We don’t yet have any details on what’s coming in this version but with lots of recent activity from shavlik on the community we may start to see some of the new patch management and monitoring that was announced late last year.

This is how ever only a minor release version so we are not expecting it to be the fully fledge system if it is in there. We do know there will be lots of bug fixes and a couple of minor improvements built in though.

Some features are also set to be removed. According to a post last year the “Old User Portal” and “Ticket Notification Templates – Template per Event” are going to be removed. This is to allow the developers to build better features.

More news as we get it but for now make sure you join the Spiceworks 5.1 Beta Group for the latest information.

Spiceworks 5.0 has just been released and includes some great new features. If you have followed our beta reviews you will probably know about all the cool new features. If you haven’t checkout the below for a quick over view of everything.

All of these great new features are designed to help you manage your network and make your day even easier.

If you already know what’s changed get stuck in now and download it here.

Purchasing

To help you manage your IT purchases better Spiceworks 5.0 has now brought in a new purchases management area. This allows you to track and manage everything you buy for clients or for your company depending on if you’re a MSP or a lone IT guy.

You can use it to track every aspect of a buy from picking the product to getting it delivered and then the man hours required to set it up. Of course like with everything in Spiceworks you can then use the powerful reporting system to give management or clients with details about what you brought for them and when.

Checkout more about the free IT purchasing system here.

People View

The people view is another great addition to Spiceworks which allows you to track your active directory users directly from within the dashboard as well as link them to devices, enable and disable accounts, checkout the user’s open tickets and edit basic account information.

You can setup departments and even photos for all your user’s to make it easier to find that person who you should know but can’t remember where they sit or what they look like. In the future we may even see this rolled out more so that you can allow human resources to view the information or pull out telephone lists from it to make things even easier for you, your team and your company.

Read more about this great new free active directory management here.

Multi-site Helpdesk

One of the things MSP’s wanted was the ability to be able to run a helpdesk across multiple sites, they were already able to set up remote collectors to scan the network on a remote site but now you can turn these into a fully fledged remote helpdesk. It has its own user portal and email setup, when a ticket is created or updated it sends the information securely back to the central site.

MSP’s have been an increasing part of the community with more and more getting involved using it as a solution to check and manage clients better. The Spiceworks team have listened to this and have started to add feature dedicated to them. Using the feature request section they are able to quickly work out what SpiceHeads want and build it.

Want to know more about how Spiceworks can help you be a MSP? Check it out here.

Configuration management capabilities

With the new built-in TFTP server you can now backup, restore and watch network device configurations. Once setup and working Spiceworks will also keep track of the configurations and allow you to view the changes so you can quickly spot what’s caused a network outage.

You can even use this to push out new firmware updates, you give it the firmware file, tell it what device(s) to update and let it do the hard work.

Checkout what you can use the TFTP server for here.

Better Network Map

The network map already included in Spiceworks has been updated to help provide you with a even bigger and better picture of your network.

There is more “real time” support for the bandwidth charts, depending on the device it can poll up to every 15 seconds allow you to checkout network spikes quicker and easier.

They have also updated the way the map is built to help build a better picture.

Find out how you can start mapping your network.

Discover more virtualized Machines and manage them

5.0 brings enhanced virtualization management allowing you to check on and manage both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware.

You can get detailed information about the host and the virtual machines very quickly. You then have the ability to turn the machines on and off and in the future you will be able to do even more.

Start discovering virtual servers.

Cleaner and faster Interface

The user interface (UI) has been updated to make it easier to view your network and it brings speed improvements.

This layout is also being rolled out to the community to keep everything looking the same and to speed up the community.

More Access Levels

There are now more user levels ‘help desk admins,’ inventory admins’ and ‘portal admins’. This makes it easier to manage who can use what as well as securing your Spiceworks install.

So what are you waiting for?

Download Spiceworks 5.0 NOW and start making your day even easier. Remember if you get stuck there is a HUGE IT Community ready and waiting to help you.

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?

Last night the eighth Spiceworks 5.0 beta was release:

The eighth 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 isn’t as fully packed as previous beta’s have been with most of the work being done of bug fixing to help ensure that when Spiceworks is release (according to Jay should be soon) everything is working and user’s can drive straight in without worry.

They have however managed to slide in a new first time user flow for the network backup configuration. This is designed to help user’s get started with the part of Spiceworks they want.

There are are performance improvements to the network scanner, which are designed to help it complete faster and more accurate.

That’s about all I can say about all I can say for this beta, check it out via the links below or read though our other reviews.

Links

• 5.0 Beta VIII Build Now Available (5.0.56975)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Unofficial Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• Beta 5
• Beta 6
• Beta 7
• People View
• Additional Plugin APIs
• Purchasing

The seventh 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.

As always this build is full of cool new stuff as well as loads of bug fixes:

People View

The cool new people view feature has some cool new updates in which make it even easier to manage your IT:

• Welcome popup – There is a new popup when you first go into the people view in which explains what its about and how to get the most out of it. Of course SpiceRex is the keeper of this new feature and couldn’t wait to shout about it.
• Updated Search – The search included in Spiceworks will now also bring in the results from the people view. This makes it a lot easier to track down a user to help them fix their problems.
• Multiple devices to one person – If you have user’s in which have more than one device maybe a phone and laptop or even a custom device you can now link them all back to the user. This is all designed to help you get the most out of Spiceworks and make your day easier.
• Perform AD actions – Finally the people view is a true management system you can now reset passwords, unlock, enable and disable accounts directly from within the user interface.

Click a image to enlarge

Virtualization

• Turn on and off VMware machines – As with the Hyper-V machines mentioned in the last review you can now also turn on and off VMware vSphere or ESXi hosts (4.0 or newer) machines from direct within Spiceworks.
• Updated environment summary – VM tab now included in the Environment Summary that allows you to view and access power controls for all VM’s scanned into inventory.

Inventory

• Data ribbon – Spiceworks have now added a data ribbon to the device’s, this allows you to quickly view basic device information as well as scan errors.
• Network Shares tab – There is also a new “network shares” tab for scanned devices in which allows you to see what shares are open on a machine and the permissions for it. This is designed to help you make sure you network is secure.

Purchasing

• Changes to Purchase page - new view filters (Open & All), columns have been rearranged, and other stylistic changes

Warranty Scanning

• You can now scan the warranty information for Lenovo computers.

Help Desk

• Central helpdesk checks remote sites at a regular interval for a connection. If the connection fails, an alert is generated with optional email
• Polling interval for remote sites is configurable and can be turned off completely

That’s all for now! We are still expecting Spiceworks 5.0 to be release the start (first two weeks) of October. Will be a great day when it’s finally release.

Links

• 5.0 Beta VII Build Now Available (5.0.56612)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Unofficial Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• Beta 5
• Beta 6
• People View
• Additional Plugin APIs
• Purchasing

I’m sure you will have all see the new IT Purchasing Management system in the Spiceworks 5.0 beta which is designed to allow you to start a purchasing workflow, create detailed reports for purchases and track your ticket costs for better billing. It appears that in my earlier reviews of 5.0 I have only skimmed over this exciting new feature so here is a fully fledged review on what it does and how it can help you.

When Spiceworks went out and looked at what IT pro’s were finding hard to manage one of the things that came out was that they are finding it hard to keep track of things they are buying either for internal user or for their clients if they are MSP’s. Some people did have a system for doing this but being able to link this into the helpdesk was going to be a great help.

I’m one of those who doesn’t track purchases so no promises this review will be the best, I’m sort of winging it, but it will give you the idea of the power behind this new exciting system.

Track it.

When Spiceworks 5.0 is install you can get stuck straight into managing your purchases, one of the easiest ways of adding an item to be purchased is by adding it to a ticket. You can also add items on the purchase’s page but having a ticket for each item will make your reporting more accurate.

The form is simple to fill in just enter a few simple details like, description, quantity, price, vendor, PO number and department.

Once the information is entered and saved you will get given the choice to research the best product / prices via the community, CDW or Comparing prices on PriceGrabber.com.

As you go though the process of getting items approved, brought and delivered you can then mark it off in Spiceworks so that you have complete control and at any point you can send off a report to the people who need it about what’s outstanding, why you brought something or where it is.

Report it.

Spiceworks already has a powerful reporting system and it now allows you to report on what you have brought.

The basic built-in reports give you Name, Quantity, Price, Total Price, Part Number, Purchased At, Purchase Order, Shipping Code, Received At, Related to, Ticket and Vendor. As with any type of report in Spiceworks you can add or remove columns to make it suit you, either in the report editor or using SQL.

This is great for when your boss needs a report on where all your budget has gone a day before he asks you for it.

Bill it.

A lot of people using Spiceworks are MSP’s and bill on an hourly rate or even if you’re a internal support team you may still want to bill departments or just keep track of where your time is being spent.

In earlier versions of Spiceworks you have been able to add time spent against a ticket but from 5.0 forward you will be able to track what this really costs. Setting your hourly rate in the settings allows you to run reports and track how much a client or department is really costing you.

Of course all of this information can be added to reports so that when your rushed off your feet managing your time isn’t as hard.

That’s it.

I think I’ve covered it all off, if you can think off anything else or fancy writing a review on something Spiceworks yourself drop me a line via the contact form.

That’s right Spiceworks 5.0 is onto the 6th beta!

Spiceworks are dedicated to making sure IT Pro’s get the best product possible and so testing and feedback from SpiceHeads is a really important part of this process. There is no word yet on how many beta’s there will be or the release date for 5.0 they are however aiming to have it released by SpiceWorld 2010 so that they can give user’s hands on training with the latest product.

In this build we see some cool new features, bug fixes and updates:

People View

The new people view feature now starting to be marked as “Free Active Directory Management” has had a couple of updates:

• Delete User’s – You can now delete user’s from People View and then have this changed Synced back to active directory, this is another step forward in allowing you to completely manage your active directory in one place.
• Automatically associate devices with users – This is something I have been looking forward to, Spiceworks will now link up the owner or last login information picked up by the scan and link it to your user’s, saving you the time of going though all your devices linking people up.
• Confirmation message on first sync – One of the problems with the AD sync was that if you setup the people view and added user’s when you first synchronized with Active directory these changes would get pushed as well. From this build forward you will now be promoted with a confirmation message asking if you want to do this or drop all the changes you made earlier.

Purchasing

The purchasing section of Spiceworks is something I’m currently in the process of writing a full review of and these updates will add more to my list to talk about:

• Sorting – You are now able to sort the purchasing lists so that you can quickly find the item you are looking for.
• Deleting – If you have added a purchase by mistake you are now able to delete it, this is something Spiceworks didn’t originally think was needed but the power of the community made the overturn that decision and they have now implemented it. Simple things that can make a IT pro’s day even easier only come out of real beta testing by the real SpiceHeads.
• Categorization – Like with helpdesk tickets you can now categorize items for purchase, this will help with reporting when you need to find out where you are spending your IT Budget.
• Summaries for device groups – In the environment summary of the device groups view you can now see how much you have spent in that group. This is another great way of tracking that sometimes wild IT Budget.
• Cursor changes – Hovering the cursor over the state arrows on the purchase list will show what happens if the user clicks on the arrows.

Inventory

• Physical disks for Linux devices – As well as the logical drives for Linux devices you can now see the full army of physical ones.
• New AMT tab for vPro devices – This new tab displays displays Bios, Baseboard, Processors, Memory and Disks information.

Rackspace Intergration

• Add or remove mailboxes from existing Aliases/Distribution lists – these changes are pushed back to your Rackspace account
• Updates to User Interface – Dashboard widget now shows services used and top five mailboxes for a given domain

Other Bits

As always Spiceworks work hard to offer the best product people this build was no different there are also some minor updates which include:

• Turn on and Off Hyper-V virtual machines – We have already seen that 5.0 will support Hyper-V virtualization but with this build we get the added ability to turn on and off Hyper-V’s virtual machines from within the Spiceworks dashboard.
• Spiceworks Upgrades – The upgrade process has been tweet a little to help make sure your data is even more safe, when you upgrade from now on it will do a database integrity check. The database page size is also set to increase to allow for better speed.
• Real-Time data in the network map – SSH devices in which support the needed interface protocols will now show real-time traffic data in the network map. Spiceworks are looking for feedback on how this works with BSD/Solaris devices.
• Dell warranty – The Dell Warranty renewal workflow has been tweeted to help you renew your warranties quicker.
• Debug info added for User Portal Ticket Gauge plugin – The Ticket Gauge plugin will now write a log entry when it is installed and removed. Not fully sure why this was added but it’s there non the less.
• LOADS of other bug fixes – There are of course loads of other bug fixes in which are either too small to mention or have gone past without loads of people noticing, if you had a problem in beta 4 check out beta 5 and see if it’s still there.

That’s all for now pop over to the community to download it and for the full test plan, links below:

Links

• 5.0 Beta VI Build Now Available (5.0.56140)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Unofficial Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• Beta 5
• People View
• Additional Plugin APIs

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.

Read More

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.

• You can now upload pictures of “avatars” to user’s to work out who’s who quicker. Keeping track of your user’s can be a pain, but with this build your able to upload a picture to user as an avatar on the people view and soon maybe the inventory and helpdesk view so at a glance you know who you are dealing with.
• Bug: Importing from AD into People View fails if LDAP connection does not work – fixed
• You are not able to delete people from the people view at the moment but this is planned for a future build.
• One thing I didn’t like about the people view is the location of the edit button, it took me a couple of minutes to find it but once found its in a nice location but maybe need to be made more visible as I can see a lot of people missing it when they first look.

The people view is really coming along well and over time it will be a great way of managing your user and their desktops.

Purchasing

Another great addition to Spiceworks 5.0 is the purchasing area to help you manage what’s you are buying and who for. In this release you can:

• Add new purchases from both the purchases and inventory pages.
• You can now tab between the fields on the purchasing page, before it jumped all over the place, this build its nice and smooth process.
• At the moment you still can’t delete purchases this is set to be in a future build.

Remote Helpdesk

The remote helpdesk feature has been enhanced to allow you to manage the tickets better when the central helpdesk is down. When the remote site detects that the central server is down or unavailable it holds all the email tickets until the connection is re-established. This ensures that all your tickets are processed and not lost of only visible at the remote site.

Plugins

By default there is a new widget, “Ink and Toner” this allows you to quickly see your toner / ink levels for printers, setup warning threshold’s and create purchases straight from the widget when needed. This will be very useful for companies finding it hard to keep track of toner/ink levels on multiple printers in lots of locations.

That’s all for now

Links

• 5.0 Beta V Build Now Available (5.0.55563)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Unofficial Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• People View
• Additional Plugin APIs

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.

When Spiceworks 5.0 is fully release we will hopefully see more people create some nice widgets / plugins for the portal. There are already a lot of people using iFrames to add things like weather, news and other bits and bobs, its going to be a very useful feature and we expect to see some awesome new creations.

Links

• 5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• People View

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.

If you already use the department field for user’s Spiceworks will recognise this and spilt your user’s up automatically for you, if you don’t everyone will just be put into the “no department” group for you to sort out if you so wish to do so.

The look and feel is no different from my last review for the people view but it feels so much better having all my user’s in there, I have some data to start looking at and playing with.

Although at the moment it doesn’t sync these changes back to active directory (it should do in the next beta drop) it’s still a great insight into just what you will be able to do with it in the future.

That’s about all I have to say about it for now, as it grows ill continue to let you know what the changes are and how you can use it to make your day easier.

Links

• 5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4