Unofficial Spiceworks

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.

Then that fateful day came – the day I stumbled across Spiceworks. I had purchased a new, larger monitor for my computer at home and decided “I have a new monitor, may as well find a new wallpaper as well!” So off to my favorite search engine I went and did a simple image search of “1680×1050” and after a few pages I saw one that I found intriguing. It was a simple picture with a black background and an orange, Super Man-looking diamond with this circular swoosh in the center. Underneath it said “I am IT.” “That’s awesome!” I thought, the IT geek side of me shining through. Then I said “Wait a minute….is that IT, as in Information Technology, or IT as in ‘I’m cocky and there’s no one better’?” Not really caring for the “there’s no one better than me” cocky option, I looked a bit closer and saw “Spiceworks” at the bottom of the image. “Ok, I have to see what this is all about”. A quick search later I thought I had struck gold. “Spiceworks does all of this AND it’s free?! I HAVE to look into this!” And there’s where the journey really began.

I installed Spiceworks on my own desktop at work and began to poke around it a bit. The setup was all too simple and I had things up and running in what seemed like a matter of minutes. After getting acclimated and configuring a test email account, I showed my boss. The short of it, we implemented Spiceworks to manage all of our Help Desk requests within a couple of weeks and haven’t looked back. That was July 2008. The ticketing system was just the tip of the iceberg. The reporting and inventory options have been just beautiful and we know we still haven’t scratched the surface of what Spiceworks can do for our organization. Now, here comes Spiceworks 5.0…

When I first saw the announcement of Spiceworks 5.0 and the new features that are being added, I needed a cup to catch all of the drool! I’ll touch on a couple and my brief thoughts:

• Being able to query Active Directory to “inventory” all of our users is just awesome and the fact that we can manage those accounts to some degree directly from the Spiceworks portal is even better. Combine that with the ability to assign multiple devices to each user and tracking and change management just got that much easier.
• Wait….You’re telling me I can monitor, backup and restore the configuration from my networking equipment? Just wow… Enough said.
• It’s getting faster with every release, and this one is no exception. The quicker I can do a task at hand, the quicker I can move on to the next. Love it.
• The ability to assign different access rights for the admin portal is great for us. We have another department that is using a separate Spiceworks install just for the Help Desk feature, so setting them to a Help Desk only role will be nice.
• The new purchasing features will help track our orders in a much more granular way than previously and moves us closer to a unified location for just about everything we do.

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve done enough of that already! Spiceworks has not only made my job easier, it has completely redefined how I approach it. Sure, the price tag is great (who would argue with this all being free), but what really makes Spiceworks so amazing is the community surrounding it and most importantly those that bust their humps every day to bring us this product. The Spiceworks team – all of them – is what really separates them from the rest. They take the time to listen to their users and help in every way that they can, and do it with a sense of gratitude towards their users. It is we who should be grateful, and I know I am! I would hate to think how we would be doing things now or how much money we would be wasting if we didn’t have Spiceworks in our arsenal.

So keep your eyes on Unofficial Spiceworks for more of these in the coming days and weeks!

Thank you Dean for starting this off with such a great write up.