Unofficial Spiceworks

Haven’t been testing Spiceworks 4.0? Well find out what’s coming up here, Screenshots and the latest news…

New more user friendly user interface

The current user interface is dated and needed updateing, Spiceworks 4.0 has done this perfectely, it has been redesigned from Scratch.

The key enhancements of the New interface are:

• All the pages now scrool naturally and do not have height limited.
• Using the latest technology pages do not fully reload speeding up Spiceworks.
• Inventory icon view shows you more items. The orange drop down gives you access to a drop down menu.
• The tabs on the left have moved to the top.

Global Toolbar

Spiceworks have now made a global toolbar which provides you with quick status of your network, from the number of tickets to the number of alerts.

This was done to make the information you need just a click away at all times making it even easier to get to the pages you need quickly.

Brand new Help Desk UI

Link the user interface the Helpdesk has been reworked in a major way. Its now quicker and easier to edit, update and create helpdesk tickets.

• Colour has been added to make it easier to tell a private message to  user message
• You can edit closed tickets to add time, change categories or update with new comments.
• Your purchase lists are now shown in new tabs, making it easier to look at when you want to and not clutter up your screen.

Help Desk Collaboration

Something everyone screamed about not having was the ability to cc in helpdesk tickets, so you can copy management level in and have multiple contacts to one ticket.

This has been answered in 4.0 you can add in CC’s and multiple addresses.

Tickets Anywhere

If you find updating tickets a real pain, tickets anywhere is here to help you.

Tickets can now be updated via email replies allowing you to special commands to work, close, re-assign tickets. This has been a long awaited feature and their is a big buzz around now being able to track every user request no matter how small.

Learn more.

New End User Portal

Another redesign from the Spiceworks team, the whole user end portal has been reworked to produce a more user friendly feature full and professional looking portal.

The new user portal in 4.0 will let you create new pages, new content areas, change colour schemes, and even re-arrange the layout of pages.

Live Search

If you find it hard to find things in Spiceworks don’t worry your not along, its not the best…

Spiceworks 4.0 promises a “Live Search” which will show the results as you type.

Network Map

Finally loads of promise but no show since 4.0…

The network map is finally out their the 4.0 alpha was the first build with the network map and is now being developed faster than a small boy running to ice cream.

The Visual Layout shows you your network and allows you to navigate (zoom, move, inspect) the information. The Mapping Engine determined the connections between the devices on your network. We need your help in making sure the mapping is working right for your set of switches, routers, etc.

Screenshots and information coming soon.

Want more information?

Why not checkout the Official Spiceworks 4.0 forum? http://community.spiceworks.com/group/show/321-spiceworks-4-0

Everyone who uses the community will have noticed that over the last 15/20 months the Spiceworks community has exploded in size. Passing 250,000 users in January 2008, since then the community decided to grow again now up to 650,000 users. Some stats from the Office Spiceworks blog: 36,000 IT topics with over 137,000 posts. 13,000 IT products rated, with over 3,500 reviews completed by 2,250 reviewers 400 discussion groups created by technology, industry, or location 383 shared reports by 270 authors 103 Spicelists (crowdsourced lists) created with 3,151 items, 11,662 contributors and 39,475 votes 63 plugins by 35 authors have been downloaded over 20,000 times

With all this growth Spiceworks has produced some great new community features. As you can see in the top right of this post they have now produced Spice badges, Spice levels and so many other small improvements its hard to mention.

With so many more features still in the working and new fun things being thought of the Spiceworks Community is set to continue to grow.

4.0 Alpha Build II is now available get the latest information and download it from: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/36454

Spiceworks 4.0 is getting bigger and better… The bugs are being crushed into the floor and the new features are being tidied up.

Download SW 4.0 now

So you’ve heard and seen Spiceworks but what does it do for you?

Spiceworks allows you to manage “Everything IT for free” anything that is networkable you can manage for free.

SW provides you with a complete network inventory off all your networked hardware and software. It will then keep an eye on your network with its powerful network, exchange and license monitoring systems. Allowing you to quickly pull of reports about your system keeping you up-to-date with the changes that go on.

Then the biggest god send to IT people, it integrates a full helpdesk designed for IT guys, link tickets to devices to find fault machines quicker and let your users login via a user portal to update and create tickets.

Once you have the hang of using the software you can dive into the HUGE community of questions, reviews, advice and just plan fun.

Just over a month since 3.5 was released 3.6 pops its head out the Spiceworks HQ…

Bringing with it some 50 improvements and bug fixes, the biggest of which is the Speed increase.

With more than 600,000 people using Spiceworks and the community it was bound to happen that people would have huge networks in which Spiceworks cannot test with, so working with the users Spiceworks has managed to find thing that can speed up and tidy up making 3.6 the fastest yet…

Spiceworks 3.5 released last night promises to be the best yet, with many feature and speed improvements.

One of the major changes was the “device limit” being raised from 250 to 500 devices, of course their is no real limit some people have 2000/3000 devices on their network, its the recommended current max for Spiceworks.

With every version the “limit” goes up.

Of course this was not the only change…

• Network Bandwidth analyzer – Spiceworks now has a SNMP network Bandwidth analyzer to help you find network bottle necks and issue.
• Nagios Integration - If you use nagios on your network Spiceworks has become a closer friend,  Spiceworks now sports full Nagios integration
• Custom SQL reporting – Want to make custom reports? Now you can write your own SQL based report, the reporting facility is now endless.

Spiceworks 3.5 was in beta for over two months and five releases… with over 2,000 testers! It was worth it in the end.

Spiceworks is the best IT management solution around. Its free now and will remain free.