So as before with the 4.6 features post we managed to get some info on the February Community Update, again these are unofficial and may change:

• Events Planner – In February we will see the start off the event planner which allows SpicePioneers to setup meetings and PM the group. Group members can then RSVP, and then the SpicePioneer can mark attendance to award Spice points.
• News tab on Whats New – shows the Official Spiceworks News so that you don’t have to pop back to the home page every time to see it.
• Show Peppers for Partners – This one I like the idea off, we will be able to see the SpiceLevel off the Spiceworks Partners that way everyone can see how active the they are, to give reputation to their answers. As well as start some friendly competition between them.
• Twitter name on profile – If you link your Twitter profile to your user status, Spiceworks will display your Twitter username on your profile.
• Notify when post is moved – PM all subscribers to a discussion when it is moved, so they know where it is now.
• Notify all spice voters when a Feature request is implemented – Anyone who has voted up a feature request will be notified when that feature request is implemented, this is designed to help show users how many get implemented.
• Bug fixes – As with everything there are bugs and the Feb release will have the normal bug fixes in as well.

The community have started up a new feature called “Contributor of the Week”, this week it was Trivious, for posting 5 How-tos in one week!

I’m not going to repeat what the “Contributor of the Week” is every week but thought I would give an insight into what its about. I managed to digg up some information about this new feature which hasn’t been released.

The “Contributor of the Week” is not there to recognise people like me or Scott Alan Miller who week in week out get the top poster or top amount of BA’s its there to notice people like Trivious who spent a larger than normal amount of time on the community in one week writing up things in this case “how-to’s”.

Things that are set to be looked at include reviews, windows events comments and plugins (when/if someone released more than 2 in a week).

I would expect in the future weeks to see people like Yasaf Burshan who is doing a GREAT job and beating me to answers to be mentioned not people like Craig M or Scott Alan Miller. So show you can contribute well in areas like windows events or reviews and see your name up in “Spiceworks News”

Its to help recognise the people who put a lot of effect in to help them come back.

akp982

Woo, a nice long and detailed post by me for once, to go along side Real World SMB Security and hopefully some more posts soon I wrote about my move to a virtual environment.

I’m going to start off by robbing Adam’s (DigitalBlacksmith) first couple of sentences. "To start with I am not what you would consider a virtualisation expert. I don’t have any certifications, I don’t go to expensive seminars, and I haven’t had a lucrative virtualisation career."

…

Not having used any sort of server virtualisation before, I read some white papers and decided to test virtualising on a workstation first, and then an old server. I checked out various options for my test installation and ended up settling on VMware Vsphere4. It provided us with all the tools we needed to run the servers effectively as well as easily manage them.

…

I checked out the Spiceworks virtualisation whitepapers, lots of YouTube videos, and other online training resources. Over time I became more confident. I installed ESXi on an old server so I could play around and get a grip on all the different parts of it, before trying to install and implement on the real servers. I was surprised at how easy it was to install and setup VMware. It was up and running within 30 minutes, ready and waiting for me to do something with it.

Read more

Thanks to Nic (Spiceworks) for being a “grammar nazi” everyone knows by now mines not the best.

Want to write your own article? Just drop Nic a PM Would be great to see some more up in the From the Trenches of IT group.

Read Moving to a Virtual Environment on the community

Let start this off right

. 

Happy Birthday Arno (ObieOne)

Now on with the story. For his birthday ObieOne has released version 2.3 of the much loved and used Spiceworks MobileHelpdesk.

The mobile helpdesk allows you to view, edit and update tickets on nearly every mobile device from iPhone, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry. There have also been reports of it working on some nokia’s.

MobileHelpdesk uses Tickets Anywhere to allow you to remotely update your tickets as if you were at your desk, allowing you to quickly resolve problems on the go. Its simple to install and setup using .NET, IIS and a SQLite connector. Its easy to setup, and once ready you just surf to the website you setup, login and away you go.

So far ObieOne is very pleased with all the feedback he’s getting and he sure hope people will enjoy it.

Read on for the new features and bug fixes or download it now

Screenshots

New and fixed in version 2.3:

• Fixed several issue’s with the data adapters after the Spiceworks 4.5 upgrade. (un-assigned tickets page works again).

• Open tickets page now also view un-assigned tickets.

• Changed some typo’s in the web.config notes sections.

• Changed some typo’s and instructions, so the installation procedure is more clear.

• Issue fixed with User Details and Change Password screen crashing.

• Home page now shows actual un-assigned open tickets.

• Add comment now sends to the right #ticketID again.

• Edit ticket statics now sends to the correct #TicketID again.

All these fixes are implemented and tested with special thanks to Ben, Barb E, Mark J Gosling, Mike384 and Miiiki.

If you haven’t tried it, then go ahead and do.

Download the MobileHelpdesk from the community.

So other than breaking the login the Spiceworks update did do some good. As mentioned yesterday there were 5 main new features.

1. Spiceworks Partner directory

Spiceworks have now implemented a “Partner directory”, this allows you to quickly see all the Spiceworks Partners so you can contact them with Questions.

You can also use this to quickly add partners your interested in to your IT pro’s list so you can quickly find them in the future as well as follow what they do on the community in the My IT pro’s section

One thing I found cool about this section is seeing everyone’s avatars. Some are cool, some are just the logos.

Check it out 

2. Public audit trail on discussions

To help people see what’s going on with a topic there is now a activity monitor which shows when posts have been moved, answers marked etc.

This is here to help Group Admin’s feel comfortable when marking answers that there not going behind people’s back doing it. Its also there to watch for people who are just going around marking there own answers and cheating the system.

You can see this at the bottom of all topic pages.

Read More…

So I got up this morning. Played xbox for a while then went to login to the community. Put my details in then got confronted by a nice little “SSL is required” error…

If you are having the same problem its easy to get around

• Login to you Spiceworks install
• Click My Community

That will by pass the community login page by passing your details directly in.

I  have posted up on the community read my post and also contacted the Spiceworks team. This is probably broke during last nights community update that I will be posting more about shortly.

Read my post and let us know if your having the same problem on the community

UPDATE: 15:50: Everything is back up and working as normal

  Another community update coming our way this time it includes

• Public audit trail on discussions – This is so you can track who marked the best answer, if it was moved etc to make the community more transparent
• Google Translate any Community page – To help internationalise the community google translate will now be built in to quickly allow you to translate posts
• PM notification when post is deleted – If a post gets deleted you will now get PM’d about it maybe with a reason
• Ad navigation – scroll through previous ads – YAY finally you will be able to go boy that was a great ad what was it?
• Spiceworks Partner directory – Find out whos a partner of Spiceworks and how to get hold of them

The update is set to take 4 hours

Screenshots etc coming after the update

Read more and the comments on the community here http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/85994

Find out what time the update is where you are http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2010&mo=1&d=15&h=2&mn=0

According to one of the latest news articles from Spiceworks IE8 now out performs FireFox 3.5!

Its great to see speed improvements in Spiceworks but I was personally shocked by this one. It appears Spiceworks works faster in IE8 than it does Firefox, of course IE7 is still way behind.

Who knows how they fully managed it, could it be that the IE version has less functionality? It definitely doesn’t look as pretty, the corners in IE8 are square were Firefox they are rounded.

I certainly prefer the look and feel of it in Firefox.

So considering Firefox renders these nice corners I can allow for that small speed bump.

Read the whole article from the Spiceworks team

So maybe I’ve been slow writing up on the dell plugin but it’s here now…

So about a 3 months ago Spiceworks managed to team up with CDW to make the “CDW Search” as that is a US plugin Unofficial Spiceworks hasn’t reviewed it as its not much use to UK people. This went off well and now has 700 downloads. Then 2 months into this being live Dell and Spiceworks teamed up to produce one to allow you to instead of search CDW search the dell website for products and services.

This would allow people to quickly find Dell products from directly in Spiceworks.

I gave it ago my self it works well, I don’t use Dell myself but it was definitely good to see what they had to offer in the different sections.

If you have dell on your network it is well worth giving ago. Its great to see Spiceworks working with companies like Dell to produce plugins like this, its what makes Spiceworks invaluable.

Screenshots

Get the Dell search plugin now

Jump on over to the community…

Ok taken a lot longer than hoped but here they are some screenshots off the new Microsoft SQL plugin!

Its taken longer due to bugs with 4.5 beta and the plugin in which were fixed very quickly by the Spiceworks staff.

Read More…