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.

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!!!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

Most IT Pro’s have watched the website is down’s videos and if the creator attends SpiceWorld it will be a great chance to ask him your questions about the site and or the videos.

Last year one of his videos made it to the grand opening so will be great to see him attend this year.

Checkout what people are saying about it on the community here.

This new layout is also designed to provide

• Faster Loading – Using better styling and design the site should load better
• No widescreen support – Due to how we read on a screen the community will not stretch to the full width of your screen, there will be more room at the navigation has been moved to the top but as long stings of text are harder to read it will keep the original max width.
• Larger Search – Like the the application the search bar is HUGE this is designed to help you remember it’s there and find answers quicker.
• More features coming to the footer bar – We have already started to see more things added to the bar in 5.0 and we are expecting to see more added to the community, things like group updates or the facebook like links etc.
• Better mobile support – The community already works well on a mobile but the new design will enhance the mobile experience even more.

Spiceworks 5.0 RC

Last night we also saw the release of the 5.0 release candidate:

To all the SpiceHeads who have helped test 5.0 and give feedback – thank you! Because of it, the Release Candidate build of Spiceworks 5.0 is now ready for final testing. Remember to still install this in a test environment and retest any issues that you’ve found in previous builds.

The 5.0 RC build is available here.

This version contains over 200 bug fixes and no new features. Which all means the final version is on it’s way soon. It’s still suggested you don’t use this version in production as it may still contain a serious bug but its stable enough to be classed as RC what’s the worst that could happen?