Unofficial Spiceworks

Jen has just announced Spiceworks SpiceRex advert making contest

Geico has a gecko.
Pets.com has a sock puppet.
Aflac has a duck.
…and Spiceworks has SpiceRex – a friendly-yet-fierce orange T-Rex! Who we’re hoping you will help become as recognized and well loved as the famous mascots listed above! See below for how….

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The challenge is to build a advert in which features SpiceRex promoting Spiceworks

WHAT WILL I WIN?
Top 5 Finalists (in each category):

• A cool, limited edition SpiceRex t-shirt (commemorating 1 million users)

Grand Prize Winners (in each category):

• 1-foot custom created cut-out of SpiceRex (he’ll stand on your desk!)
• SpiceWorks Ultimate Swag Bag (which will include a SpiceRex t-shirt!)
• Bragging rights as creator of Spiceworks first ever crowd-sourced ad– to be run on a variety of IT websites

Checkout the full details of the contest, enter and checkout mine on the community “Contest: Create An Ad. Win a SpiceRex Tshirt!”

‘more than you might first think!’ by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252)

One of the Spiceworks features often undervalued or overlooked is the ‘Community’. For many MSPs, IT Service Providers generally and particularly small or one man (person) shops there can be a feeling of relative technical and social isolation. This feeling is also common for many IT Pros, even if they are in quite large businesses. There is commonly an attitude from the user base that the ‘IT folk are a breed of their own’ (rightly so too, in most cases).

The Spiceworks Community is a great group of like-minded IT Pros, all very friendly and encouraging each other’s efforts both in IT and elsewhere. There are often spirited debates and conversation in the community, both technical and social, but always good natured and in the best spirit. If the conversations ever get out of control or strays outside the community guidelines, Nicholas Tolstoshev (Nic (Spiceworks)), Spiceworks super-efficient community manager is there to get things back under control.

Sharing is another great benefit of the community. Answers, Reports, How-tos, Ratings and Reviews, Articles from other sources, methodologies, tips and techniques are shared freely by most community members for the benefit of all. If you have an issue or problem you are having trouble resolving or just getting your head around, the community is sufficiently broad and in many cases experienced enough that someone somewhere in the global community will have either the answer you are looking for or suggestions to get you on the trail of a solution very quickly.

For those of us who experience those feelings of isolation, having thousands of friends all round the world prepared and very willing to help is a wonderful thing and should not be undervalued.

Most Spiceheads have their own ways of navigating and using the community but one of the best places to get started is the Community page. From here you can catch up on the Featured Conversations, What’s New in the Community, Spiceworks News, Upcoming events, Top Contributors, Recent Reviews and more. Most of these sections link to their own pages revealing even more useful or interesting information.

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Yesterday SpiceHead Scott Alan Miller reached Pure Capsaicin the highest Spiceworks SpiceLevel, he is the second person to ever make it after akp982 earlier this year.

Well done Scott on a great achievement, it is well deserved you are a great asset to the community.

Scott managed to get there with a mixture of gaining points in the community:

As well as running 4 SpiceCorps throughout the US.

Congratulations again Scott, enjoy your new black SpiceLevel.

Checkout other peoples comments on the community Congratulations to Scott Alan Miller for reaching Pure Capsaicin!

The “SpiceKing” of everything MSP in Spiceworks Lawrie5252 has just created a nice post on the community about how the new features in 5.0 will be a great help for MSP’s:

I guess by now most of you are aware ‘Spiceworks 5.0 beta I‘ has been released for community testing. Wow isn’t it good?

I wanted to make a little feature for you about the changes in 5.0 beta targeted at MSPs and Service Providers generally.

Firstly and most outstanding of the new features would have to be the Multi-site Helpdesk feature. This is very specifically targeted at MSP although bigger…

Read the whole post on the community “Spiceworks 5.0 MSP accented features.”

Checkout his Lawries other posts on how MSP’s can get more out of Spiceworks here.

So as most people know the first Spiceworks 5.0 beta was released on Wednesday and seems to have already been a hit with SpiceHeads around the world. Not all the features planned for the final version have been released in this beta they will be slowly added in as the program moves along.

The SpiceLords have however pulled out another stunning version of Spiceworks and in this beta build (5.0.53561) we see:

• Multi-site Helpdesk – Using remote collectors you can now setup multiple helpdesks all feeding back to the one place. This is designed to help MSP’s get more out of Spiceworks and the helpdesk, allowing them to manage multiple clients from one location, securely. Each helpdesk portal and email notification can be tailored to each site and in the future each site will also be able to integrate into separate active directory domain.

• Purchasing – To help you manage all your IT purchases in one place 5.0 brings a new purchasing area to help you manage and track IT purchases against tickets. Adding this into Spiceworks will allow you to quickly charge out the right price for the right item to the right department as well as giving MSP’s a way of tracking sales. From the purchasing screen you can also click directly though to CDW or do a community search for the product you are looking for.

• LDAP Authentication via SSL – Keeping account information safe and private is often a key priority for SpiceHeads around the world, so to help IT pro’s use feel safer using Spiceworks you can now use SSL for LDAP Authentication.

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Yesterday Spiceworks announced the release of Spiceworks 5.0 beta 1.

Checkout the Spiceworks 5.0 group for more information.

Unofficial Spiceworks will be doing a full review of the beta(s) soon

As some of you may have already seen Spiceworks recently announced that they support the OpenStack Project:

Today Rackspace and NASA announced the OpenStack Project, an open-source cloud platform. Along with 25 other tech companies we announced our support for the project. You can get all of the details on the Open Stack website and follow developments at @openstack on twitter.

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This announcement comes shortly after releasing the Spiceworks Reach program which is aimed to bring companies like Rackspace into the SMB (Small Medium Business) market though the community.

The OpenStack announcement is designed to do the same sort of thing, SpiceHeads are not normally going to be running networks with the complexity of NASA or Rackspace but can still largely benefit from cloud technologies and solutions. As many will know the Spiceworks’ mission is to “simplify everything IT for the world’s SMBs” and managing IT in a hybrid cloud/premise world is increasingly part of that.

By participating in the OpenStack project the Spiceworks team are able to look into the future and start to think about new and exciting ways to manage cloud apps from Spiceworks as well as providing the management solution first. Last week co-founder and CTO Francis Sullivan and some developers went to the OpenStack Design Summit to get a sneak peak and start to learn about the product(s). They have already come up with some “interesting ideas” on how they can implement it.

With some great cloud based integration already in Spiceworks including Rackspace Hosted Email and Dell and HP warranty the development team have proven they can already quickly and effectively integrate with cloud solutions, the OpenStack project will only add to this and help bring large enterprise solutions to the small and medium businesses quicker, easier and cheaper.

Read Jay’s write up on the community for more information.

The Spiceworks 5.0 beta group has been updated, with information on the new features we are going to get.

5.0 delivers the next frontier of "everything IT" with features to help you manage your network, people & purchasing: Config Management. Newly Tuned Network Map. Microsoft Hyper-V Support. People View. Purchase & Cost Tracking. ….& more, letting you navigate your wild-frontier of a workday like the IT maverick you are!

Spiceworks 5.0 is set to be their biggest release yet with some huge new features for managing your network, the people and purchasing.

The major thing for a lot of people will be the speed, Spiceworks believe the start-up will be around 40% quicker and after that the pages will load 30% quicker. This is a major boost to help allow you to navigate it quicker and more effectively.

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