Unofficial Spiceworks

On Wednesday Nic announced the 5th beta release.

The fifth build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try. 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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So what’s really new in this beta?

As with anything that Spiceworks do they have exceeded the expectations for this beta with some great new features/bug fixes and updates.

People View

The people view is one of the major things being added in Spiceworks 5.0 and we are getting close to seeing a fully working version.

• New Data Ribbon to allow you to see the more important information about a person at a glance. This is a great addition and allows you to quickly navigate though your user’s and find the information you want fast. As you build up your people view this cool overview will quickly allow you to work out where the user is, who the supervisor is for when they annoy you and what machine they use.
• This build now allows you to write / sync your changes back to active directory. Allowing you to quickly and effectively manage all your user’s from one place. You can change simple bits of information like number, location and department at the moment but soon you will be able to reset passwords and enable and disable accounts.

• You can now upload pictures of “avatars” to user’s to work out who’s who quicker. Keeping track of your user’s can be a pain, but with this build your able to upload a picture to user as an avatar on the people view and soon maybe the inventory and helpdesk view so at a glance you know who you are dealing with.
• Bug: Importing from AD into People View fails if LDAP connection does not work – fixed
• You are not able to delete people from the people view at the moment but this is planned for a future build.
• One thing I didn’t like about the people view is the location of the edit button, it took me a couple of minutes to find it but once found its in a nice location but maybe need to be made more visible as I can see a lot of people missing it when they first look.

The people view is really coming along well and over time it will be a great way of managing your user and their desktops.

Purchasing

Another great addition to Spiceworks 5.0 is the purchasing area to help you manage what’s you are buying and who for. In this release you can:

• Add new purchases from both the purchases and inventory pages.
• You can now tab between the fields on the purchasing page, before it jumped all over the place, this build its nice and smooth process.
• At the moment you still can’t delete purchases this is set to be in a future build.

Remote Helpdesk

The remote helpdesk feature has been enhanced to allow you to manage the tickets better when the central helpdesk is down. When the remote site detects that the central server is down or unavailable it holds all the email tickets until the connection is re-established. This ensures that all your tickets are processed and not lost of only visible at the remote site.

Plugins

By default there is a new widget, “Ink and Toner” this allows you to quickly see your toner / ink levels for printers, setup warning threshold’s and create purchases straight from the widget when needed. This will be very useful for companies finding it hard to keep track of toner/ink levels on multiple printers in lots of locations.

That’s all for now

Links

• 5.0 Beta V Build Now Available (5.0.55563)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Unofficial Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• People View
• Additional Plugin APIs