Unofficial Spiceworks

A while ago (well almost 4 weeks ago) Spiceworks announced the ‘Who’s Got Your Back?’ competition

Got an IT pro in the Spiceworks Community who’s always helping you out? Or maybe one who’s helped you out in a pinch – and saved your IT day?

Tell us your story – what happened, who helped you from the Spiceworks Community – all the juicy details that made you go, “Whew – thanks for having my back!” after your IT issue was resolved. And, when you do, you and your helpful IT bud will get entered to win $1,000 USD toward a trip to SpiceWorld 2010.*

Don’t have a heroic tale to share that involves another person, but use CA ARCserve? Tell us how CA ARCserve has backed up, restored or helped you with your data – and you’ll be enter too! If your story is chosen, you and a SpiceHead of your choice will be able able to win $1,000 USD to meet up in Austin, Texas – at SpiceWorld 2010!*

At the moment their aren’t a lot of entries so your chance of winning is pretty high.

Make sure you check out the competition and enter today on the community. Who’s Got Your Back? Tell Us & Win a Trip to SpiceWorld(sponsored by CA ARCserve

Ted (Spiceworks) recently announced Spiceworks’ new and exciting in application advertising.

This is no normal advertisement. Heck, it is barely an advertisement; it’s like a mini application. InFlow is edutainment, better yet appucation (yes I just invented that word). InFlow is completely interactive. InFlow has information, community content, calculators and more – all built, well “in flow”. Yep, all this exists on the same page you have been working in within Spiceworks. You never have to leave or click through to anywhere. When done simply click the ‘X’ button and, wah-la, you are right back in your workflow.

Read more: Beta Launch: Spiceworks InFlow – Advertising and Information… well “in flow”

This new feature is very exciting as it will start to bring vendors new ways of promoting their products without distracting IT Pro’s. As the feature grows more interactive adverts as well as more detailed adverts will start to show. At the moment this new feature is only being used for Rackspace on the “Microsoft Exchange Health Widget” built into Spiceworks.

You will start to see the little showing up in other places over time. If you have a chance do checkout the information on this first interactive InFlow advert.

Make sure you read Ted’s news article on this exciting new feature and leave your feedback: Beta Launch: Spiceworks InFlow – Advertising and Information… well “in flow”.

I’ll admit before I start this I think is one of my most adventurous posts yet and has taken me a while to get all the information together. I’m also going to start by saying none of this is officially confirmed it’s all my work from information freely available on the partners community profiles.

The stats will go out of date quickly and things will change but here we go.

After seeing what I thought was a drop of activity from the partners I decided to dig into all there profiles and find out how active they are. Here’s some basic stats:

• Partners – From what I can see there are 79 registered partner profiles from 28 companies.
• Contributions – They have made a total off 745 contributions, remember a contribution is a single post on a single topic. There are people who have posted lots of times just in the same topic.
• Reviews – 13 reviews of which most are about there own products rather than products they have used or using.
• Best Answers’ – With a total of 78 best answers between them.
• Helpful Post’s – and a measly 48 helpful posts, normally people have more HP’s that BA’s because they are easier to get. To me this shows when they don’t know the answer they don’t try they leave it for someone else.
• How-to’s – 13 How-to’s which isn’t bad, they are all detailed and good ones.
• Plugins – 3 plugins, some of these were made by Spiceworks and then just released by the partner.

I was undecided if these stats were good then I saw the top 3 contributors:

• Arun Tejaswi from CA – 237 Contributions – 7 Reviews – 10 BA’s – 15 HP’s – 2 How-to’s
• Christopher Le Texier from Microsoft – 101 Contributions – 0 Reviews – 28 BA’s – 15 HP’s – 0 Hot-to’s
• Thomas Kearsley from Symantec – 72 Contributions – 1 Reviews – 19 BA’s – 7 HP’s – 0 Hot-to’s

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The winners of the Unitrends create a advert contest were recently announced by Nic “Winner of the Unitrends Ad Design contest”

Jenn (Unitrends) did a great job putting all the 153 adverts up on the competition website for people to vote on.

Ryan.Johnson was the official winner he will now get a Unitrends Swag bag and gift card.

But there was a shock…

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Last night Nic announced the release of the seventh Spiceworks 5.0 beta.

The seventh 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.

As always this build is full of cool new stuff as well as loads of bug fixes:

People View

The cool new people view feature has some cool new updates in which make it even easier to manage your IT:

• Welcome popup – There is a new popup when you first go into the people view in which explains what its about and how to get the most out of it. Of course SpiceRex is the keeper of this new feature and couldn’t wait to shout about it.
• Updated Search – The search included in Spiceworks will now also bring in the results from the people view. This makes it a lot easier to track down a user to help them fix their problems.
• Multiple devices to one person – If you have user’s in which have more than one device maybe a phone and laptop or even a custom device you can now link them all back to the user. This is all designed to help you get the most out of Spiceworks and make your day easier.
• Perform AD actions – Finally the people view is a true management system you can now reset passwords, unlock, enable and disable accounts directly from within the user interface.

Click a image to enlarge

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Yesterday Jay Hallberg and the “european team” came over to the UK for 360IT (The IT Infrastructure Event) to do a talk on “The Future of IT is Social: How Spiceworks is Revolutionizing the Way IT Works” in which was a very interesting talk about where Spiceworks is at the moment and where its going. As well as how Spiceworks is going to help shape the way IT managers work aiming to make their day easier.

The night out

Well… As always when SpiceHeads clash with the SpiceLords people get a little drunk and have a cracking great time… 360IT London was no different.

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Following in our series of Spiceworks employee interviews I decided to bring it a bit closer to “home” for this month’s by talking to Oliver who is the Regional Manager Sales & Marketing guy for the UK.

What sort of thing do you do for Spiceworks over here in the UK?

I’am the Regional Manager Sales & Marketing UK at Spiceworks. Focus is very much on Sales so I am talking to IT vendors here in the UK and showing them how to reach a great audience – the Spiceworks usership. Furthermore, I’m involved in event organization, campaign planning, product development and whatever has to be done.

Are you looking forward to the UK Boot Camps?

Absolutely! Boot Camps are great occasions to connect with whom is most important for us – our users! Besides that it’s always nice parties afterwards.

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I’m sure you will have all see the new IT Purchasing Management system in the Spiceworks 5.0 beta which is designed to allow you to start a purchasing workflow, create detailed reports for purchases and track your ticket costs for better billing. It appears that in my earlier reviews of 5.0 I have only skimmed over this exciting new feature so here is a fully fledged review on what it does and how it can help you.

When Spiceworks went out and looked at what IT pro’s were finding hard to manage one of the things that came out was that they are finding it hard to keep track of things they are buying either for internal user or for their clients if they are MSP’s. Some people did have a system for doing this but being able to link this into the helpdesk was going to be a great help.

I’m one of those who doesn’t track purchases so no promises this review will be the best, I’m sort of winging it, but it will give you the idea of the power behind this new exciting system.

Track it.

When Spiceworks 5.0 is install you can get stuck straight into managing your purchases, one of the easiest ways of adding an item to be purchased is by adding it to a ticket. You can also add items on the purchase’s page but having a ticket for each item will make your reporting more accurate.

The form is simple to fill in just enter a few simple details like, description, quantity, price, vendor, PO number and department.

Once the information is entered and saved you will get given the choice to research the best product / prices via the community, CDW or Comparing prices on PriceGrabber.com.

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