Unofficial Spiceworks

Everyone who uses the community will have noticed that over the last 15/20 months the Spiceworks community has exploded in size. Passing 250,000 users in January 2008, since then the community decided to grow again now up to 650,000 users. Some stats from the Office Spiceworks blog: 36,000 IT topics with over 137,000 posts. 13,000 IT products rated, with over 3,500 reviews completed by 2,250 reviewers 400 discussion groups created by technology, industry, or location 383 shared reports by 270 authors 103 Spicelists (crowdsourced lists) created with 3,151 items, 11,662 contributors and 39,475 votes 63 plugins by 35 authors have been downloaded over 20,000 times

With all this growth Spiceworks has produced some great new community features. As you can see in the top right of this post they have now produced Spice badges, Spice levels and so many other small improvements its hard to mention.

With so many more features still in the working and new fun things being thought of the Spiceworks Community is set to continue to grow.

So you’ve heard and seen Spiceworks but what does it do for you?

Spiceworks allows you to manage “Everything IT for free” anything that is networkable you can manage for free.

SW provides you with a complete network inventory off all your networked hardware and software. It will then keep an eye on your network with its powerful network, exchange and license monitoring systems. Allowing you to quickly pull of reports about your system keeping you up-to-date with the changes that go on.

Then the biggest god send to IT people, it integrates a full helpdesk designed for IT guys, link tickets to devices to find fault machines quicker and let your users login via a user portal to update and create tickets.

Once you have the hang of using the software you can dive into the HUGE community of questions, reviews, advice and just plan fun.