Unofficial Spiceworks

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

IT Service Providers are in an interesting position, many of them/us use Spiceworks ‘In-house’ like everyone else, but also use Spiceworks to make managing their/our Clients IT systems and infrastructure easier and more effective too.

A number of aspects of Spiceworks seem very well targeted at the ‘In-house’ use of Spiceworks and not always as well applied to management of outside, ‘Client IT’. One thing we noticed shortly after starting to use Spiceworks is how flexible and configurable Spiceworks is. Use of features like Custom Attributes, Language Packs, Remote Collectors and Ticket Rules, along with a number of other features can make Spiceworks even more useful for MSPs, as they do for ‘In-house’ users.

This is the first in a series of articles for Unofficial Spiceworks discussing how one small MSPs in Australia, uses Spiceworks with a few minor additions and changes to make their MSP business more efficient while providing their clients better service.

‘Use Spiceworks to record IT Services consumed, on-sold and provided directly to clients’

This how-to: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/1357 , the associated Language Pack: http://community.spiceworks.com/language_pack/370-msp-pack and 5 accompanying reports deal directly with the methodology used to make this happen.

‘Language Pack’ you say?.. Yes, Language Pack. One of the main things that changes to make this methodology more intuitive and rational is changing the terms and labels in the IT Services section of Spiceworks to better reflect the business of consuming, on-selling and supplying IT Services. Some fields have been added to further emphasise the difference in the three classes of IT Service, one to record the Customer, one for what class of IT Service and one more for service or agreement status.

All the existing Spiceworks IT Services functions can then easily be used for all three classes of Service. You can use ‘Related to’ to link services to tickets in the Helpdesk, you can set monitors to alert when any of your services are coming up for renewal, regardless if they are services you consume in-house, services you on-sell to clients provided by a third party Service Providers or services you provide directly to your clients.

This image shows the Edit details of an IT Service, with the additional Custom Attribute fields in play, in this case it is a service provided directly to a client by the MSP and the custom fields are adjusted accordingly.

Some more of the standard features of the IT Services section of Spiceworks include adding Notes and Documents to IT Services, we even attach a copy of the Services Agreement for the services we sell/supply to clients directly and also copies of the Agreements where we are on-selling service provided by a 3^rd party Service Provider. We also attach copies of the SLAs and contracts for services provided and consumed by us In-house.

This method of using Spiceworks not only provides very useful additional functionality for MSPs, but very well demonstrates the flexibility and versatility of Spiceworks itself.

For more details see the how-to: Use Spiceworks to record IT Services consumed, on-sold and provided directly to clients and follow the links from there to the MSP Pack Language Pack and the five sample reports. For more details about how MSPs can and are using Spiceworks, have a look at the Spiceworks MSP Guide.

Also watch out for the next article in the series!

This is a Guest Post by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) of Lawrie Dalman Consulting from Australia.