Unofficial Spiceworks

jdorfman has recently found out that the guy behind The Website is Down maybe attending this years Spiceworks SpiceWorld.

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.

Last nights community update was a success with all the mentioned updates being rolled out including the brand new look to go inside with the Spiceworks 5.0 release happening soon (more on the Release Candidate in a bit)

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?

Tonight Spiceworks will be performing their regular community update to give us new functionality, bug fixes etc.

Tonight’s update will start at 8:00pm CDT where they will be trying a new rollout procedure that will decrease the downtime but if it doesn’t all go well it will be the normal 4 hour downtime. Fingers crossed for a short period

To find out what time the downtime will be where you are, use this link: http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2010&mo=10&d=8&h=1&mn=0

This update includes:

• New Community Layout – To match the new 5.0 UI, if you connect from 4.7 it will look like it does at the moment but connect from 5.0 you will see the new shiny version.
• Improvements to the community connector – To allow you to connect more than one application account to a single community account.
• Search PM’s – To find that one you know is there somewhere but can’t remember who sent it or when
• Block .exe uploads – To prevent spam + dodgy downloads
• Report reviews – The same as you can topics so that rude or inappropriate ones can be removed.
• More CDN stuff – More parts of the community will now be run of the CDN released last time round
• Third Choose Your Own IT Adventure story in the 5.0 group
• And of course loads of bug fixes.

Well get up some screenshots + some other exciting news tomorrow morning.

As part of a new series of posts we will be asking SpiceHeads (Spicework’s users) how Spiceworks and Spiceworks 5.0 will change their professional life Dean M (Gonefishing), has done a fantastic job of getting this started.

I was asked recently to give my thoughts on how Spiceworks 5.0 will change my professional life. I feel in order to fully answer this question I first need to take a look back on how Spiceworks itself has changed the way I do things every day in general.

When I first started here three years ago, Help Desk requests were a mix between direct emails sent to individual members of the IT team and emails sent to the Help Desk address, which in turn was a custom mailbox that was access by each member of IT (at the time two techs and the manager). If we were assisting someone with a particular item, we would drag their message to our own folders within the Help Desk account and work from there. As you might imagine, this was a fairly cumbersome way to work and often resulted in an overlap of two technicians working on the same request, but it got us through.

Eventually we decided we needed a way to track things a bit better, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a Help Desk ticketing system. One member of our team had looked into various solutions, but they were all either too expensive to maintain or way too complex and required too much time from a group that was already stretched thin. Thus, we created a library in SharePoint to track requests. This just ended up being us working from the custom Help Desk mailbox as before, but now with the added step of copying and pasting each response into a separate system. It was cumbersome and added extra steps and time, but at least we had a little more tracking than before.

Read More…

A while ago (well almost 4 weeks ago) Spiceworks announced the ‘Who’s Got Your Back?’ competition

Got an IT pro in the Spiceworks Community who’s always helping you out? Or maybe one who’s helped you out in a pinch – and saved your IT day?

Tell us your story – what happened, who helped you from the Spiceworks Community – all the juicy details that made you go, “Whew – thanks for having my back!” after your IT issue was resolved. And, when you do, you and your helpful IT bud will get entered to win $1,000 USD toward a trip to SpiceWorld 2010.*

Don’t have a heroic tale to share that involves another person, but use CA ARCserve? Tell us how CA ARCserve has backed up, restored or helped you with your data – and you’ll be enter too! If your story is chosen, you and a SpiceHead of your choice will be able able to win $1,000 USD to meet up in Austin, Texas – at SpiceWorld 2010!*

At the moment their aren’t a lot of entries so your chance of winning is pretty high.

Make sure you check out the competition and enter today on the community. Who’s Got Your Back? Tell Us & Win a Trip to SpiceWorld(sponsored by CA ARCserve

Ted (Spiceworks) recently announced Spiceworks’ new and exciting in application advertising.

This is no normal advertisement. Heck, it is barely an advertisement; it’s like a mini application. InFlow is edutainment, better yet appucation (yes I just invented that word). InFlow is completely interactive. InFlow has information, community content, calculators and more – all built, well “in flow”. Yep, all this exists on the same page you have been working in within Spiceworks. You never have to leave or click through to anywhere. When done simply click the ‘X’ button and, wah-la, you are right back in your workflow.

Read more: Beta Launch: Spiceworks InFlow – Advertising and Information… well “in flow”

This new feature is very exciting as it will start to bring vendors new ways of promoting their products without distracting IT Pro’s. As the feature grows more interactive adverts as well as more detailed adverts will start to show. At the moment this new feature is only being used for Rackspace on the “Microsoft Exchange Health Widget” built into Spiceworks.

You will start to see the little showing up in other places over time. If you have a chance do checkout the information on this first interactive InFlow advert.

Make sure you read Ted’s news article on this exciting new feature and leave your feedback: Beta Launch: Spiceworks InFlow – Advertising and Information… well “in flow”.

I’ll admit before I start this I think is one of my most adventurous posts yet and has taken me a while to get all the information together. I’m also going to start by saying none of this is officially confirmed it’s all my work from information freely available on the partners community profiles.

The stats will go out of date quickly and things will change but here we go.

After seeing what I thought was a drop of activity from the partners I decided to dig into all there profiles and find out how active they are. Here’s some basic stats:

• Partners – From what I can see there are 79 registered partner profiles from 28 companies.
• Contributions – They have made a total off 745 contributions, remember a contribution is a single post on a single topic. There are people who have posted lots of times just in the same topic.
• Reviews – 13 reviews of which most are about there own products rather than products they have used or using.
• Best Answers’ – With a total of 78 best answers between them.
• Helpful Post’s – and a measly 48 helpful posts, normally people have more HP’s that BA’s because they are easier to get. To me this shows when they don’t know the answer they don’t try they leave it for someone else.
• How-to’s – 13 How-to’s which isn’t bad, they are all detailed and good ones.
• Plugins – 3 plugins, some of these were made by Spiceworks and then just released by the partner.

I was undecided if these stats were good then I saw the top 3 contributors:

• Arun Tejaswi from CA – 237 Contributions – 7 Reviews – 10 BA’s – 15 HP’s – 2 How-to’s
• Christopher Le Texier from Microsoft – 101 Contributions – 0 Reviews – 28 BA’s – 15 HP’s – 0 Hot-to’s
• Thomas Kearsley from Symantec – 72 Contributions – 1 Reviews – 19 BA’s – 7 HP’s – 0 Hot-to’s

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The winners of the Unitrends create a advert contest were recently announced by Nic “Winner of the Unitrends Ad Design contest”

Jenn (Unitrends) did a great job putting all the 153 adverts up on the competition website for people to vote on.

Ryan.Johnson was the official winner he will now get a Unitrends Swag bag and gift card.

But there was a shock…

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