Unofficial Spiceworks

So this week has been a busy week for the Spiceworks team, they have cam all the way from Austin, Texas to London to join SpiceHeads for a SpiceCorps, 2 Unplugged events and lots of press releases so many infact that poor old Chief Spice (Scott) lost his voice by the end of day 1!

For those of you who don’t know the Spiceworks unplugged events are pretty much panels for IT Marketers to ask SMB IT Pros’ questions about how what and why they buy to try and get more vendors to engage with the community. Combine this with the opening off a 6 staff London office (more about this later), the SpiceCorps and also various press meetings with high profile papers and IT article writers its been a packed time for them.

The SpiceCorps London Event

We were lucky enough to have around 10 Spiceworks employees turn up to our SpiceCorps UK event on Tuesday giving all the SpiceHeads that turned up the chance to talk to the team directly to give feedback on the UK / Europe Spiceworks developments.

During the event we spoke about the upcoming release of Spiceworks 5.3 (set to be out of public within around a week and a half but you didn’t hear that here ) Hubba Bubba (Ben) also spoke about the SpiceUni program where you can pay for training in various locations though-out the UK to help you get more out of Spiceworks. Finally I (akp982 – Andy) was presented with a star for managing to get to pure capsaicin twice!

Checkout all the photos on Unofficial Spiceworks’ Google+ page here and keep an eye on the community for more events early next year.

The launch off Spiceworks Europe Limited

To help Spiceworks grow in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) the team have worked hard to launch a new office in London with a starting staff of 6 people it promises to help get more vendors in the UK geared up and involved in the community. Unofficial Spiceworks is planning to do a tour of the new office, take lots of pictures and report back as soon as we can.

“Spiceworks has become the best place in Europe for technology brands to connect with IT pros at small and medium enterprises,” said Scott Abel, Co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “Our online traffic in the UK alone is expanding by 70 percent year-over-year. The Spiceworks Europe team will help us take advantage of this tremendous opportunity and better serve our marketing partners and users in the region.”

This new office really will do great things for getting more vendors into the community and hopefully even some more giveaways

For those of you interested you can checkout the full press release here.

Aaron has recently joined the Spiceworks team as a support engineer (you may know him as doublea) he’s following in Cole’s footsteps who made the jump from SpiceHead to SpiceLord last July.

Having used Spiceworks since 1.5 he’s the perfect guy to try and fix your problems… Although he may just end up passing them to Cole…

Aaron moved to Austin for the gig, coming from Sacramento where he worked for the Sacramento News & Review. In his spare time Aaron enjoys mountain biking, soccer and cooking.

Good luck working at SW HQ Aaron!!!

Some SpiceHeads have been reporting issues accessing the Spiceworks Community this morning getting either timeouts or very slow access.

We do have some knowledge that the Spiceworks team are aware of the issue and working on it and of course as soon as we have updates we will try to let you know.

I would assume when the cause is found there will be an official comment made on the Spiceworks twitter account.

For now please bear with the guys

I’m also working on my review of 5.2 so keep your eye out.

P.S. Cheers Marco for posting the SpiceRex 404 image on Google+

Update: The community is backup and running

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.

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.

Spiceworks are doing another Ask the Expert, this time on patch management. Jason one of Spiceworks’ close partners from Shavlik will be answering SpiceHeads questions about patch management for a whole week.

The last two ask the expert weeks went very well, you may remember them? The Microsoft Licensing one with Chris and CA Backup Questions one with Arun both ended up providing SpiceHeads with valuable answers which helped them with there job and implementing the correct solution.

This weeks Ask the Expert will also help the way Spiceworks evolves in the future as the questions are going to be watched by some of the team such as Tabrez to find out what we are doing, how we are doing it and what we find the hardest. All of this information will then help the developers with the upcoming shavlik integration.

As most of you are aware in an upcoming version we will be able to scan for missing patches and using shavlik’s online solution patch the machines remotely. We are currently unsure (as are the team working on the integration) on how this will work and if there will be any costs associated with it but as time moves on more details will come out.

So make sure you get your questions answered this week and help the team understand what you struggle with.

Jump on into the forum now.

This is the first time I think the community has died like this I was happily checking out what was going on in the UK Forum and it just cut out…

And according to downforeveryoneorjustme.com its not just me?

I’m sure the Kris the IT Guy will be on it soon

So what do you do when the Spiceworks community or your favourite site dies?

Updates

• It’s 4:02am in Austin (Spiceworks’ home town) so I think the IT team will still be asleep, hopefully they will wake up soon and reboot.
• To confirm Spiceworks the application should still work but the AD’s wont show.
• From @fxs (Francis from Spiceworks) – @UnofficialSpice we appear to be down across all of our servers and are still trying to figure out why. Hopefully we will be back up soon.
• The community seems to be back up and running, im sure Spiceworks will fill us in with all the details soon
• From Kris the IT Guy – http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/118733

Yes, we were down, and many apologies. We were able to restore services a few minutes ago. I am working on a root cause and will share what I can with the community as soon as I have something concrete.

Many thanks for your patience.

• The official report of what went wrong is out Spiceworks Outage This Morning (11/16/2010)

Its all back up and running

Following on from the first “Ask The Expert” on Microsoft Licensing you can now get your backup questions answered by Arun (CA) for ARCserve.

Arun is ARCserv’s Technical Pre Sales support, helping channel Partners in their everyday sales deals. He expertise covers CA ARCserve product implementation and licensing as well as storage and backup configurations in general.

How does it work?

Every now and the Spiceworks get an expert to hover around the community ready to answer your questions on a particular subject for a week.

You simply post up your question and the expert should provide you the answer.

How do I ask a question?

Pop over to this forum on the community post your question as you would normally. Arun will then be along shortly (take into account time zones) to help you out.

How did it go last time?

Last time with the Microsoft Licensing expert Chris (Microsoft) there were around 146 questions and over 240 people watching the group. Checkout our review of the last ask the expert.

Ask your question now!