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.

‘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.

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

IT Service Providers are in an interesting position, many of them/us use Spiceworks ‘In-house’ like everyone else, but also use Spiceworks to make managing their/our Clients IT systems and infrastructure easier and more effective too.

A number of aspects of Spiceworks seem very well targeted at the ‘In-house’ use of Spiceworks and not always as well applied to management of outside, ‘Client IT’. One thing we noticed shortly after starting to use Spiceworks is how flexible and configurable Spiceworks is. Use of features like Custom Attributes, Language Packs, Remote Collectors and Ticket Rules, along with a number of other features can make Spiceworks even more useful for MSPs, as they do for ‘In-house’ users.

This is the first in a series of articles for Unofficial Spiceworks discussing how one small MSPs in Australia, uses Spiceworks with a few minor additions and changes to make their MSP business more efficient while providing their clients better service.

‘Use Spiceworks to record IT Services consumed, on-sold and provided directly to clients’

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