworks, an open source infrastructure mapping tool.

Checkout the video on Hak5.org

I was doing bits and bobs for the Spiceworks-News to Unofficial Spiceworks change over can came across SpiceworksComm on twitter.

It appears to be official and provides a great feed of popular Spiceworks community posts.

From the Spread-Spiceworks group to Spamming problems, all the popular posts are included.

I’m now following SpiceworksComm are you?

Spiceworks-News has grown, with new content ideas we have decided to change our name and branding to Unofficial Spiceworks.

There are many reasons for this including making it easier for people to work out what is Unofficial News and Official News.

We have also updated our Twitter account to reflect this we are now called UnofficialSpice this is because of the 15 character limit for usernames.

We hope with this new change Unofficial Spiceworks can become bigger, better and stronger.

Our new domain is http://www.unofficialspiceworks.com/ and all old links will automatically redirect.

If you have any comments or suggests feel free to use the contact us page or leave a comment.

The team at Spiceworks always work very hard to ensure SpiceHeads can the best best out of the vendors and help bring the information you want direct to you.

Spiceworks and RackSpace have been a partner of Spiceworks for a while and have now released a "Vendor Spotlight” which includes really useful information as well as special discounts.

Now SpiceHeads can get big company discounts on worry-free email hosting from Rackspace. Mix and match Exchange and IMAP/POP email to get the best price and performance for your organization.

RackSpace have already given a lot to the SpicHeads like the FREE Rackspace Sponsored Webinar: Facts and Fiction of Hosted Email they host.

Read more and checkout the discounts on the community http://community.spiceworks.com/group/show/240-email-servers/rackspace

Hopefully we will see more vendors joining in as much as RackSpace has to help make Spiceworks and the Community “Everything IT”

Well done Spiceworks for winning the Windows IT Pro 2009 Best Free or Open Source IT Tool.

"Spiceworks is arguably the best of a new breed of free, web-based services for IT pros that combine impressive feature sets with active, online communities of active IT pros." —Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro

Read more

It really goes to show how much hard work and pride they have put into Spiceworks. From great free the support to ensuring Spiceworks does everything IT pro’s want.

From being a far fetched idea to now becoming software people can’t live without.

Read more off the awards or checkout what Spiceworks is

Well done guys and see you at Spiceworld London