Unofficial Spiceworks

Yesterday Nic announced the “Finalists in the SpiceRex ad contest”

Thank you again to everyone who took the time to create an entry! After serious deliberation by the selection committee, we have the finalists selected. Once our designers have had a chance to do some minor post-production work on the ads, we’ll run them live on sites that we advertise on. The ad that works the best in each category will be the winner.

The five finalists in the graphical ad category are:

• James3977
• Striker090871
• Don Whitehead
• EDB
• akp982

In the text ad category:

• Jaguar
• Bart894
• Lawrie5252
• EDB

Checkout the finalists and more info on the community

Following on from last months interview with Kris (Spiceworks), this month Unofficial Spiceworks cornered the first Spiceworks employee Tabrez Syed:

What moment made you feel the proudest to be part of Spiceworks?

Gosh! I’ve been fortunate to have many an occasion when I’m proud of what we (employees and users) have done together. For eg: It really makes my day when I see a thread in the community where every one (sometimes even a partner) pitches in with their opinion to help solve a problem.  If I had to pick one moment then it would be when I read an excerpt of an upcoming book on communities that profiles Spiceworks (http://gillin.com/blog/2010/05/the-power-of-b2b-communities/). The author says: “Spiceworks represents the best of what B2B communities can accomplish.”

To receive a praise like that is definitely a nice feeling

What feature are you most excited about in Spiceworks 5.0?

Spiceworks 5.0 is going to be our biggest and most exciting release to date. Earlier this year our CEO Scott posted (http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/85775) news about how we received funding to accelerate the rate at which we develop the product. Since the beginning of the year lots of great folks have joined our team. 5.0 represents the first major release of all the hard work they’ve put in.

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The latest build of Spiceworks 5.0 has been released “5.0 Beta III Build Now Available (5.0.54687)” this build is the first in which we see that start of the much-anticipated “People View” aimed to make people management easier.

The new people view will eventually allow you to:

• See user’s devices (to help you keep track of those ones that “go missing”)
• Sort out which users or departments cause you hassle
• Checkout all the info you already have on your users (via Active Directory) as well as do things like unlock accounts and reset passwords

When you first open the new people management area you are presented with a “departments overview” this allows you to browse each of your preset departments. (Click the images for a larger view.)

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If you have been testing the Spiceworks 5.0 beta or have come across the Spiceworks 5.0 community group you may have noticed the “Developer’s Notes” down the right hand side in which contain cool little insights into what the developers are working on at the moment.

Some of these are really cool like what looks to be added ability to add and remove columns from ticket views in a future version:

So you wanna add/remove columns from your ticket views, eh? *tinkers*

- Stephen (Spiceworks)

Of course none of these snippets mean what they are working on will make it to the final release, but hopefully well see some cool new stuff reading though them all.

You might enjoy even more horizontal screen real-estate with the upcoming UI changes.

- Jeff (Spiceworks)

Check them all out now on the community “Spiceworks 5.0 Features, News & Beta Testing”

Community member slatronica (Steve Latronica) runs a blog called Synergy (http://synergy-blog.com/) in which is a blog about technology, product reviews and releases, social media, web design, entrepreneurs, and more.

Recently slatronica took up an opportunity to talk with Community Manager Nic Tolstoshev in an exclusive interview about the culture at the office and how it makes for a productive and positive work environment.

Its well worth a read and will give you a bit of an insight into life in the Spiceworks offices.

• Interview with Spiceworks Community Manager Nic Tolstoshev – Part 1
• Interview with Spiceworks Community Manager Nic Tolstoshev – Part 2

The SpiceRex “Contest to create An Advert!” has been running for two weeks now and with only 6 days left its getting hot with some great designs coming though.

If you enter into the competition and win you could get:

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

The contest is already hot with some great entries like:

But just look at how awesome this one is from Striker090871 who took special care to change out some of the banners in a New York scene with Spiceworks ones as well as giving SpiceRex special powers.

Checkout his entry fully on the Spiceworks Community Here.

So what are you waiting for?

Checkout the rules and enter now!

Yesterday the Nic (Spiceworks) announced the second Spiceworks 5.0 beta was released:

The second build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try out. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

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In this build we see changes to various parts of the new features and a couple of updates to existing ones:

Purchasing:

• The purchasing page has been completely removed while they redesign the UI for it. You are able to view purchases on the ticket or Inventory or Device view.
• Purchasing changes are now added to the timeline so that you can see who did what created, updated a purchase, mark as purchased, deleted a purchase, etc
• Purchasing reports added: Unreceived, Recent, Unpurchased, Unapproved

Helpdesk:

• You can now customise which columns you want to display on the helpdesk views.
• Email notifications of helpdesk tickets are not fully functional between sites

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