Unofficial Spiceworks

Following in our series of Spiceworks employee interviews I decided to bring it a bit closer to “home” for this month’s by talking to Oliver who is the Regional Manager Sales & Marketing guy for the UK.

What sort of thing do you do for Spiceworks over here in the UK?

I’am the Regional Manager Sales & Marketing UK at Spiceworks. Focus is very much on Sales so I am talking to IT vendors here in the UK and showing them how to reach a great audience – the Spiceworks usership. Furthermore, I’m involved in event organization, campaign planning, product development and whatever has to be done.

Are you looking forward to the UK Boot Camps?

Absolutely! Boot Camps are great occasions to connect with whom is most important for us – our users! Besides that it’s always nice parties afterwards.

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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.

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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.

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Last week Spiceworks announced a new feature “Ask the Expert” and with it drawing to a close tomorrow I thought I would do a quick review of how well it went.

Currently the group stands with 26 topics of which 15 are unanswered. That may seem like a lot of unanswered questions but if you have a scan though the unanswered questions page it’s all because the original poster hasn’t replied. Chris (Microsoft) has managed to reply to every question with a full and detailed answer and with 146 posts and just over 240 members in the group it appears to have been a success.

Although the group was not intended for SpiceHeads to get involved in both Billdozer and Justin.Davison managed to pull a best answer and helpful post out of the group as well just showing the power of the community and how people are ready and willing to help when ever they can.

Well done Chris though for getting a total of 8 best answers and 8 helpful posts.

Spiceworks are already starting to plan the next “Ask the expert” and unofficially we are expecting it to be with CDW about a wide range of products or CA about backup software. Only time will tell.

You still have one more day to get your questions in to Chris if you have any! So ask away on the community today! Before its to late! Ask The Expert: Chris (Microsoft)

Next Wednesday SpiceHeads have the chance to meet Jay Hallberg & the European team at 360IT.

Spiceworks is headed to 360IT – The IT Infrastructure Event on 22-23 September and GOOD NEWS – we are throwing an after show party for all SpiceHeads who are attending!

Join fellow 360IT attendees (& Spiceworks-users) for your chance to rub elbows with Spiceworks Vice President of Marketing, Jay Hallberg & the European team to receive exclusive insight on the future of the company, upcoming IT features, & more!

Read Ashley’s Post here

You will also get to meet me akp982!

Look forward to seeing a load of you there! If you can’t make it, make sure you checkout Unofficial Spiceworks on the 23rd for some pictures

Last week we found out some interesting information about the community and 5.0, a new look!!! But first lets go though the updates in last weeks release:

• HTML community notification emails – Some of the community notification emails will now be coming though in a HTML format these include PMs, deleted posts, whitepaper downloads, and best answers. These are designed to provide you more information in a nicer looking format and may soon be rolled out to all notifications including new topic and replies.
• Bug fixes for the new 5.0 community connection method – This allows you to go back and forth between the Spiceworks 5.0 beta and the community better.
• Search your Contributions – You can now search your contributions to help you find past answers you have given or gotten quicker.

• Unread tab for inbox – This allows you just to quickly see your unread messages quickly
• Ability to attach screenshots to Scripts – You can now attach screenshots / images to a script to help you show what it does/looks like easier.
• And of course plenty of other bug fixes!

New look coming soon

We have officially been that when Spiceworks 5.0 is released the community will also get the new interface.

Although we have not been officially given a mock up (they are still playing with the design) we have a very unofficial one on the right (click for larger image).

Some of the key things we think will be in this design are (these are all unofficial and not fully confirmed by Spiceworks):

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There back! Spiceworks’ own Spiceworld and Boot Camps!

Spiceworld 2010

This will be their 3rd annual user conference, happening October 21 – 22, 2010 in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas. It’s set to be bigger and better than the last two years with some great sponsors like Dell, Buffalo Technology, CDW and loads more.

Also this year Unofficial Spiceworks is an official “SpiceMedia” sponsor meaning we will be providing you all the latest news and information about from Spiceworld via some of the guests and the live stream. Checkout the other SpiceMedia sponsors here.

The most happenin’ IT conference around, SpiceWorld is where IT pros from all walks of life come together for 2 full days to:

• LEARN the latest practical IT trends, how-tos, best practices, & solutions.
• SHARE IT ideas, processes, advice & recommendations with other Spiceworks users.
• MEET & get 1:1 answers from Spiceworks product experts & leading IT companies.
• (Oh, and let’s be honest – EAT, DRINK & BE MERRY too!)

Get the best bang-for-your-IT-buck (& one heck of a deal given it includes food, drinks, fun…& cool swag) and register today!

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Last night announced the winners of the Spiceworks SpiceRex ad contest are:

Image ad: akp982

Text Ad: EDB

We had to adjust the copy a bit, so this is the final version that ran was as follows:

“Spiceworks does Network Management
…and 1 million IT pros would call it the best Network Management Solution in the world!
Spiceworks – IT’s EVERYTHING IT
DOWNLOAD NOW!”

Congratulations to both the winners!

Note: The criteria used for winning in both cases was most number of downloads from clicking on the ad. I can’t give out exact numbers, so that we don’t leak any data to our competitors

So what did they win?

• 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

Congratulations

EDB and akp982 (can I congratulate myself I wonder?) for winning!

Does mean we can now use our bragging rights to say we have been the first SpiceHeads to create a crowd-sourced ad– to be run on a variety of IT websites promoting Spiceworks.

Checkout the official News Story and Post by Nic.