Unofficial Spiceworks

So its now the 2nd or third morning I have woken up to find my twitter flooded with tweets about the funding Spiceworks recently got. Ones like

Spiceworks CEO on the Future of IT Jobs and His Company

Got me thinking Unoffiicial Spiceworks hasn’t done anything on our thoughts about the funding?

The funding has been talked about a lot recently from when it started on TechCrunch which lead it to be mentioned on twitter over 500 times as well as all the other smaller blogs then twitting about it.

Spiceworks have said they will be adding new staff to the current team which is at the moment 45 strong. The new team will be split over marketing and development.

The new marketing team are from what I have seen mentioned going to be looking for new fun and exciting ways to market Spiceworks.

The marketing team have always had a funky way of advertising like the IT Comedy videos the new team will have to find new and cool ways. They will also be working on getting more vendors and people to attend SpiceWorld’s but its the development team I’m most interested in.

I think the enlarged development team will start looking at two main things:

• Real time monitoring – We have already started to see this with the SQL monitor plugin, and just released the Device Uptime Plugin this will bring a new set of users into Spiceworks and start to compete on a better level with tools like nagios. In doing that there will have to be some major stability changes, everyone knows about how stable nagios is when started but Spiceworks does have a small reputation for being unstable at times.
• Making it more mobile – This is reinforced by gigaom.com and some Spiceworks staff in conversations about how the community will become more mobile with a simple version for mobile access and maybe the possibility to update topics via email… We have also seen a lot of rumours in the past about apps for blackberry and the iPhone so hopefully we will see these come true.

Once or probably during those are being made the Feature Request section is going to be hammered and new features pulled out, probably starting with ones like Merge tickets to break them into how the codebase and database works before diving in and building things like the much wanted Knowledge Base.

These are only my thoughts from conversations I have had with some team members, its Spiceworks, nothings confirmed. What they think is good at the time they will roll with… For all we know we could see version 5.0 be rebuilt from scratch.

Hmm… Im not the best at article writing really am I…

Don’t know what Spiceworks is?

Download it now and find out:

You can now monitor the uptime of your servers, workstation, switches and well everything in Spiceworks.

The Device Uptime plugin will display a graph of how many devices are in the Inventory group, and how many of those devices are online.  Online devices are displayed in blue, and offline devices are displayed in Red

This is great to see as it means Spiceworks is starting to store, even if it is only per start up of Spiceworks, historical information meaning soon we will be able to produce reports for management about server uptime, or just how much the SQL server has been used recently.

Get the plugin now

This version just fixes some bugs in the code:

• Network Map: disconnecting a node, then clicking undo causes it to turn orange – fixed
• Network Map: Unable to save a view after adding devices – fixed
• Network Map: possible to make the delete popup relative to the mouse – fixed
• Remote Collector: Network scans will not run if the Remote Collector link is clicked and the setup is not completed – fixed
• User Portal: “ticket is too old to be reopened” typo – fixed
• User Portal: Allows view ticket block to be removed, which renders the page useless – fixed
• Looking at a device in browse view, then switching to software view and selecting a package does not update the display – fixed
• Using Date strings in relative format (e.g. 7 days from now) then clicking calendar button causes date errors – fixed

This does still mean we are awaiting 4.6 which has some new features ear wigged but we don’t know what yet.

Download 4.5.46618 now

There are 4 designs on there way from Unofficial Spiceworks

Just need to test them a bit more,want to help?

PM me on the community

Don’t know what the HTML Ticket Notification are? They were brought in to Spiceworks in v4.1.39854 and basically look the same across all Spiceworks installs. Read more about the nonfictions

So using email templates i have used internally and one i robbed from Spiceworks I have designed some new ones for people to use.

We have the Spiceworks Support one robbed from there support system, a orange one to wake up your users, a cool blue that looks clean and professional and a black and yellow which is used at HPS Group for internal IT updates.

Keep your eye on our twitter for more info

I’ve been trying to make a new HTML ticket design well its robbed from Spiceworks Support but shh don’t tell them…

Sneak peak

This started AGES ago and promised myself ill put it back into action after my Moving to a Virtual Environment post, the template is nearly ready to release but want a couple of people to test it out first… And also to get some feedback.

If your willing to lend a hand drop me a PM on the community and ill provide you full details.

If you know some HTML/CSS it will be a plus because its doesn’t look the nicest in OWA 2007 but then again nor did the original from Spiceworks.

You wont break Spiceworks and its 100% roll back proof

Woo, a nice long and detailed post by me for once, to go along side Real World SMB Security and hopefully some more posts soon I wrote about my move to a virtual environment.

I’m going to start off by robbing Adam’s (DigitalBlacksmith) first couple of sentences. "To start with I am not what you would consider a virtualisation expert. I don’t have any certifications, I don’t go to expensive seminars, and I haven’t had a lucrative virtualisation career."

…

Not having used any sort of server virtualisation before, I read some white papers and decided to test virtualising on a workstation first, and then an old server. I checked out various options for my test installation and ended up settling on VMware Vsphere4. It provided us with all the tools we needed to run the servers effectively as well as easily manage them.

…

I checked out the Spiceworks virtualisation whitepapers, lots of YouTube videos, and other online training resources. Over time I became more confident. I installed ESXi on an old server so I could play around and get a grip on all the different parts of it, before trying to install and implement on the real servers. I was surprised at how easy it was to install and setup VMware. It was up and running within 30 minutes, ready and waiting for me to do something with it.

Read more

Thanks to Nic (Spiceworks) for being a “grammar nazi” everyone knows by now mines not the best.

Want to write your own article? Just drop Nic a PM Would be great to see some more up in the From the Trenches of IT group.

Read Moving to a Virtual Environment on the community

Let start this off right

. 

Happy Birthday Arno (ObieOne)

Now on with the story. For his birthday ObieOne has released version 2.3 of the much loved and used Spiceworks MobileHelpdesk.

The mobile helpdesk allows you to view, edit and update tickets on nearly every mobile device from iPhone, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry. There have also been reports of it working on some nokia’s.

MobileHelpdesk uses Tickets Anywhere to allow you to remotely update your tickets as if you were at your desk, allowing you to quickly resolve problems on the go. Its simple to install and setup using .NET, IIS and a SQLite connector. Its easy to setup, and once ready you just surf to the website you setup, login and away you go.

So far ObieOne is very pleased with all the feedback he’s getting and he sure hope people will enjoy it.

Read on for the new features and bug fixes or download it now

Screenshots

New and fixed in version 2.3:

• Fixed several issue’s with the data adapters after the Spiceworks 4.5 upgrade. (un-assigned tickets page works again).

• Open tickets page now also view un-assigned tickets.

• Changed some typo’s in the web.config notes sections.

• Changed some typo’s and instructions, so the installation procedure is more clear.

• Issue fixed with User Details and Change Password screen crashing.

• Home page now shows actual un-assigned open tickets.

• Add comment now sends to the right #ticketID again.

• Edit ticket statics now sends to the correct #TicketID again.

All these fixes are implemented and tested with special thanks to Ben, Barb E, Mark J Gosling, Mike384 and Miiiki.

If you haven’t tried it, then go ahead and do.

Download the MobileHelpdesk from the community.

Jay has recently talked to mspmentor.net about Spiceworks, in the video he talks about:

0:00: Introduction
0:10: How Spiceworks serves MSPs and IT managers in SMB markets
0:35: How Spiceworks delivers free software
1:00: Spiceworks’ design, features and functions
1:40: Does Spiceworks have a sustainable business model?
2:00: Marching toward profitability
2:15:  What is Spiceworks’ goal for $16 million in new funding?
3:00: More Info
3:23: Conclusion

Read whole story http://www.mspmentor.net/2010/01/14/spiceworks-were-nearly-profitable/