Unofficial Spiceworks

The community has just seen a new feature lunched called “Ask the Expert”, this new feature is in basic a forum for you to ask questions direct to experts in that field. The first of this new and exciting new feature in the form of getting help with all your Microsoft Licensing queries from Chris Le Texier. Chris is a Technical Consultant/SI at Microsoft Inc. he has a wide knowledge of all Microsoft Licensing and will be on hand for a whole week to help you get the right licensing for your business.

Chris Le Texier has been a member of the Spiceworks Community since 2008, and this week (9/8/10-9/16/10) he’ll answer all of your Microsoft Licensing questions right here. If you’ve ever had a licensing question that you’ve never gotten a chance to ask, this is your week!

Chris (Microsoft) has been working for Microsoft close to 5 years. As a Senior Project Manager, he supports the LAR (large account reseller) and DISTI (distributors) community for the Windows Client OS in presales and licensing. He also supports Windows Client OS, SA, MDOP & Windows VDA. Chris has his own Partnercast series on the Microsoft Partner Network, and is an MSCE, MSCA and MCP.

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In the future Spiceworks will be getting other vendors like Rackspace, CA and HP involved so that you can get questions answered by experts in those area as well.

Checkout the community group “Ask The Expert: Chris (Microsoft)” now and get your questions ready for tomorrow.

So you may have seen that Tabrez and Cole were interviewed by Tightwad Tech for their podcast series. Check out the podcast here, its worth a listen to.

But did you spot that Jay Hallberg was interviewed by ChannelLine recently?

The audio isn’t that great but is worth watching and trying to listen to.

• ChannelLine – Spiceworks Interview (1 of 2)
• ChannelLine – Spiceworks Interview (2 of 2)

Ashley recently announced the SpiceWorld 2010 poster contest:

In anticipation of SpiceWorld, the spiciest IT event of the year, our friends at CDW are hosting the 3^rd annual SpiceWorld Poster Contest. For our seasoned entrants, you know the drill – for those “newbies”, it’s time to put your design skills to the test and be entered to win an Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Edition!

Playing off of the SpiceWorld venue, The Alamo Drafthouse, a charmingly quirky movie house, your mission (if you choose to accept it) is to create a poster that encompasses the spirit of SpiceWorld and will be featured at the conference. Can’t wait to get started?!

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There have already been some great entries.

Check them all out and enter now on the community here.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Jenn (Unitrends) just announced the cool Unitrends website to show off all the adverts the community has made

What started off as a conversation about a funny looking ad has evolved into a contest to see who can do better. The creator of the winning ad will receive a $50 Visa gift card, a Unitrends swag bag, and their ad will run on Spiceworks!

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Good luck to all the contestants, you can checkout the entries on the community here
or on the unitrends ad contest page here

Yesterday I reviewed the latest Spiceworks 5.0 beta drop, but at the time could not get the active directory integration for the people view working.

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.

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Last night Nic announced  5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)

The fourth 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 has some major and exciting changes and throughout this article I will walk you though as many of them as possible (some of them need Rackspace services in which I do not currently have).

Interface

The first thing that will hit you when you open up this build of Spiceworks is the new interface, it has been near completely redesigned (it’s still being worked on and could change again). This new layout is designed to make Spiceworks easier to navigate as well as making it easier to view your data.

Rather than the navigation being down the side it’s now at the top in drop down style menus. These seem to work really fast and with the performance fixes in this new GUI clicking from page to page is a lot quicker even compared to the earlier beta.

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