Unofficial Spiceworks

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.)

Once you click into a department you are presented with a view of all that departments user’s as well as a details view including information like:

• Name
• Email Address
• Contact Numbers
• Location
• Supervisor
• And more

Over time you will be able to add custom attributes to this section as well as user photo’s to help you work out who’s who when you have just got an urgent ticket in.

To get you started with this new system you can start to assign tickets (not devices) to the users.

The new people view is really exciting and hopefully with the introduction of new user roles (coming later in the beta) you “may” be able to set up “HR” users to allow them to edit and keep this information up-to-date for you allowing you to run off reports for “telephone lists” or “department lists”.

However at the moment with this beta all your users have to be entered in manually but by the last release all this information will be pre-populated via Active Directory. You will also be able update some contact information direct and disable and reset passwords.

No beta from Spiceworks would be the same without loads of other bug fixes and updates:

• Network Map
  • New “Network data” tab for this is just a placeholder at the moment for future releases
  • New “Port Information” tab for port information off managed switches
• Helpdesk
  • You can now create “Custom Attributes” for remote sites
  • Performance improvements for helpdesk views with over 100 tickets
• New Purchasing report
  • Ticket Costs, which shows labour and purchase costs for tickets
• Network Configuration
  • Juniper configuration identification updated so they are detected correctly
  • New support for “HP Procurve M” series devices
• User Roles – Helpdesk only
  • A new role has been added which allows helpdesk users to create and work tickets only
• Ruby Version Update
  • The Ruby version has been updated this is designed to improve stability without degrading performance.

We will of course keep you up-to-date with all the latest information about the people view and everything 5.0 beta as we get the news. For now though checkout the community group “Spiceworks 5.0 Features, News & Beta Testing Group”.