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Most of you have probably got or will be getting the latest newsletter from Spiceworks in which announces that Spiceworks 5.0 is set to be released in less than a week.
A lot of people are already excited about the new features they will be able to use and some have even ditched the wait and started using the release candidate in production.
Checkout more in the 5.0 Features News Beta Testing group.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a couple of projects which have now been released for your eyes…
These new “areas” can be access on the right hand side where it says pages and we will also be linking though to the appropriate areas in future blog posts. Both are still a bit of work in progress but are slowly getting there.
As some of you may have noticed SpiceRex recently attacked my car by attaching him self to my boot.
Recently I took this a step further and added the text “SpiceRex.co.uk” just under him to try to help explain what this orange T-Rex is about.
The reason for this is after driving around with him on the back for a while I often see people pointing it out to passengers while driving along and thought hay why not, if 1 or 2 people find Spiceworks by checking it out its worth it?
So go checkout SpiceRex.co.uk now 
If you have any comments leave them on this post or use the contact page.
For this month’s Spiceworks employee interview I have picked on Kenny Madden who is the director of business development.
What do you do at the "director of business development"?
I kinda made up the title myself because sales/inside sales as such a stigma attached to it. (Ideally I would be Chief Smarketing Officer) My role at Spiceworks is to essentially to bring new advertisers on board. In my 2 years so far , I have brought on Microsoft, SAP, CA Technologies & EMC to name a few. Quite proud of that
What is the most enjoyable part Of working for Spiceworks?
The people are great, I worked for the founders at a previous company in Austin. (A couple of the founders actually gave me my first job when I was fresh of the boat. Something I will not forget, I really needed a job back then) Also, I get to talk about sales and marketing all day long and be part of a mission to change the way IT products and services are advertised, marketed and sold. (I am a bit of a sales/marketing geek)
Last nights community update was a success with all the mentioned updates being rolled out including the brand new look to go inside with the Spiceworks 5.0 release happening soon (more on the Release Candidate in a bit)
This new layout is also designed to provide
Last night we also saw the release of the 5.0 release candidate:
To all the SpiceHeads who have helped test 5.0 and give feedback – thank you! Because of it, the Release Candidate build of Spiceworks 5.0 is now ready for final testing. Remember to still install this in a test environment and retest any issues that you’ve found in previous builds.
The 5.0 RC build is available here.
This version contains over 200 bug fixes and no new features. Which all means the final version is on it’s way soon. It’s still suggested you don’t use this version in production as it may still contain a serious bug but its stable enough to be classed as RC what’s the worst that could happen?
Tonight Spiceworks will be performing their regular community update to give us new functionality, bug fixes etc.
Tonight’s update will start at 8:00pm CDT where they will be trying a new rollout procedure that will decrease the downtime but if it doesn’t all go well it will be the normal 4 hour downtime. Fingers crossed for a short period
To find out what time the downtime will be where you are, use this link: http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2010&mo=10&d=8&h=1&mn=0
This update includes:
Well get up some screenshots + some other exciting news tomorrow morning.
As part of a new series of posts we will be asking SpiceHeads (Spicework’s users) how Spiceworks and Spiceworks 5.0 will change their professional life Dean M (Gonefishing), has done a fantastic job of getting this started.
I was asked recently to give my thoughts on how Spiceworks 5.0 will change my professional life. I feel in order to fully answer this question I first need to take a look back on how Spiceworks itself has changed the way I do things every day in general.
When I first started here three years ago, Help Desk requests were a mix between direct emails sent to individual members of the IT team and emails sent to the Help Desk address, which in turn was a custom mailbox that was access by each member of IT (at the time two techs and the manager). If we were assisting someone with a particular item, we would drag their message to our own folders within the Help Desk account and work from there. As you might imagine, this was a fairly cumbersome way to work and often resulted in an overlap of two technicians working on the same request, but it got us through.
Eventually we decided we needed a way to track things a bit better, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a Help Desk ticketing system. One member of our team had looked into various solutions, but they were all either too expensive to maintain or way too complex and required too much time from a group that was already stretched thin. Thus, we created a library in SharePoint to track requests. This just ended up being us working from the custom Help Desk mailbox as before, but now with the added step of copying and pasting each response into a separate system. It was cumbersome and added extra steps and time, but at least we had a little more tracking than before.
Last night the eighth Spiceworks 5.0 beta was release:
The eighth 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.
This build isn’t as fully packed as previous beta’s have been with most of the work being done of bug fixing to help ensure that when Spiceworks is release (according to Jay should be soon) everything is working and user’s can drive straight in without worry.
They have however managed to slide in a new first time user flow for the network backup configuration. This is designed to help user’s get started with the part of Spiceworks they want.
