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.

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Spiceworks 5.0 is set to be HUGE with some major new features being added, but there are also some smaller features in the background being added to help slim down the amount of feature requests and help keep user’s happy.

One of the things they are adding is the ability to add plugins to the User Portal this has been kick started with the ability to add the Ticket Gauge to the user portal with the “User Portal Ticket Gauge” plugin.

This allows your users to quickly see how many tickets you have to work on and will help give them an idea of how busy you are.

Once you have added the plugin to the portal, as with any widget you can move it around and even edit the points for when it changes yellow and red.

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Jenn (Unitrends) just announced the cool Unitrends website to show off all the adverts the community has made

What started off as a conversation about a funny looking ad has evolved into a contest to see who can do better. The creator of the winning ad will receive a $50 Visa gift card, a Unitrends swag bag, and their ad will run on Spiceworks!

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Good luck to all the contestants, you can checkout the entries on the community here
or on the unitrends ad contest page here

Yesterday I reviewed the latest Spiceworks 5.0 beta drop, but at the time could not get the active directory integration for the people view working.

It wasn’t the beta’s fault it didn’t work I needed to use user@domain.local rather than domain\user simple fix and once changed it was up and running within 2 minutes with all my active directory users imported. Read my community discussion on this if you get stuck.

First off in some of I have omitted names and some details. The information was there just to be safe and to protect the ID of people I have covered it up.

Once you have the active directory settings correct and it syncs you will instantly start to see how the people view will help you.

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Last night Nic announced  5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)

The fourth 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 has some major and exciting changes and throughout this article I will walk you though as many of them as possible (some of them need Rackspace services in which I do not currently have).

Interface

The first thing that will hit you when you open up this build of Spiceworks is the new interface, it has been near completely redesigned (it’s still being worked on and could change again). This new layout is designed to make Spiceworks easier to navigate as well as making it easier to view your data.

Rather than the navigation being down the side it’s now at the top in drop down style menus. These seem to work really fast and with the performance fixes in this new GUI clicking from page to page is a lot quicker even compared to the earlier beta.

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Nitish Kumar has recently written another great article on Spiceworks following on from introducing it and showing a preview of upcoming Spiceworks 5.0.

Going into great detail on the install, configuration and troubleshooting.

The Spiceworks software as a less than 25 Mb download file (as of now) could be downloaded from the www.spiceworks.com. The same executable is inclusive of all basic requirements for Spiceworks that includes the SQLite database for storing settings-n-stats and Apache web server (need to check if installations already there to avoid conflicts).

Read the rest of his write up on his blog “A Step by Step Guide about Spiceworks”

With Spiceworks 5.0 still in beta it may surprise you to hear that some reports and plugins are already being produced and shared for it.

Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) (checkout his blog posts) is one of the first to start making reports. Aimed at the MSP market it allows you to see what you have purchased for your customers within the last 30 days. A very useful report to track what you have sold to who.

Purchases by Customer for 30 days (Spiceworks 5.0 Beta 3 and later)
Our first offering of a report written for Spiceworks 5.0 (Note: this report relies on tables and fields only available from version 5.0 and higher).

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So pop on over to the reports section of the community and download it now.

Spread-Spiceworks.org.uk (a Unofficial Spiceworks site) has just released some Service Provider (MSP) badges for use on your company website.

Spread-Spiceworks was originally a very rubbish website until about 4 months ago when I picked up an idea i started ages ago. It now provides community members with dynamic badges they can use on there websites, email, forums and more to promote Spiceworks and gain points.

This morning it grew some more with the addition of MSP badges, a growing percentage of community users are from MSP companies and using these badges could help draw in some business, or points in the community or both. With 6 designs to choose from and more coming soon you should find something you like.

Checkout the other designs on Spread-Spiceworks.org.uk today!

Thanks to Lawrie5252 for helping with the designs and coming up with the idea.