Unofficial Spiceworks

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 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”

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.

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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Yesterday Spiceworks announced the release of Spiceworks 5.0 beta 1.

Checkout the Spiceworks 5.0 group for more information.

Unofficial Spiceworks will be doing a full review of the beta(s) soon