Unofficial Spiceworks

So the Spiceworks 5.1 third beta was released 3 days ago and had around 25 changes and additions so following on from our first review here is our quick overview review of the latest and greatest beta.

One of the first things you will notice when you install the new beta is the new dashboard widgets bar to let you know about all the cool new preinstalled widgets you can add to any of your dashboards. These new widgets include:

• Google Apps – Manage your Google Apps services from your Spiceworks Dashboard
• UPS Supervisor -Easily dig into the details about power events and redundancy hardware on your network
• EMC Storage Advisor – Visualize your storage capacity needs over time
• Warranty Center – View workstation and server warranty statuses at a glance.
• Ink & Toner Center – Review all your printer ink levels at once

Merge tickets

One of the next major things you will notice is the ability to Merge duplicate tickets into a single ticket this has been a long awaited feature for some users and has taken Spiceworks a while to build it so that they build it right! Merging tickets can be a dangerous thing in regards to how the data is migrated and what to do with update etc… After lots of planning and talks with SpiceHeads the team finally came up with a way to do it and now within 5.1 you can merge tickets into one.

Merging tickets brings across all the needed information, the creator, all comments, related assets, purchases, and CC’d users are added to the new “master ticket”. Duplicate ticket attributes should not overwrite the master ticket’s attributes unless the duplicate ticket has higher priority, an earlier due date, or the master ticket is missing certain attributes.

Bug Fixes

Some minor bug fixes were also rolled out in this release:

• Timeline on manual devices in inventory errors out – fixed
• Text wrapping around to second line of cell when exporting report to PDF – fixed
• Network Utilization Graph – Graph not displaying for all WMI devices – fixed
• Connected to Port should show interface name and not just a number
• Create new scan error for devices that support config backup but have no associated accounts
• Support for Alcatel/Lucent Omniswitch
• Create auth error when no config backup accounts specified for supported device
• Add reporting columns for connected switch and port
• [Network Config Backup] – SSH scan error not being generated for Dell PowerConnects – fixed
• Improve the first inventory scan experience
• Proxy App Notifications through the Community
• Float values in reports displaying as currency – fixed
• Info message on the dashboard that new widgets are available
• UPS: Device cannot be attached to UPS that is already attached to a person – fixed
• Create UPS Connection for USB Attached UPS automatically
• Network devices that are backup/restore capable should assist the user instead of messaging them
• Combine multiple devices fixed from scan error alerts into single scan entry
• Helpdesk: Attachments in replies to notifications fail to attach in the next set of notifications – fixed
• Helpdesk: Only the first attachment is received in notification when multiple attachments are sent – fixed
• HTML Email Template: No Message on Ticket Closed – fixed
• Items under “Related To” no longer left-justified – fixed
• Exchange 2007/2010: Notifications with attachments included fail to send – fixed

Checkout http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/132609 for all the info on the third 5.1 beta

Some of you may have seen that at the recent SpiceRex Party the Spiceworks guys have had a nice new mascot costume made up. It’s great to see that SpiceRex has really become such a huge part of Spiceworks that they have created a costume of him.

The cardboard cut out is still slowly making its way around the world meeting the different SpiceHeads.

Checkout some of the other pictures from the party on the community here.

Yesterday was the first SpiceCorps Nottingham meeting which was a great success there were around 9 SpiceHeads who turned up to talk about various bits of Spiceworks from the new 5.1 beta to getting more out of Spiceworks and even how we ended up in IT.

SpiceCorps are a great way to get to meet people in your local area and we found out how much fun they can be with a pepper costume when we popped down to a Goth pub after.

You can checkout all the photos here.

Thanks stefuk for a great event. It was a good afternoon and was great to meet some new faces and say hi to people I had met before, and yes I did get lost trying to find my car after the event…

Hopefully we will continue to have meetings in Nottingham and around the UK to keep track of when and where the next one is pop into the SpiceCorps Of United Kingdom Group on the community.

The first Spiceworks 5.1 beta was released around a week ago and the second beta has just been released so its time I got a review of what’s new and coming up for the people who are unable to install it but want to see what its all about.

5.1 has around 14 new major features and countless minor ones we also finally say good bye to the old user portal and template per event email notifications.

Bit of a side-track but a cool story around the email notifications… The HTML email templates wasn’t ever a major feature request it was something one of the SpiceHeads came up with at a user event, one of the developers then went back to Spiceworks HQ and built it into the version of Spiceworks at the time. It was something that had not been previously thought off but has now provided so many user’s with the flexibility on the information included and design that would have been a bottle neck of the helpdesk for so many users. The way that a user can mention something that no one has thought about but would make the application that little bit better, for then a developer to go off on his own and built it is what makes it so successful. Unofficial Spiceworks even made some alternative templates for people to use. Anyywaaaayyy back onto the review I think…

For a minor version release (a major version for Spiceworks is .0 or .5) its packed full of new features and some of them aren’t that small. One of the big ones I’m excited about is the “Multithreading Support” so lets dive straight in with that:

Multithreading support

A major bottleneck for previous versions has been the single threading for the database and webserver, each users request would stack up behind another user’s and the webserver could end up becoming unresponsive or very slow. The updates to the webserver and database mean that more user’s can work on tickets, the inventory or the people view at one time.

If you have more than one user or are a power user you should see major speed improvements, if like me its just you that normally uses it then you probably wont see any difference but will allow you to grow or multitask better.

Ink and Toner Center Widget Updated

Built into 5.0 the widget now has a new trending feature, which once there is enough data you can click a new “analyse link” to view a graph of the changes. This could and will prove useful when trying to track when toners are used the most so that you can build up a in house stock or simple working out when all the toner disappeared to track who may have used it.

Google Aps Integration

I don’t have Google apps for business so can’t comment on how well it works but its based on the same lines as the recent RackSpace integration you are able to check and even report on your users and mailboxes setup within your Google apps account.

Read More…

Spiceworks launched their “new” vendor pages back in January with the community update on the 25th at this time it was released as more of a beta feature (the community is riddled with beta features a quick count shows there are still 4 but that’s another post). Between then and a few days ago with the March community update the team of developers and designers have been working hard to improve the layout and look of these pages to increase uptake on this new feature. All of the hard work paid off and the official press release was published today.

With vendors like Intel, Rackspace and Windows7 (although I don’t technically agree Windows7 is a vendor…) Spiceworks is slowly becoming what a lot of people are calling “the future of media”. With over 1,300,000 SMB SpiceHeads using the community or application it is a great way for vendors to reach out to sometimes what are the forgotten market. Although no official stats have been released by the amount of time and effort some companies like RackSpace put into the community they must be seeing good enough returns for there investments that its made worth while.

“Just like Facebook Pages did for consumer brands, we’re giving every technology company from big to small a way to have a presence within the world’s largest social business network for IT professionals,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “We’re also making it easier for our users to do their jobs by connecting them with the tech brands they depend on – all while using Spiceworks.”

“As Spiceworks continues to transform IT in a social way, it’s expanding our reach in terms of how we build and maintain relationships with our customers,” said Lauren McCadney of CDW. “With Spiceworks Vendor Pages, we have a highly relevant social channel to serve both new and existing clients, while showcasing our value to over a million small business IT professionals who are current and potential buyers of our products and services.”

If your a IT pro make sure you checkout and follow your favourite vendors on the community and IT vendors don’t forget you can setup your own page for free here.

Yesterday Spiceworks released two new videos on there YouTube Channel the first one about the new iPhone app and the other about the driven employees of Spiceworks.

For all the other cool videos checkout http://www.youtube.com/spiceworks