Unofficial Spiceworks

The Spiceworks community has a new group, for the new Spiceworks 5.1 beta program that is starting soon.

We don’t yet have any details on what’s coming in this version but with lots of recent activity from shavlik on the community we may start to see some of the new patch management and monitoring that was announced late last year.

This is how ever only a minor release version so we are not expecting it to be the fully fledge system if it is in there. We do know there will be lots of bug fixes and a couple of minor improvements built in though.

Some features are also set to be removed. According to a post last year the “Old User Portal” and “Ticket Notification Templates – Template per Event” are going to be removed. This is to allow the developers to build better features.

More news as we get it but for now make sure you join the Spiceworks 5.1 Beta Group for the latest information.

Spiceworks are doing another spontaneous advert contest, following on from last years Unitrends Contest this year Lisa has found the current Peer 1 lets just say slightly “wrong” with some SpiceHeads like Rivitir laughing there heads off “ROFL! Spiceworks Advertising FAIL!”

Peer 1 have even put up an official blog post about this “Banner Ad Failure” which shows they have a sense of humour and are willing to engage there user’s.

The prize this time around is credit on the new advert and a Spiceworks T-shirt or the extra special plush SpiceRex.

Good luck to all those who enter and I hope I find time to get something in.

Enter on the community here!

Spiceworks are doing another Ask the Expert, this time on patch management. Jason one of Spiceworks’ close partners from Shavlik will be answering SpiceHeads questions about patch management for a whole week.

The last two ask the expert weeks went very well, you may remember them? The Microsoft Licensing one with Chris and CA Backup Questions one with Arun both ended up providing SpiceHeads with valuable answers which helped them with there job and implementing the correct solution.

This weeks Ask the Expert will also help the way Spiceworks evolves in the future as the questions are going to be watched by some of the team such as Tabrez to find out what we are doing, how we are doing it and what we find the hardest. All of this information will then help the developers with the upcoming shavlik integration.

As most of you are aware in an upcoming version we will be able to scan for missing patches and using shavlik’s online solution patch the machines remotely. We are currently unsure (as are the team working on the integration) on how this will work and if there will be any costs associated with it but as time moves on more details will come out.

So make sure you get your questions answered this week and help the team understand what you struggle with.

Jump on into the forum now.

Spiceworks have just announced what they will be doing about SpiceHead training this year. For the last two years they have done Spiceworlds and BootCamps in other countries like the UK, Germany and Italy.

Called “Spiceworks University”, or as Jen put it “Spice U” which sounds much better, they are the new BootCamps in which were held last year. The main difference is that all the training is provided by your fellow SpiceHeads or SpiceTrainers.

Hand-picked users from all over the world will be trained up by Spiceworks and provided with helpful materials to then cover topics like the Spiceworks Fundamentals, Intermediate Inventory and Intermediate Help Desk. As time goes on more topics will be added and harder sessions built.

Once they have all the training and are ready to go venues around the world will be picked and the trainers will rock up and teach you how to get the most out Spiceworks. It’s believed the trainers will also have contact with a Spiceworks employee during the events encase they get stuck on a question or just need a bit of a hand.

After attending the training, like the BootCamps, you will be provided a certificate to show you attended and probably a nice new shiny community badge.

Darren Schoen, David Scammell, and Justin Davison are the first three trainers and have already started to show off there talent at the South and Central Florid SpiceCorps last night. The team behind the universities picked some great beta testers and have been doing a great job in getting this all started.

We can’t wait to see what happens next and how the first sessions go, as soon as we have more information we will let you know

For more information checkout the official post on the community “Announcing Spiceworks University!” of course they don’t have the cool SpiceRex picture

Today is community manager appreciation day so we managed to track Spiceworks’ own community manager Nicholas Tolstoshev down for a quick interview. Nic does a great job ensuring the community is up working and me and Scott aren’t fighting too much.

• To start us off can you give us a quick overview of who you are and how you ended up working at Spiceworks as the community manager?
  The details of my life are quite inconsequential… very well, where do I begin?  My first job as a community manager was at Intuit on their QuickBooks community.  I started at Intuit in tech support, but then when a position opened up on their community team I jumped at it.  Most of my career prior to that was spent as a sysadmin at SMBs, which combined my interests of people and technology.  I had majored in both CS and psychology in college – I didn’t want a job that only fulfilled one of those interests.  Being a code monkey was too isolated, and doing clinical or research psych wasn’t technical enough.  Turns out that community manager for an IT community was the perfect marriage.  I should have seen the clues earlier in my life (hindsight is 20/20, right?   In high school I had interned at the National Institutes of Health.  It was there that I got my first Unix account with email and Usenet access.  When I wasn’t writing AWK scripts or playing Nethack, I spent all my time in the Usenet groups.
• What’s a typical day like for you as the Spiceworks community manager and what tools help you get though it?
  I come in every morning to a full inbox which I empty (I earned my zero inbox merit badge! http://www.nerdmeritbadges.com/products/inbox-zero)  Once I’ve cleared that out, read all the discussions I’m keeping track of, answered all user inquiries and requests from my coworkers, I update my daily to-do list (go GTD!)  The rest of my day will either include some meetings with Tabrez & the community dev team, working on projects such as interviews, contests, planning new community features, and keeping track of SpiceRex.  Then I’ll write answers to interview requests (good lord, will the questions never end?   At the end of the day I do my daily moderation, which includes reviewing all the new topics for the day, the new profile pictures uploaded (we get some interesting ones) and all the posts by rule-following challenged.  In between all that I manage to squeeze in some time in the IRC.
• Every job has it’s challenges, what ways does the community challenge you?
  Two major ways:  Spammers (or anyone who wants to abuse the community for their own benefit), and dealing with flamewars.  Both of those can make it hard for me to keep my cool, as I’m passionate about protecting the community for the benefit of the greater good.  I have to remind myself to not misattribute the intentions of everyone involved.  99% of the time there is no bad intention, just ignorance of the rules.  Mostly I have to educate people rather than scold them.

Read More…

First off I must start by saying sorry for the lack of posts, silly work getting in the way. Now on to the main event…

A couple of days ago Yasaf Burshan who already runs SpiceworksLounge.com a dedicated Spiceworks blog for Hebrew speaking SpiceHeads launched another new and exciting website called SpiceworksTutorials.com in which provides free Spiceworks tutorial videos and how-tos for everyone to read and learn from. Regardless of your pepper level, they have a tutorial for you.

Yasaf has started the site of well with 6 awesome videos including:

• Embed Customer Satisfaction Survey in the End-User Portal
• Link IT Service and Asset Together
• Using the Tools Feature

All of the videos are very well made and simple to follow, it really is a testament to how far one person will go to help a company out who has helped him out so much. Spiceworks really is the key to a lot of networks and the user’s really appreciate the time and care the support team put in.

And of course SpiceRex makes an appearance on the site in a few places…

Make sure you check it out! http://www.spiceworkstutorials.com/

The Spiceworks BootCamp in Manchester started and like yesterday is set to be a great event at another great venue.

Hi to all those here and hopefully get a chance to chat to a few of you during the breaks.

Spiceworks iPhone app update

Spiceworks recently unveiled details for the new mobile network monitoring and help desk iPhone app. Check out the latest information and view a few early screenshots (although they may change significantly by the time the app is released).

In the community you may now have noticed a in the bar at the bottom of the screen? This is the link to the Spiceworks iPhone application beta signup.

We need beta testers, but not just any beta testers. The best-of-the-bunch. The few, the proud, the dedicated who’ll go above-and-beyond to beta test in a way that’ll shape the future of “everything IT” mobility.

Read more

This is very exciting there is no current date for when the signed up users will get a copy but we are told it should be this month. Read more about the iPhone app here or on the sign up page.

Places are limited so…

Join the beta now

***Spiceworks iPhone app update

Spiceworks recently unveiled details for the new mobile network monitoring and help desk iPhone app. Check out the latest information and view a few early screenshots (although they may change significantly by the time the app is released).