Unofficial Spiceworks

Tonight Spiceworks will be carrying out a community update, this month’s is full of great new features:

• Classification of Software Reviews – The first new feature is designed to allow SpiceHeads to categorize the software reviews by software type. This is aimed to help people find the right solution for them as well as related software packages they maybe interested in checking out.
• Mobile View – This has been a long awaited feature for some people, with more and more smart phone devices being used to checkout the community Spiceworks have added a mobile view. The community will automatically detect if you are using a mobile device and display a simplified view to allow you to read and reply to topics. This feature will be released as beta while they fine tune it to ensure it works on as many mobile devices as possible so if you have a problem let them know.
• New User Permissions – As the community is growing some people have spotted a increase in junk posts, scripts and how-to’s. After the release tonight Pimientos will be restricted to asking only 2 questions, and restricted from sharing how-tos, scripts, and reviews.
• Advanced Search Options – You will now be able to search the community based on date using the new advanced search options link.
• Unanswered Questions on What’s New in the Community sidebar – As well as the recent, popular and news tabs in the “What’s New in the Community” box in the sidebar of the community we will also have a unanswered questions one to help you quickly help your fellow IT pro’s.
• Improvements to Group Admin Weekly Update email – Some more information as been added to the group admin’s weekly update emails to help you manage your group better.
• Upload SpiceCorps meeting notes as attachments – You will now be able to upload your meeting notes as a document rather than coping and pasting.
• Speed up subscription & verification emails – The priority for subscription and verification emails has been raised so they go out before the digests. Finally this looks like it might get fixed, some people have been having this problem for a good few months now.
• And as always plenty of bug fixes.

The full official notes will be released onto the community news section soon.

The update will happen at 00:00 tonight for people in the UK (GMT) or 7:00pm CDT. Convert it into your time zone.

Update: The notes are out see them here

SpiceRex has finally made it to Cole1436 (Cole Lakes) in Montana. His stay in Montana will be followed by another visit to Spiceworks HQ when Cole takes up his new job as Software Support Engineer. After a flying visit to the Spiceworks HQ he will be off again in his little brown box to San Antonio with Slava.

Does make you wonder what customs think when they see a box labelled “Paper Dinosaur”

Checkout all the photos and comments on the community here. For all the latest SpiceRex news checkout the SpiceRex community group.

I don’t normally cover new staff starters at Spiceworks as to be honest there not normally interesting, but this one is different!

We see the move from SpiceHead to SpiceLord, Cole1436 (Cole Lakes) or as the IRC and a fair few people know him the monkey man. He will be taking up the post of Software Support Engineer which will hopefully provide quicker support, not sure it will end up being better support? Only time will tell I suppose.

To be able to take the job Cole is moving from Montana to Spiceworks HQ in Austin, which means the beloved SpiceRex is going to be back at HQ for some more beer before he takes his next trip off to San Antonio with Slava.

Congratulations monkey man, I’m sure you’ll have a great time at Spiceworks HQ. Wonder how long it will be before they have to ban you from the IRC though…

So recently you may have seen a stream of tweets along the lines off “Spiceworks Launches Cloud Partner Program” and wondering what its all about and when its all going to be ready?

This new partner program is designed to bring cloud service management into one place making it easier for the 1 million SpiceHeads to manage cloud services like Rackspace email. As more services have moved into the cloud more IT pro’s have found it harder to manage there wide range of networks:

“As my company adds more and more cloud services, switching between 10 different web-based portals to monitor and provision cloud resources is not an efficient approach to cloud management,” said Justin Davison, Systems Engineer, RJ Lee Group. “With Spiceworks, I can learn about new cloud services and then manage the ones I use in the same place I manage all my in-house IT assets.”

This new program was released at the GigaOm Structure conference by Scott Abel:

“Our new Reach partner program offers cloud vendors a simple and effective way to make their offerings instantly available to over 20 percent of SMB IT professionals worldwide,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “It’s a win for them and for small and medium businesses, which represent one of the fastest growing markets for cloud computing services.”

The program is designed to help Spiceworks accomplish their mission to simplify everything IT, to try and engage as many vendors as possible they have designed 3 levels of participation:

• Cloud Services Inventory and Monitoring – This is the basic level and gives account and service information to users ready to be monitored.
• Cloud Management Plug-ins – Stepping it up a level this allows vendors to have a plug-in which provides granular management and monitoring capabilities. Over 140 Spiceworks management plug-ins are currently available for both cloud services and on-premise technology, including the Storage Advisor sponsored by EMC and the Maintenance Manager sponsored by Intel.
• Cloud Service Distribution – The most involved level, this allows people to add, manage and monitor cloud services within the Spiceworks application. Giving SpiceHeads near complete control of there cloud services. Some companies have already taken this up like Rackspace’s Cloud Email Services and LogMeIn Rescue.

There are a few more vendors planned to get involved in version 5.0 and we can’t wait to see who these are. As always as soon as we get some information we will share it.

Checkout the Spiceworks Press Release for more information.

Last night Spiceworks released another update (4.7.52439) as per normal there are a few bug fixes and a couple of new features. Including:

• Helpdesk Aliases causing CC emails – We have previously mentioned that this was going to be fix and should help a lot of people with helpdesk email problems. (Note: anyone using this workaround should upgrade and turn off the Regex workaround)
• Exclude specific email addresses from the Help Desk auto reply and update notifications – This is aimed to help prevent emails looping between each other maybe between two helpdesk systems or postmaster bounce addresses.
• User Portal plugins – We can now start to make plugins for the User Portal, first off in this release you can now add widgets using iFrames but more things are being planned.
• IP Phones not filtered from backbone list in network map – fixed, not fully sure what thing one is about but its there
• Warranty: NULL ship_date prevents Inventory summary from rendering – Some devices did not have a ship_date provided by either Dell or HP and would cause the inventory view for that device to lock up.

The biggest new feature though is the new Security Center Widget in which can be added to a dashboard and give you a quick overview of your antivirus software status.

Using the widget you can very quickly see:

• Machines that have up to date antivirus
• Machines that have out of date antivirus
• Machines that have no antivirus
• Machines that have an unknown status
• And what antivirus is installed.

This is a great addition to Spiceworks allowing you to very quickly checkout what machines you need to update or check.

With version Spiceworks 5.0 being worked on at the moment its great to see that they still care about the current version and want to ensure as many people are happy with the product as possible.

Spiceworks last night announced the agenda for the SpiceWorld 2010 in Austin Texas, this year is set to be bigger and better than last year with some cool new ideas being tried out as well as the removal of the Spiceworks basic’s sessions.

The Spiceworks basics sessions have been taken out of the SpiceWorld and moved “Spiceworks Boot Camps” like the one in Austin as well as free online training sessions though webinars. This is so that the real event can be filled with more stuff that you want to see and hear things like new features in 5.0, to Virtualization talks from Spiceworks Partners.

They have kept in one of the great things from last year getting some of the SpiceHeads and “Community Rockstars” like Scott Alan Miller to take to the stage and present some topics like “Security Essentials for the SMB IT Network (on a Shoestring Budget!)”.

It looks like an action packed couple of days, you can checkout the full agenda on the Spiceworks website here.

Need help finding the budget? Checkout the topic need help getting approval/budget to go to SpiceWorld? on the Spiceworks community, lots of people shared ideas last year.

Don’t forget there are only 200 places and around half of them have already gone. So make sure you register before its too late!

Checkout our posts about SpiceWorld 2009 and of course Unofficial Spiceworks will be updating you as we get more as well as providing you all the gossip from the event well from the live stream at least.

So if you were at the Spiceworks 1 million party last night or watching it on the stream then you may have heard me big up the IRC Chat room (or the RRC as Jen put it) and seems a few people are confused about what it is.

IRC or Internet Relay Chat to give it its full name is a form off real time messaging like Live Messenger (MSN) or facebook chat but normally it is between a group of people with a common interest rather than two people.

There was a lot of interest in setting up some sort of chat system for the community members to chat about Spiceworks and have fun which after a good 4 months of nagging Spiceworks finally took the first steps into becoming an official chat system with the integration of a web based IRC client into the water cooler.

One thing I have to say though is “This chatroom is not monitored or moderated by Spiceworks.”

Why should I join in?

The chat room is great fun, we talk about a wide range of things from Spiceworks to moobs, yes, moobs. It is a place of some adult humour be warned if you enter.

We also have two regular Spiceworks staff on hand to join in the fun and help with those really quick problems, we try to keep larger problems in the community for future reference.

What’s going to happen to the IRC in the long run?

So for the moment the IRC is going to be staying as and where it is but if we can gain enough traffic to warrant bringing it into the community more there are plans to try and integrate it into the community more maybe like the facebook chat it would popup from the bottom via the toolbar. This all depends on how many people come to use it and if the Spiceworks staff feel like it is worth it.

Joining the IRC fun

You can use the web based IRC client in the water cooler here or use a IRC client like mIRC or ChatZilla and connect to the freenode servers on:

• Server: irc://chat.freenode.net/
• Channel: #spiceworks

The Spiceworks 1million user party last night looked like a great event, there were just over 350 people at the peak on the stream and some great interviews with the Spiceworks employee’s and SpiceHeads including Scott Alan Miller, Ben Harned, Andy Phelps, Lawrie Dalman and David Scammell.

5 people got “beamed in” (Jen’s name for it) using Skype which was a new experience for me and for Spiceworks, it worked really well though and was a great way of getting some SpiceHeads and even a couple of SpiceCorps involved from around the world.

We also managed to see what appears to be the first public sighting off the 6 foot SpiceRex model. Which for me and I believe a lot of people was a shock, you you also look closely at Lawrie’s webcam (above) you can see SpiceRex sitting on a tree covered in peppers behind him (it is also his current picture on the community). From a photo contest to having a 6ft model made up SpiceRex really has become a big hit with the community and Spiceworks employees, wonder what will be next? There was a sighting off a SpiceRex t-shirt which looks good.

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