Unofficial Spiceworks

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

Virtualization

• Turn on and off VMware machines – As with the Hyper-V machines mentioned in the last review you can now also turn on and off VMware vSphere or ESXi hosts (4.0 or newer) machines from direct within Spiceworks.
• Updated environment summary – VM tab now included in the Environment Summary that allows you to view and access power controls for all VM’s scanned into inventory.

Inventory

• Data ribbon – Spiceworks have now added a data ribbon to the device’s, this allows you to quickly view basic device information as well as scan errors.
• Network Shares tab – There is also a new “network shares” tab for scanned devices in which allows you to see what shares are open on a machine and the permissions for it. This is designed to help you make sure you network is secure.

Purchasing

• Changes to Purchase page - new view filters (Open & All), columns have been rearranged, and other stylistic changes

Warranty Scanning

• You can now scan the warranty information for Lenovo computers.

Help Desk

• Central helpdesk checks remote sites at a regular interval for a connection. If the connection fails, an alert is generated with optional email
• Polling interval for remote sites is configurable and can be turned off completely

That’s all for now! We are still expecting Spiceworks 5.0 to be release the start (first two weeks) of October. Will be a great day when it’s finally release.

Links

• 5.0 Beta VII Build Now Available (5.0.56612)
• 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
• Beta 5
• Beta 6
• People View
• Additional Plugin APIs
• Purchasing