Unofficial Spiceworks

Spiceworks 5.2 is on the way!!!

There has been a official alpha release. The main thing / only real thing we have seen so far with this release is the new Cloud Services features.

Cloud Services will help you manage your off-premise inventory. This includes discovering and scanning providers for services like your ISP, domain registrar, hosted email, cloud servers, and cloud storage.

Read more here

It also appears that there will be some near real time website + ISP monitoring so you can keep an eye on your hosted website and or your internet connection.

As soon as we have more details and some “working” screenshots we will post At the moment were waiting for some bugs to be fixed… As you expect.

At the moment the alpha is NOT being released to the public so don’t request a download/link. When its ready it will be posted in the 5.2 beta group.

So the Spiceworks iPhone Application came out a while ago but I wasn’t able to post much or do much with it as well… I don’t like apple… Plus android is the way forward. This time around though will be different! I have and LOVE my HTC Desire with custom rom, fish and now the all important Spiceworks app! Also just to warn you, while writing this I was a little hyper… it shows…

The Spiceworks Android App is on its way and I have a copy… I have been warned and need to warn you guys before I start this is an INTERNAL build I have managed to get hold of, the UI is not what it will be when its finished, some of the stuff will change and I think there will a lot of improvements on what it does at the moment. For now its a very basic very powerful and quick way to browser and update some of your data on the move.

Personally though… even in the state its in I LOVE IT! I even delayed going to sleep last night to play with it and today I haven’t put it down. If I could have one thing on my phone, this would be it.

Anyway you don’t want to hear me witter on you want to see it and get a feel for it!

Read More…

So its been a manic time again at work so I haven’t managed to keep the blog as up-to-date as possible but things have got a little better and with the long weekend just gone I’ve managed to get roughly back on top of things. So ill stop wittering on now and get on with the real thing.

Spiceworks 5.1 was released earlier this week and is packed full of new features, speed improvements and changes. Like previous versions of Spiceworks this one is packed full of new features and shows even more how the team are aiming to help you manage your whole environment from one place.

Its out and its big

There are loads of new features and changes two many to write about in one blog post, you can get the full release notes on the community here. The application and the community goes from strength to strength with every update. With the recent $25million in funding we can expect to see bigger, better features built even quicker now.

The new Spiceworks HQ has a huge amount of room for a much larger staff base to ensure all the stuff we as SpiceHeads want gets built and gets built right.

RackSpace Cloud

One of the key things you will see the Spiceworks Application do more of is allow you to manage cloud services. We have seen this with the RackSpace email and more recently the Google Apps integration and now you are also able to manage your RackSpace Cloud services. Once you have setup Cloud services as a new IT service you are able to create and see basic information about your servers. This is neat but one of the even nicer features of this is the ability to backup your install to the cloud via RackSpace to ensure your inventory, ticket and people information is backed up ready for you to restore if you should ever have the need.

The ability to route email alerts though the community

When the team where looking at what people had problems setting up, using and getting to grips with they noticed that some people wanted/needed the email alerts to work without having there own SMTP server. For this reason the developers built in the functionality to be able to route the emails up to the “community cloud” and back down to your email account. Of course in doing this all your data is still kept safe it is only the email with very basic information that is sent.

Automatic updates

One of the problems at the moment is if there is a security whole or a major problem getting people to perform updates can be a pain, Spiceworks’ awnser is to build in auto update functionality. This allows the team to quickly deploy updates to patch problems before they become a major issue *cough* PlayStation network *cough*. This isn’t as bad as you may think don’t worry! If your on version 5.1 and version 6 is out you wont be forced to update to 6, they will just patch 5.1 and deploy an update for 5.1 user’s… So I believe anyway. Only time will tell how this feature is used but if you have any problems with it the support team will be more than happy to help you get it fixed don’t worry!

Ticket Merging

With 639 people wanting the ticket merging feature request it was something people desperately wanted to get down the amount of helpdesk tickets they have open…

Its a very simple sounding function but has a huge complexity added on how people expect and want it to work. There were so many options but as always the guys went out, talked to people, got feedback and implemented what is a great solution.

Merging tickets is really easy, go to the duplicate ticket in the helpdesk, click “close as duplicate”, select the master ticket and then merge and close.

When they are merged all the info from the duplicate is put into the master and any replies are sent direct to the master. It works really well and I have already found its really useful.

Multi-threading Support

Another one of the feature I’m excited about is the new multi-threading support which is designed to help speed up the application when you have one or more user’s and when the network scan is running. Rather than having to wait for the other user’s command to finish being processed Spiceworks can now work on two things at once (it may end up being more if it works well and it looks like you can hack the config file already ). This means you can now use Spiceworks more in bigger more demanding environments.

People Information in User Portal

When user’s first login to the user portal (or they can click edit profile) they are shown a form to fill in there user profile information. They are able to complete basic forms like name, phone #s, job title etc. They are also able to upload a photo which you can then use to try and remember who is who. You are already able to upload photo’s in the front end of Spiceworks and using the new iPhone app. If you have AD sync on once the user has changed their information it is sync’d back to your Active Directory meaning users now have the ability to update there own name if spelt wrong, or change the job title with promotion.

One use I have found for this and will probably start to try and play with is making a dynamic distribution group for each team and allowing the user to go in and change which department they work for. In a company where people change job roles almost on a weekly bases from working on one account to another this will be a great time saver for many IT teams and the feature I’m probably second most excited about (after the multi-threading).

Network Utilization Graphs, Alerts and Reports

Another step in helping you manage troubleshoot and build a better network is knowing how much bandwidth is used and where. So Spiceworks have built in new utilization graphs, alerts and reports to help you locate bottlenecks, the top user’s and the problem areas on a wider range of devices. Windows and Mac devices which have been scanned with valid credentials should now have a new bandwidth utilization graph which shows you when they were busy. You can then setup alerts on this to notify you if a device uses a lot of bandwidth and so you can get a broader view of the traffic flow you can then report on it.

UPS Support

You can now scan UPS devices to keep an eye on your battery backup status, Spiceworks have already found out how valuable this is, after someone unplugged the UPS to test it and forgot to plug it back in before they went home. You can then monitor the health of the devices to ensure they are working correctly and will there when and if your power really goes.

S.M.A.R.T status

You can now check the S.M.A.R.T status of windows hard drives to help you protect against a failure before it happens. You can setup alerts so as soon as the S.M.A.R.T says there is a problem you get a notification email and an alert shows up on the Spiceworks dashboard. Helping your protect your data and sleep easier.

Thats it for now

But watch out for some information about the android app soon

So the Spiceworks 5.1 third beta was released 3 days ago and had around 25 changes and additions so following on from our first review here is our quick overview review of the latest and greatest beta.

One of the first things you will notice when you install the new beta is the new dashboard widgets bar to let you know about all the cool new preinstalled widgets you can add to any of your dashboards. These new widgets include:

• Google Apps – Manage your Google Apps services from your Spiceworks Dashboard
• UPS Supervisor -Easily dig into the details about power events and redundancy hardware on your network
• EMC Storage Advisor – Visualize your storage capacity needs over time
• Warranty Center – View workstation and server warranty statuses at a glance.
• Ink & Toner Center – Review all your printer ink levels at once

Merge tickets

One of the next major things you will notice is the ability to Merge duplicate tickets into a single ticket this has been a long awaited feature for some users and has taken Spiceworks a while to build it so that they build it right! Merging tickets can be a dangerous thing in regards to how the data is migrated and what to do with update etc… After lots of planning and talks with SpiceHeads the team finally came up with a way to do it and now within 5.1 you can merge tickets into one.

Merging tickets brings across all the needed information, the creator, all comments, related assets, purchases, and CC’d users are added to the new “master ticket”. Duplicate ticket attributes should not overwrite the master ticket’s attributes unless the duplicate ticket has higher priority, an earlier due date, or the master ticket is missing certain attributes.

Bug Fixes

Some minor bug fixes were also rolled out in this release:

• Timeline on manual devices in inventory errors out – fixed
• Text wrapping around to second line of cell when exporting report to PDF – fixed
• Network Utilization Graph – Graph not displaying for all WMI devices – fixed
• Connected to Port should show interface name and not just a number
• Create new scan error for devices that support config backup but have no associated accounts
• Support for Alcatel/Lucent Omniswitch
• Create auth error when no config backup accounts specified for supported device
• Add reporting columns for connected switch and port
• [Network Config Backup] – SSH scan error not being generated for Dell PowerConnects – fixed
• Improve the first inventory scan experience
• Proxy App Notifications through the Community
• Float values in reports displaying as currency – fixed
• Info message on the dashboard that new widgets are available
• UPS: Device cannot be attached to UPS that is already attached to a person – fixed
• Create UPS Connection for USB Attached UPS automatically
• Network devices that are backup/restore capable should assist the user instead of messaging them
• Combine multiple devices fixed from scan error alerts into single scan entry
• Helpdesk: Attachments in replies to notifications fail to attach in the next set of notifications – fixed
• Helpdesk: Only the first attachment is received in notification when multiple attachments are sent – fixed
• HTML Email Template: No Message on Ticket Closed – fixed
• Items under “Related To” no longer left-justified – fixed
• Exchange 2007/2010: Notifications with attachments included fail to send – fixed

Checkout http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/132609 for all the info on the third 5.1 beta

Some of you may have seen that at the recent SpiceRex Party the Spiceworks guys have had a nice new mascot costume made up. It’s great to see that SpiceRex has really become such a huge part of Spiceworks that they have created a costume of him.

The cardboard cut out is still slowly making its way around the world meeting the different SpiceHeads.

Checkout some of the other pictures from the party on the community here.

Yesterday was the first SpiceCorps Nottingham meeting which was a great success there were around 9 SpiceHeads who turned up to talk about various bits of Spiceworks from the new 5.1 beta to getting more out of Spiceworks and even how we ended up in IT.

SpiceCorps are a great way to get to meet people in your local area and we found out how much fun they can be with a pepper costume when we popped down to a Goth pub after.

You can checkout all the photos here.

Thanks stefuk for a great event. It was a good afternoon and was great to meet some new faces and say hi to people I had met before, and yes I did get lost trying to find my car after the event…

Hopefully we will continue to have meetings in Nottingham and around the UK to keep track of when and where the next one is pop into the SpiceCorps Of United Kingdom Group on the community.

The first Spiceworks 5.1 beta was released around a week ago and the second beta has just been released so its time I got a review of what’s new and coming up for the people who are unable to install it but want to see what its all about.

5.1 has around 14 new major features and countless minor ones we also finally say good bye to the old user portal and template per event email notifications.

Bit of a side-track but a cool story around the email notifications… The HTML email templates wasn’t ever a major feature request it was something one of the SpiceHeads came up with at a user event, one of the developers then went back to Spiceworks HQ and built it into the version of Spiceworks at the time. It was something that had not been previously thought off but has now provided so many user’s with the flexibility on the information included and design that would have been a bottle neck of the helpdesk for so many users. The way that a user can mention something that no one has thought about but would make the application that little bit better, for then a developer to go off on his own and built it is what makes it so successful. Unofficial Spiceworks even made some alternative templates for people to use. Anyywaaaayyy back onto the review I think…

For a minor version release (a major version for Spiceworks is .0 or .5) its packed full of new features and some of them aren’t that small. One of the big ones I’m excited about is the “Multithreading Support” so lets dive straight in with that:

Multithreading support

A major bottleneck for previous versions has been the single threading for the database and webserver, each users request would stack up behind another user’s and the webserver could end up becoming unresponsive or very slow. The updates to the webserver and database mean that more user’s can work on tickets, the inventory or the people view at one time.

If you have more than one user or are a power user you should see major speed improvements, if like me its just you that normally uses it then you probably wont see any difference but will allow you to grow or multitask better.

Ink and Toner Center Widget Updated

Built into 5.0 the widget now has a new trending feature, which once there is enough data you can click a new “analyse link” to view a graph of the changes. This could and will prove useful when trying to track when toners are used the most so that you can build up a in house stock or simple working out when all the toner disappeared to track who may have used it.

Google Aps Integration

I don’t have Google apps for business so can’t comment on how well it works but its based on the same lines as the recent RackSpace integration you are able to check and even report on your users and mailboxes setup within your Google apps account.

Read More…

Spiceworks launched their “new” vendor pages back in January with the community update on the 25th at this time it was released as more of a beta feature (the community is riddled with beta features a quick count shows there are still 4 but that’s another post). Between then and a few days ago with the March community update the team of developers and designers have been working hard to improve the layout and look of these pages to increase uptake on this new feature. All of the hard work paid off and the official press release was published today.

With vendors like Intel, Rackspace and Windows7 (although I don’t technically agree Windows7 is a vendor…) Spiceworks is slowly becoming what a lot of people are calling “the future of media”. With over 1,300,000 SMB SpiceHeads using the community or application it is a great way for vendors to reach out to sometimes what are the forgotten market. Although no official stats have been released by the amount of time and effort some companies like RackSpace put into the community they must be seeing good enough returns for there investments that its made worth while.

“Just like Facebook Pages did for consumer brands, we’re giving every technology company from big to small a way to have a presence within the world’s largest social business network for IT professionals,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “We’re also making it easier for our users to do their jobs by connecting them with the tech brands they depend on – all while using Spiceworks.”

“As Spiceworks continues to transform IT in a social way, it’s expanding our reach in terms of how we build and maintain relationships with our customers,” said Lauren McCadney of CDW. “With Spiceworks Vendor Pages, we have a highly relevant social channel to serve both new and existing clients, while showcasing our value to over a million small business IT professionals who are current and potential buyers of our products and services.”

If your a IT pro make sure you checkout and follow your favourite vendors on the community and IT vendors don’t forget you can setup your own page for free here.