Unofficial Spiceworks

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.

Following on from the “Spiceworks SpiceRex advert contest” Spiceworks have “teamed up” in a VERY spontaneous way with Unitrends to make another advert, you may have noticed a day ago Nic (Spiceworks) posted up “Spontaneous contest to design a Unitrends Ad” in the Spiceworks News area of the community:

What started off as a conversation about a funny looking ad has evolved into a contest to see who can do better. Take your best shot at making an ad for Unitrends – the winner gets a $50 Visa gift card, a Unitrends swag bag, and their ad will get run on Spiceworks.

Enter here! Entries have to be in by the end of August.

There have already been some GREAT entries into the competition. Make sure you enter as well.

So make sure you enter now for your chance to win $50 on a visa gift card!

Checkout the other entries and enter here

Yesterday Nic announced the “Finalists in the SpiceRex ad contest”

Thank you again to everyone who took the time to create an entry! After serious deliberation by the selection committee, we have the finalists selected. Once our designers have had a chance to do some minor post-production work on the ads, we’ll run them live on sites that we advertise on. The ad that works the best in each category will be the winner.

The five finalists in the graphical ad category are:

• James3977
• Striker090871
• Don Whitehead
• EDB
• akp982

In the text ad category:

• Jaguar
• Bart894
• Lawrie5252
• EDB

Checkout the finalists and more info on the community

Following on from last months interview with Kris (Spiceworks), this month Unofficial Spiceworks cornered the first Spiceworks employee Tabrez Syed:

What moment made you feel the proudest to be part of Spiceworks?

Gosh! I’ve been fortunate to have many an occasion when I’m proud of what we (employees and users) have done together. For eg: It really makes my day when I see a thread in the community where every one (sometimes even a partner) pitches in with their opinion to help solve a problem.  If I had to pick one moment then it would be when I read an excerpt of an upcoming book on communities that profiles Spiceworks (http://gillin.com/blog/2010/05/the-power-of-b2b-communities/). The author says: “Spiceworks represents the best of what B2B communities can accomplish.”

To receive a praise like that is definitely a nice feeling

What feature are you most excited about in Spiceworks 5.0?

Spiceworks 5.0 is going to be our biggest and most exciting release to date. Earlier this year our CEO Scott posted (http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/85775) news about how we received funding to accelerate the rate at which we develop the product. Since the beginning of the year lots of great folks have joined our team. 5.0 represents the first major release of all the hard work they’ve put in.

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The latest build of Spiceworks 5.0 has been released “5.0 Beta III Build Now Available (5.0.54687)” this build is the first in which we see that start of the much-anticipated “People View” aimed to make people management easier.

The new people view will eventually allow you to:

• See user’s devices (to help you keep track of those ones that “go missing”)
• Sort out which users or departments cause you hassle
• Checkout all the info you already have on your users (via Active Directory) as well as do things like unlock accounts and reset passwords

When you first open the new people management area you are presented with a “departments overview” this allows you to browse each of your preset departments. (Click the images for a larger view.)

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