Unofficial Spiceworks

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.

Ok so that’s the boring intro bit done with now we can get into what the current top requests:

The current top 5

I was rather shocked when I found out that having a Knowledge base was the top wanted feature. Currently it is just over twice as “hot” as the next feature request. The MySQL or MSSQL feature request is not one I’m a fan off, hopefully the 4.5 update to Apache will bring a lot of speed improvements and personally there are lots of new features I would love to see and various bits and bobs fixed before Spiceworks possibly open a can off worms by using a database like MySQL or MSSQL in which can be a lot more complex to manage, back and setup.

Seeing the above made me think about what are the underdog requests in which I feel people want but aren’t Spicing up.

My Most Underrated Request

So I had a look around and here is what I think are the 5 most underrated requests:

These are my most underrated and well probably just the things I really want but I tried to be far and pick ones that the community may feel are underrated.

There are LOADS of feature requests do Spiceworks read them?
Do Spiceworks action them?

This is a question that seems to get asked a lot on the community and in meet up’s like SpiceWorld, I don’t have any official word to hand but from the  many web and phone conferences I have had with Spiceworks I have a rough idea, here it goes.

There are currently about 564 requests for changes, so Spiceworks have to pick the ones they think will help the SpiceHeads the most.

Well there are many factors Spiceworks consider.

The main thing Spiceworks seems to look for is the things that will make it bit more special and useable as well as get them the most users. Things like work needed for plugins from vendors will take priority, ones like the vPro power manager plugin required a lot of backend work to be able to shutdown and start up machines.

It then appears Spiceworks will try to hunt though the feature request section for at least 1 new feature to add to every major release. I’m not sure which conference the team mentioned this but one this year a team member stated they will always get one user submitted feature request in a major release (these being like the jump from 3.x to 4.x) but aim for more. This is something great to hear and this can be seen in the implemented page of feature requests one of the most recent and biggest feature request that has been implemented was the network map which has proven over time to be a great asset and one that really has brought new people in to the community.

Wasn’t really sure what to say so sorry that bits a mess, hope you get the idea? Maybe someone from Spiceworks will be able to drop me a PM or email and ill get the official word up

Checkout the feature request section here 

That it for now though, hope it wasn’t just the ramblings of a insane man

See you around the community

Please note: Spice Ratings were on the 24th December 2009 and can change daily.