Unofficial Spiceworks

On Wednesday Nic announced the 5th beta release.

The fifth build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

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So what’s really new in this beta?

As with anything that Spiceworks do they have exceeded the expectations for this beta with some great new features/bug fixes and updates.

People View

The people view is one of the major things being added in Spiceworks 5.0 and we are getting close to seeing a fully working version.

• New Data Ribbon to allow you to see the more important information about a person at a glance. This is a great addition and allows you to quickly navigate though your user’s and find the information you want fast. As you build up your people view this cool overview will quickly allow you to work out where the user is, who the supervisor is for when they annoy you and what machine they use.
• This build now allows you to write / sync your changes back to active directory. Allowing you to quickly and effectively manage all your user’s from one place. You can change simple bits of information like number, location and department at the moment but soon you will be able to reset passwords and enable and disable accounts.

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Spiceworks 5.0 is set to be HUGE with some major new features being added, but there are also some smaller features in the background being added to help slim down the amount of feature requests and help keep user’s happy.

One of the things they are adding is the ability to add plugins to the User Portal this has been kick started with the ability to add the Ticket Gauge to the user portal with the “User Portal Ticket Gauge” plugin.

This allows your users to quickly see how many tickets you have to work on and will help give them an idea of how busy you are.

Once you have added the plugin to the portal, as with any widget you can move it around and even edit the points for when it changes yellow and red.

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Yesterday I reviewed the latest Spiceworks 5.0 beta drop, but at the time could not get the active directory integration for the people view working.

It wasn’t the beta’s fault it didn’t work I needed to use user@domain.local rather than domain\user simple fix and once changed it was up and running within 2 minutes with all my active directory users imported. Read my community discussion on this if you get stuck.

First off in some of I have omitted names and some details. The information was there just to be safe and to protect the ID of people I have covered it up.

Once you have the active directory settings correct and it syncs you will instantly start to see how the people view will help you.

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Last night Nic announced  5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)

The fourth build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try out. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

This build has some major and exciting changes and throughout this article I will walk you though as many of them as possible (some of them need Rackspace services in which I do not currently have).

Interface

The first thing that will hit you when you open up this build of Spiceworks is the new interface, it has been near completely redesigned (it’s still being worked on and could change again). This new layout is designed to make Spiceworks easier to navigate as well as making it easier to view your data.

Rather than the navigation being down the side it’s now at the top in drop down style menus. These seem to work really fast and with the performance fixes in this new GUI clicking from page to page is a lot quicker even compared to the earlier beta.

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The latest build of Spiceworks 5.0 has been released “5.0 Beta III Build Now Available (5.0.54687)” this build is the first in which we see that start of the much-anticipated “People View” aimed to make people management easier.

The new people view will eventually allow you to:

• See user’s devices (to help you keep track of those ones that “go missing”)
• Sort out which users or departments cause you hassle
• Checkout all the info you already have on your users (via Active Directory) as well as do things like unlock accounts and reset passwords

When you first open the new people management area you are presented with a “departments overview” this allows you to browse each of your preset departments. (Click the images for a larger view.)

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If you have been testing the Spiceworks 5.0 beta or have come across the Spiceworks 5.0 community group you may have noticed the “Developer’s Notes” down the right hand side in which contain cool little insights into what the developers are working on at the moment.

Some of these are really cool like what looks to be added ability to add and remove columns from ticket views in a future version:

So you wanna add/remove columns from your ticket views, eh? *tinkers*

- Stephen (Spiceworks)

Of course none of these snippets mean what they are working on will make it to the final release, but hopefully well see some cool new stuff reading though them all.

You might enjoy even more horizontal screen real-estate with the upcoming UI changes.

- Jeff (Spiceworks)

Check them all out now on the community “Spiceworks 5.0 Features, News & Beta Testing”

Yesterday the Nic (Spiceworks) announced the second Spiceworks 5.0 beta was released:

The second build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try out. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

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In this build we see changes to various parts of the new features and a couple of updates to existing ones:

Purchasing:

• The purchasing page has been completely removed while they redesign the UI for it. You are able to view purchases on the ticket or Inventory or Device view.
• Purchasing changes are now added to the timeline so that you can see who did what created, updated a purchase, mark as purchased, deleted a purchase, etc
• Purchasing reports added: Unreceived, Recent, Unpurchased, Unapproved

Helpdesk:

• You can now customise which columns you want to display on the helpdesk views.
• Email notifications of helpdesk tickets are not fully functional between sites

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So as most people know the first Spiceworks 5.0 beta was released on Wednesday and seems to have already been a hit with SpiceHeads around the world. Not all the features planned for the final version have been released in this beta they will be slowly added in as the program moves along.

The SpiceLords have however pulled out another stunning version of Spiceworks and in this beta build (5.0.53561) we see:

• Multi-site Helpdesk – Using remote collectors you can now setup multiple helpdesks all feeding back to the one place. This is designed to help MSP’s get more out of Spiceworks and the helpdesk, allowing them to manage multiple clients from one location, securely. Each helpdesk portal and email notification can be tailored to each site and in the future each site will also be able to integrate into separate active directory domain.

• Purchasing – To help you manage all your IT purchases in one place 5.0 brings a new purchasing area to help you manage and track IT purchases against tickets. Adding this into Spiceworks will allow you to quickly charge out the right price for the right item to the right department as well as giving MSP’s a way of tracking sales. From the purchasing screen you can also click directly though to CDW or do a community search for the product you are looking for.

• LDAP Authentication via SSL – Keeping account information safe and private is often a key priority for SpiceHeads around the world, so to help IT pro’s use feel safer using Spiceworks you can now use SSL for LDAP Authentication.

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