Unofficial Spiceworks

With over 400 votes, the contest was a close one. Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest and to all of the folks who voted. Without further ado, here are the winners:

Read the original post here

There are some great new features in 4.7 and also some bug fixes so make sure you update

• Spiceworks 4.7 Release Notes

• Spiceworks now supports Exchange 2007/2010

• See whether your Dell devices are still under warranty

• New: Rackspace Email Hosting Integration in Spiceworks

Download and Install Spiceworks 4.7.50667 Now

md5sum = 782faf3d594159576583b6dd73476913

The post that opened Spiceworks-News was this time last year, taking 2 weeks for Spiceworks to find it and to declare what a big hit it was.

Since then we have changed our name to Unofficial Spiceworks and we have gone from having a blue coloured theme to a Spiceworks Orange one.

So what have we ( well I ) done in the year?

• 150+ unique visitors a day
• ~50 returning visitors a day
• 18 Google subscribers
• 300+ Track able referrals + countless none track able
• 360+ posts (just under one a day)
• 30+ Categories
• 130+ comments
• 840+ tweets
• Made it into the Spiceworks monthly update email twice
• Got 120+ links back to us
• Got 3 guest posts by Justin Dorfman
• Was the inspiration for SpiceworksLounge.com the Hebrew Spiceworks site

With some outstanding and loved posts like

• How good can support for FREE software be?
• Ups and Downs of working in the social media / community world
• HTML Email Templates
• All the latest beta and sneak peak reviews and info
• The invention of SpiceRex who made it to America

As well as then creating Let Me Spiceworks Search That For You and working hard on the community to answer questions.

I know were not the biggest blog but its not bad?

So what’s to come?

Well my plan as with any website is to continue to grow. Some key things coming up will be:

• New logo and slogan, this has been in the works for a while. I will be shorty posting up more information about this and how you can get involved.
• A new theme? Maybe, Maybe not… not sure on that one.
• The closure off spread-spiceworks.org.uk, this was the inspiration for Unofficial Spiceworks but quickly found it copied too much off the official Spread Spiceworks area and recently ended up being a holding page with not a lot of info or visits. I’m in the process of deciding if I want to port the theme on to Unofficial Spiceworks. Either way in the coming months the site will just redirect to here.
• Better insider information, hopefully I can try and wiggle my way into Spiceworks HQ more this year to get some more information to you first.
• More guest posts, from doing things in the community to making plugin’s, what ever people want to talk about. If you want to guest post drop me a email via the the contact form or add a comment anything Spiceworks related.
• Work on my spealing, I know its really bad at times, I’m working on it…

And thank you

Too all the readers for continuing to read

It’s what makes it worth while.

And as always if you have any comments or suggestions for this site drop me a email via the contact form or add a comment

Birthday wishes from SpiceworksLounge.com

Thanks Yasaf and SpiceworksLounge.com for their Happy Birthday Post

Unofficial Spiceworks is celebrating its first  birthday today!  Launched just a year ago Unofficial Spiceworks quickly became the best source for Spiceworks community news. Andy is doing FANTASTIC job spreading the word by bringing us Spiceworks news and reviews from the underground

Read the whole post on SpiceworksLounge.com

Monitor CPU, memory, disk, and network performance on any Windows machine,

right from your dashboard!

So as you may have seen yesterday we managed to get a Screenshot of the new Performance Monitor and today, well very late last night, I got some more information on it.

As above you will be able to monitor CPU, memory, disk, and network performance on any machine running Windows.

What will I need to run this plugin?

At the moment the plugin has not been released, its due to be released at the same time as the 4.7, hopefully later today.

Once 4.7 and the plugin is released it will be as simple as clicking installing, going to your dashboard, added the widget and selecting the machine to monitor.

How does this plugin work?

• Select a Windows machine from the drop-down
• Adjust the performance thresholds to your liking (or stick with the defaults)
• Click Save and wait one minute for the first data point to appear
• Click on each of the performance indicators to see a larger graph
• Click "configure me" to adjust the thresholds or switch monitoring to another machine
• Click <machine name>’s processes to see all running processes on that device
• Click on the machine name at the top to see that device’s Inventory page
• Click on the description under each of the performance criteria to get a description of what is being measured

Additional Notes

• You can run multiple instances of the Performance Monitor to monitor more than one device at a time
• A scan runs on the device once a minute on the device being monitored.  You can see this scan on the Active Schedules screen
• If a threshold is exceeded then that performance indicator will turn red
• You can scroll back in time for each performance indicator on the larger graph

As soon as I spot 4.7 and or the plugin is released don’t worry ill blog it

So if your like me and not had the time to check out 4.7 or not had Dell hardware or Rackspace Email to check all the functionality here are some screenshots I managed to squeeze out of Spiceworks. Enjoy

And yes your eyes are right, that is a screenshot of the Performance monitor. I’m trying to hunt down some more information on it at the moment.

Unofficial Spiceworks has just heard that version 4.7 of Spiceworks is due to be released this week!

As you may have already seen we have already posted about the 4.7 early access which includes some great new features like:

• Being able to monitor and manage hosted email (see Spiceworks’ recent press release for more information)
• Track Dell warranty expiration dates.
• And exchange 2007 health monitor support.

We have also just heard that warranty tracking for other manufacturers is on its way and that we should start seeing the start of real time windows performance monitoring soon.

The full Spiceworks 4.7 Care Pack is on its way and as soon as I have a copy ill get some screenshots up

Want to try it out before it released checkout the 4.7 early access program.

I’m sorry about the delay in getting some 4.7 news to you, was trying to get some screenshots but I have no Dell hardware and don’t use Rackspace for email so their isn’t a lot for me to report on…

The new features in 4.7 include:

• Check the Dell Warranty Status – You can now quickly check the warranty status off Dell hardware from within you Spiceworks dashboard. More details available in the help document.
• Rackspace Email Hosting Integration – If you are using Rackspace for your email hosting they have now teamed up to make it easier for you to check account details. See this help document for more details.
• Exchange 2007 support – Spiceworks have created a script which allows you to push exchange 2007 health information direct into dashboard. More details on how to set this up are available in the help document.

If you do use Dell hardware or Rackspace cloud email if you could drop me a PM or Email with some screenshots that would be great

Its not the best quality but here is a video where Jay talked about Cloud-Services in the SMB and also Spiceworks.

View on the original site.

So when does Jay talk?

Well I think I got them all… but the video is worth a watch even if its not just for Jay.

The counter goes down on this video player for some reason… so the time is the time seen on the right of the process bar.

• Jay quickly talks about Spiceworks around 35:45
• Research and the data around 28:00
• The SMB perspective 21:00
• Spending in the SMB 12:52
• The knowledge of cloud in SMB 08:55

P.S. Doesn’t he look bored or half asleep most of the time?