Unofficial Spiceworks

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”

Community member slatronica (Steve Latronica) runs a blog called Synergy (http://synergy-blog.com/) in which is a blog about technology, product reviews and releases, social media, web design, entrepreneurs, and more.

Recently slatronica took up an opportunity to talk with Community Manager Nic Tolstoshev in an exclusive interview about the culture at the office and how it makes for a productive and positive work environment.

Its well worth a read and will give you a bit of an insight into life in the Spiceworks offices.

• Interview with Spiceworks Community Manager Nic Tolstoshev – Part 1
• Interview with Spiceworks Community Manager Nic Tolstoshev – Part 2

So SpiceworksLounge.com has been active for just over 2 weeks, so I thought I would check in and see how things are going.

Yasaf Burshan has been doing a great job so far with some great posts in Hebrew like:

• Design storage volumes using Storage Advisor
• Spiceworks on Steroids – Improving Performance
• Remote Collectors – Collecting information on remote networks

Keep up the great work Yasaf well done

The ups and downs of working with social media my experiences with Spiceworks

First off… This isn’t really all Spiceworks related but just had the idea for a post along these lines and Spiceworks-News is about the only place I could put it. It is however all based on my experience with Spiceworks.

So everyone knows what social media is now days? And that big buzz word of “web 2.0” and companies like Spiceworks are starting to exploit it to market there products and IT conferences like Spiceworld. Places like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg and Ustream are regularly used.

So what do I think are the advantages and disadvantages of Social media and networking…

The ups (Advantages)

There are many pro’s to social media and well they do outweigh the downs.

A great example of this was at Spiceworld 2009 Austin, I (akp982) was about to receive a Spicies award when Justin Dorfman (from Frugal IT) had the idea of using Skype to allow me to give my acceptance speech. I ran around and got a microphone ready and he ran off to the Spiceworks Staff to hand him his laptop which got pushed onto stage. This was great, I was watching the live stream though Ustream and also talking live to the presenters. It was a very weird feeling I was in the UK and talking and watching people in the US. Without the Ustream chat to get me on skype with Justin and without skype for allowing us to make a “call” it would not have been possible. It was organised so quick the presenters were shocked to hear that I was ready to talk to them.

Social media mainly things like twitter can really help promote your products very quickly by telling lots of people instantly. When Spiceworks 4.1 was released it was mentioned by over 100 people on twitter and Spiceworks are expecting more people to spread 4.5 when it comes out. From this people will quickly write reviews to jump on the back off this and give their blog or website a boost in traffic and hope for some regular readers. Frugal IT is and example of a site that did well at this with there Spiceworld 2009 coverage (http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009) they were able to get multiple people to tweet, blog and just share their link. With this link spread all over the world, people would then visit the site pickup on the ads and information around the Spiceworld page and may then come back in the future. I know we (Spiceworks-News) jump on even the oddest of things. We often pickup on blog posts about or mentioning Spiceworks and re post the first paragraph in hope for a ping back. Posts like (Getting IT spicey at your church) got a ping backs out there and we may have got another 1/2 visitors (they all add up over time to now around 300 people looking at Spiceworks-News on a daily basis according to Google analytics… if only some of them posted comments).

Read More…

Focusing on the often-neglected information technology manager is paying off for Spiceworks Inc.

Founded by four former Motive Inc. executives, the Austin company set out four years ago to build software that would make life easier for the workers who oversee computer networks at small and medium-size businesses.

Before writing a line of code, Scott Abel, Jay Hallberg, Greg Kattawar and Francis Sullivan spent three months interviewing IT managers at 40 Austin companies to find out what drove them crazy about managing their systems.

The answer? Just about everything.

Read more

The bit that I though was interesting was:

Spiceworks user Justin Davison, a systems engineer and help-desk manager at material analysis company RJ Lee Group in Pittsburgh, is an example of how the company has won fans.

Davison tried Spiceworks last summer because he needed inventory management software and had nowhere near the $15,000 estimate he received from another company.

“Free was the right price for me,” he said. Read more

There are lots off really good quotes in this article its well worth a read.

Increasingly SpiceHeads refer to Spiceworks as the “Facebook of IT”: the place where they do their job and connect with other IT pros like them.  To us, that is the ultimate validation of what we have been working on which we somewhat academically call a “social business application”.  Social business apps have three ingredients (industry focus, a community, workflow tools & apps) and they weave these together in one seamless user experience.  We use social apps (Facebook) to connect with friends; we use social business apps (Spiceworks) to do our jobs… with other people.

Read more

Thanks to the usability of Apps.gov, more businesses in the public and private sector may be encouraged to investigate cloud computing initiatives of their own. In fact, a significant amount of businesses already have – a recent survey from Spiceworks found that 57 percent of small businesses currently use some kind of cloud computing service.

http://www.edlconsulting.com/newsdetail.php?id=427&headline=Apps.gov:_The_cloud_computing_trendsetter

Not a very big mention but any mention is better than no mention?

It helps show Spiceworks provides useful information to a wide range of people.

Justin recently posted a great article on his blog about the future of Spiceworks.

I just read Andrew Phelps’ article on the Spiceworks Script Center (Beta) and a light bulb turned on.  I have made many predictions about Spiceworks in the past and some of them became a reality.

Here is my new set of predictions of where Spiceworks is headed and if some of them come true I really think it will change the way the IT vendors conduct business with new and exsisting customers.

Ever since the Points System launched this year SpiceHeads have really been more active in the community. Don’t believe me? According to compete in the past year community.spiceworks.com has seen a 109.65% increase!

BTW that is all organic traffic, because the only domain they advertise (PPC) is www.Spiceworks.com which leads you to a well crafted Landing Page.

In his post Justin talks about the future of Spiceworks in 3 ways:

1. Virtual Currency – What if Spiceworks gave you money for posting and getting best answers, what could you do with them and how it would increase the use of the community.
2. The iTunes of IT – At Spiceworld Las Vegas, Greg Kattawar (VP of Dev & Co-Founder) was speaking and kept referring to Spiceworks as “The iTunes of IT”, Spiceworks plan to be everything IT, they want to keep you using there product(s) as much as possible so you see their adverts and they can gain more money from companies like Microsoft and CDW (they really need to find someone like CDW for the UK)
3. Exit Strategy – What happens if it all goes Pete Tong? Justin thinks there are three options they could look at if they needed to… Read his post to find out what they are. For the record I hope for #3

Check out his full post here

Edited: 23/09/09 16:46 (GMT)