Unofficial Spiceworks

Progress Bar as Spiceworks Starts Up

The first thing you will notice when you start up Spiceworks 4.6 is the new splash screen. It will give new users the chance to watch some videos on how Spiceworks can help them.

The dashboard

The dashboard has stayed almost unchanged… I say almost as its starting to get busier with more plugins being added by default.

The Intel power manager has now been added to the default installed plugins.

PM and Community Notifications on Status Bar

One of the nice new features is being able to check what’s going on in the community direct from Spiceworks.

At the moment you can see how many PM’s you have at the top off the screen which isn’t always that accurate. Spiceworks in 4.6 have brought this into the notification bar and made it more “live”.

Vertically Resize Tables: Helpdesk, Reports, Plugins & Software

You can now vertically resize the table views for the helpdesk, reports and well pretty much every table.

This is to allow you to see more or less information at a glance, some people will want to see every ticket and screen to the detailed information and others will want to see more of the detailed info and less tickets.

Click and drag the bottom of the table to resize to your desired size.

View and Kill Processes on Remote Computers

To help combat problems remotely you can now view and kill running processes on a remote machine.

This could be very useful for those lazy IT admins who have applications which keep freezing up.

Select a computer from your inventory and click on Running Processes in the Troubleshoot section.

See this help document for more details.

Search & Buy

One of Spiceworks biggest and best partners are CDW they have provided prizes, webinars and product help.

In 4.6 CDW and Spiceworks have teamed up to allow you to search for products and services from within Spiceworks and buy on the spot.

The CDW Search plugin is enabled by default, for users in North America.

If you do not see the CDW icon on your status bar, go to Settings->Manage Extensions and click Configure on the CDW plugin. Change Show Outside North America to On and click Save.

Its a great way off keeping Spiceworks free.

Virtualization Management

You can now see your ESX, ESXi and vSphere VMs in inventory, just like a physical device.

This is what could be the first steps in a lot bigger and better virtualization management at the moment you can see machine names, OS and the RAM and HDD space allocated.

Go to Settings->Network Scan, and edit your scan ranges to add in ESX login information.

Network Map Improvements

There are lots of new improvements to the network map including reports of it running a lot faster.

New Device Support

New devices are supported for the network map discovery. You can now map Cisco Wireless Access Points. Dell network equipment will display the service tag.

Device List

A list of devices is displayed on the right side of the Network Map. You can see device attributes at a glance using this list

Print Preview

Clicking on the print button on the Network Map gives you a preview of how your map will print.

Cloud Counter

Any device that has been collapsed will show a count of the hidden devices attached to it. Double-clicking on the cloud will expand it again and remove the counter.

Add HTML files to Plugins

Make your plugin code cleaner by separating out the HTML sections into separate files. There is documentation and a tutorial to show you how this is done.