Unofficial Spiceworks

With Spiceworks 5.0 still in beta it may surprise you to hear that some reports and plugins are already being produced and shared for it.

Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) (checkout his blog posts) is one of the first to start making reports. Aimed at the MSP market it allows you to see what you have purchased for your customers within the last 30 days. A very useful report to track what you have sold to who.

Purchases by Customer for 30 days (Spiceworks 5.0 Beta 3 and later)
Our first offering of a report written for Spiceworks 5.0 (Note: this report relies on tables and fields only available from version 5.0 and higher).

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So pop on over to the reports section of the community and download it now.

Following on from the “Spiceworks SpiceRex advert contest” Spiceworks have “teamed up” in a VERY spontaneous way with Unitrends to make another advert, you may have noticed a day ago Nic (Spiceworks) posted up “Spontaneous contest to design a Unitrends Ad” in the Spiceworks News area of the community:

What started off as a conversation about a funny looking ad has evolved into a contest to see who can do better. Take your best shot at making an ad for Unitrends – the winner gets a $50 Visa gift card, a Unitrends swag bag, and their ad will get run on Spiceworks.

Enter here! Entries have to be in by the end of August.

There have already been some GREAT entries into the competition. Make sure you enter as well.

So make sure you enter now for your chance to win $50 on a visa gift card!

Checkout the other entries and enter here

Following on from last months interview with Kris (Spiceworks), this month Unofficial Spiceworks cornered the first Spiceworks employee Tabrez Syed:

What moment made you feel the proudest to be part of Spiceworks?

Gosh! I’ve been fortunate to have many an occasion when I’m proud of what we (employees and users) have done together. For eg: It really makes my day when I see a thread in the community where every one (sometimes even a partner) pitches in with their opinion to help solve a problem.  If I had to pick one moment then it would be when I read an excerpt of an upcoming book on communities that profiles Spiceworks (http://gillin.com/blog/2010/05/the-power-of-b2b-communities/). The author says: “Spiceworks represents the best of what B2B communities can accomplish.”

To receive a praise like that is definitely a nice feeling

What feature are you most excited about in Spiceworks 5.0?

Spiceworks 5.0 is going to be our biggest and most exciting release to date. Earlier this year our CEO Scott posted (http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/85775) news about how we received funding to accelerate the rate at which we develop the product. Since the beginning of the year lots of great folks have joined our team. 5.0 represents the first major release of all the hard work they’ve put in.

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The SpiceRex “Contest to create An Advert!” has been running for two weeks now and with only 6 days left its getting hot with some great designs coming though.

If you enter into the competition and win you could get:

Top 5 Finalists (in each category):

• A cool, limited edition SpiceRex t-shirt (commemorating 1 million users)

Grand Prize Winners (in each category):

• 1-foot custom created cut-out of SpiceRex (he’ll stand on your desk!)
• SpiceWorks Ultimate Swag Bag (which will include a SpiceRex t-shirt!)
• Bragging rights as creator of Spiceworks first ever crowd-sourced ad– to be run on a variety of IT websites

The contest is already hot with some great entries like:

But just look at how awesome this one is from Striker090871 who took special care to change out some of the banners in a New York scene with Spiceworks ones as well as giving SpiceRex special powers.

Checkout his entry fully on the Spiceworks Community Here.

So what are you waiting for?

Checkout the rules and enter now!

‘more than you might first think!’ by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252)

One of the Spiceworks features often undervalued or overlooked is the ‘Community’. For many MSPs, IT Service Providers generally and particularly small or one man (person) shops there can be a feeling of relative technical and social isolation. This feeling is also common for many IT Pros, even if they are in quite large businesses. There is commonly an attitude from the user base that the ‘IT folk are a breed of their own’ (rightly so too, in most cases).

The Spiceworks Community is a great group of like-minded IT Pros, all very friendly and encouraging each other’s efforts both in IT and elsewhere. There are often spirited debates and conversation in the community, both technical and social, but always good natured and in the best spirit. If the conversations ever get out of control or strays outside the community guidelines, Nicholas Tolstoshev (Nic (Spiceworks)), Spiceworks super-efficient community manager is there to get things back under control.

Sharing is another great benefit of the community. Answers, Reports, How-tos, Ratings and Reviews, Articles from other sources, methodologies, tips and techniques are shared freely by most community members for the benefit of all. If you have an issue or problem you are having trouble resolving or just getting your head around, the community is sufficiently broad and in many cases experienced enough that someone somewhere in the global community will have either the answer you are looking for or suggestions to get you on the trail of a solution very quickly.

For those of us who experience those feelings of isolation, having thousands of friends all round the world prepared and very willing to help is a wonderful thing and should not be undervalued.

Most Spiceheads have their own ways of navigating and using the community but one of the best places to get started is the Community page. From here you can catch up on the Featured Conversations, What’s New in the Community, Spiceworks News, Upcoming events, Top Contributors, Recent Reviews and more. Most of these sections link to their own pages revealing even more useful or interesting information.

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The “SpiceKing” of everything MSP in Spiceworks Lawrie5252 has just created a nice post on the community about how the new features in 5.0 will be a great help for MSP’s:

I guess by now most of you are aware ‘Spiceworks 5.0 beta I‘ has been released for community testing. Wow isn’t it good?

I wanted to make a little feature for you about the changes in 5.0 beta targeted at MSPs and Service Providers generally.

Firstly and most outstanding of the new features would have to be the Multi-site Helpdesk feature. This is very specifically targeted at MSP although bigger…

Read the whole post on the community “Spiceworks 5.0 MSP accented features.”

Checkout his Lawries other posts on how MSP’s can get more out of Spiceworks here.

As some of you may have already seen Spiceworks recently announced that they support the OpenStack Project:

Today Rackspace and NASA announced the OpenStack Project, an open-source cloud platform. Along with 25 other tech companies we announced our support for the project. You can get all of the details on the Open Stack website and follow developments at @openstack on twitter.

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This announcement comes shortly after releasing the Spiceworks Reach program which is aimed to bring companies like Rackspace into the SMB (Small Medium Business) market though the community.

The OpenStack announcement is designed to do the same sort of thing, SpiceHeads are not normally going to be running networks with the complexity of NASA or Rackspace but can still largely benefit from cloud technologies and solutions. As many will know the Spiceworks’ mission is to “simplify everything IT for the world’s SMBs” and managing IT in a hybrid cloud/premise world is increasingly part of that.

By participating in the OpenStack project the Spiceworks team are able to look into the future and start to think about new and exciting ways to manage cloud apps from Spiceworks as well as providing the management solution first. Last week co-founder and CTO Francis Sullivan and some developers went to the OpenStack Design Summit to get a sneak peak and start to learn about the product(s). They have already come up with some “interesting ideas” on how they can implement it.

With some great cloud based integration already in Spiceworks including Rackspace Hosted Email and Dell and HP warranty the development team have proven they can already quickly and effectively integrate with cloud solutions, the OpenStack project will only add to this and help bring large enterprise solutions to the small and medium businesses quicker, easier and cheaper.

Read Jay’s write up on the community for more information.

‘more than you might first think!’ by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252)

IT Service Providers have needs not dissimilar to those of IT Departments in medium to large organisations where costs and time need to be attributed to the departments or cost centres, for MSP this is Customers.

Being able to track and account, also attribute these costs is critical to MSP business profitability, in order for accounting and invoicing to be adequately attributed and reimburse all costs associated with delivering services to clients. The second part of this attribution of costs is derived from accurate and detailed record keeping. For many MSPs this can be difficult to get and get right.

As described in the previous article, MSPs doing more with Spiceworks – Part 1, there was extensive use of Custom Attributes to make changes to IT Services to enhance record keeping. Likewise, in this article Custom Attributes are a critical part of the methodology to enhance the cost accounting and record keeping through Helpdesk operations. This plays heavily, once again, on one of the great features of Spiceworks for MSPs, the configurability and versatility of Spiceworks. Out of the box Spiceworks has many excellent features and functions, but the ability to make a few customisations to further enhance Spiceworks usability and enhance functionality is a unique and valuable aspect of Spiceworks, not just for MSPs but IT Pros all over, wanting to do more with less and make their IT day easier.

At the heart of this week’s article is another useful How-to: Tracking Costs for Service, Repairs & Maintenance using Spiceworks. This How-to is written from an MSP point of view, but the principal and methodology can be usefully deployed for monitoring and accounting departmental costs in a larger business or individual businesses costs too.

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