Unofficial Spiceworks

Mark Southall and his company has made a GREAT gadget for vista sidebar or windows 7.

My company’s helpdesk wanted a quick way to check the tickets that were open on the system, without needing to open up web pages. Having found nothing during our search for a gadget to do that, I wrote one to connect to our database.

Originally it was just intended for use within the company, as it was originally hard coded. However I have now made modifications to the gadget and it is available to the community to use.

Download: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/985

The community have started up a new feature called “Contributor of the Week”, this week it was Trivious, for posting 5 How-tos in one week!

I’m not going to repeat what the “Contributor of the Week” is every week but thought I would give an insight into what its about. I managed to digg up some information about this new feature which hasn’t been released.

The “Contributor of the Week” is not there to recognise people like me or Scott Alan Miller who week in week out get the top poster or top amount of BA’s its there to notice people like Trivious who spent a larger than normal amount of time on the community in one week writing up things in this case “how-to’s”.

Things that are set to be looked at include reviews, windows events comments and plugins (when/if someone released more than 2 in a week).

I would expect in the future weeks to see people like Yasaf Burshan who is doing a GREAT job and beating me to answers to be mentioned not people like Craig M or Scott Alan Miller. So show you can contribute well in areas like windows events or reviews and see your name up in “Spiceworks News”

Its to help recognise the people who put a lot of effect in to help them come back.

akp982

I just found this video it was posted 4 days ago and is really worth a watch…

Not all about Spiceworks, there is talk about Austin’s Taffic and even bike routes, and doesn’t sound like Jay likes the idea of his kids riding motorbikes…

So its now the 2nd or third morning I have woken up to find my twitter flooded with tweets about the funding Spiceworks recently got. Ones like

Spiceworks CEO on the Future of IT Jobs and His Company

Got me thinking Unoffiicial Spiceworks hasn’t done anything on our thoughts about the funding?

The funding has been talked about a lot recently from when it started on TechCrunch which lead it to be mentioned on twitter over 500 times as well as all the other smaller blogs then twitting about it.

Spiceworks have said they will be adding new staff to the current team which is at the moment 45 strong. The new team will be split over marketing and development.

The new marketing team are from what I have seen mentioned going to be looking for new fun and exciting ways to market Spiceworks.

The marketing team have always had a funky way of advertising like the IT Comedy videos the new team will have to find new and cool ways. They will also be working on getting more vendors and people to attend SpiceWorld’s but its the development team I’m most interested in.

I think the enlarged development team will start looking at two main things:

• Real time monitoring – We have already started to see this with the SQL monitor plugin, and just released the Device Uptime Plugin this will bring a new set of users into Spiceworks and start to compete on a better level with tools like nagios. In doing that there will have to be some major stability changes, everyone knows about how stable nagios is when started but Spiceworks does have a small reputation for being unstable at times.
• Making it more mobile – This is reinforced by gigaom.com and some Spiceworks staff in conversations about how the community will become more mobile with a simple version for mobile access and maybe the possibility to update topics via email… We have also seen a lot of rumours in the past about apps for blackberry and the iPhone so hopefully we will see these come true.

Once or probably during those are being made the Feature Request section is going to be hammered and new features pulled out, probably starting with ones like Merge tickets to break them into how the codebase and database works before diving in and building things like the much wanted Knowledge Base.

These are only my thoughts from conversations I have had with some team members, its Spiceworks, nothings confirmed. What they think is good at the time they will roll with… For all we know we could see version 5.0 be rebuilt from scratch.

Hmm… Im not the best at article writing really am I…

Don’t know what Spiceworks is?

Download it now and find out:

You can now monitor the uptime of your servers, workstation, switches and well everything in Spiceworks.

The Device Uptime plugin will display a graph of how many devices are in the Inventory group, and how many of those devices are online.  Online devices are displayed in blue, and offline devices are displayed in Red

This is great to see as it means Spiceworks is starting to store, even if it is only per start up of Spiceworks, historical information meaning soon we will be able to produce reports for management about server uptime, or just how much the SQL server has been used recently.

Get the plugin now

This version just fixes some bugs in the code:

• Network Map: disconnecting a node, then clicking undo causes it to turn orange – fixed
• Network Map: Unable to save a view after adding devices – fixed
• Network Map: possible to make the delete popup relative to the mouse – fixed
• Remote Collector: Network scans will not run if the Remote Collector link is clicked and the setup is not completed – fixed
• User Portal: "ticket is too old to be reopened" typo – fixed
• User Portal: Allows view ticket block to be removed, which renders the page useless – fixed
• Looking at a device in browse view, then switching to software view and selecting a package does not update the display – fixed
• Using Date strings in relative format (e.g. 7 days from now) then clicking calendar button causes date errors – fixed

This does still mean we are awaiting 4.6 which has some new features ear wigged but we don’t know what yet.

Download 4.5.46618 now

There are 4 designs on there way from Unofficial Spiceworks

Just need to test them a bit more,want to help?

PM me on the community

Don’t know what the HTML Ticket Notification are? They were brought in to Spiceworks in v4.1.39854 and basically look the same across all Spiceworks installs. Read more about the nonfictions

So using email templates i have used internally and one i robbed from Spiceworks I have designed some new ones for people to use.

We have the Spiceworks Support one robbed from there support system, a orange one to wake up your users, a cool blue that looks clean and professional and a black and yellow which is used at HPS Group for internal IT updates.

Keep your eye on our twitter for more info

I’ve been trying to make a new HTML ticket design well its robbed from Spiceworks Support but shh don’t tell them…

Sneak peak

This started AGES ago and promised myself ill put it back into action after my Moving to a Virtual Environment post, the template is nearly ready to release but want a couple of people to test it out first… And also to get some feedback.

If your willing to lend a hand drop me a PM on the community and ill provide you full details.

If you know some HTML/CSS it will be a plus because its doesn’t look the nicest in OWA 2007 but then again nor did the original from Spiceworks.

You wont break Spiceworks and its 100% roll back proof