Unofficial Spiceworks

As everyone should be aware by now the SpiceWorks European BootCamps are coming in just under a week!

The BootCamps are hands on training provided by two of the great Spiceworks Employees, Tabrez Syed the first employee and Vice President of Products and David Babbitt the Technical Project Manager. Ashley Connell the Marketing Communications Coordinator will also be attending to ensure you get your badges and be on hand to help answer your questions on Spiceworks. I can’t confirm this for the Germany or Italy BootCamps but Oliver the Regional Manager Sales & Marketing guy for the UK will be attending both the London and Manchester events.

These mini one day training sessions on Spiceworks are different from the larger SpiceWorld’s held in Austin, Texas as they are purely based on getting to know your peers and learning more about the tool that can make “Everything IT” easier.

Last year the team came to London and it turned out to be a great event followed by a great after party.

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There back! Spiceworks’ own Spiceworld and Boot Camps!

Spiceworld 2010

This will be their 3rd annual user conference, happening October 21 – 22, 2010 in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas. It’s set to be bigger and better than the last two years with some great sponsors like Dell, Buffalo Technology, CDW and loads more.

Also this year Unofficial Spiceworks is an official “SpiceMedia” sponsor meaning we will be providing you all the latest news and information about from Spiceworld via some of the guests and the live stream. Checkout the other SpiceMedia sponsors here.

The most happenin’ IT conference around, SpiceWorld is where IT pros from all walks of life come together for 2 full days to:

• LEARN the latest practical IT trends, how-tos, best practices, & solutions.
• SHARE IT ideas, processes, advice & recommendations with other Spiceworks users.
• MEET & get 1:1 answers from Spiceworks product experts & leading IT companies.
• (Oh, and let’s be honest – EAT, DRINK & BE MERRY too!)

Get the best bang-for-your-IT-buck (& one heck of a deal given it includes food, drinks, fun…& cool swag) and register today!

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I don’t normally cover new staff starters at Spiceworks as to be honest there not normally interesting, but this one is different!

We see the move from SpiceHead to SpiceLord, Cole1436 (Cole Lakes) or as the IRC and a fair few people know him the monkey man. He will be taking up the post of Software Support Engineer which will hopefully provide quicker support, not sure it will end up being better support? Only time will tell I suppose.

To be able to take the job Cole is moving from Montana to Spiceworks HQ in Austin, which means the beloved SpiceRex is going to be back at HQ for some more beer before he takes his next trip off to San Antonio with Slava.

Congratulations monkey man, I’m sure you’ll have a great time at Spiceworks HQ. Wonder how long it will be before they have to ban you from the IRC though…

Spiceworks last night announced the agenda for the SpiceWorld 2010 in Austin Texas, this year is set to be bigger and better than last year with some cool new ideas being tried out as well as the removal of the Spiceworks basic’s sessions.

The Spiceworks basics sessions have been taken out of the SpiceWorld and moved “Spiceworks Boot Camps” like the one in Austin as well as free online training sessions though webinars. This is so that the real event can be filled with more stuff that you want to see and hear things like new features in 5.0, to Virtualization talks from Spiceworks Partners.

They have kept in one of the great things from last year getting some of the SpiceHeads and “Community Rockstars” like Scott Alan Miller to take to the stage and present some topics like “Security Essentials for the SMB IT Network (on a Shoestring Budget!)”.

It looks like an action packed couple of days, you can checkout the full agenda on the Spiceworks website here.

Need help finding the budget? Checkout the topic need help getting approval/budget to go to SpiceWorld? on the Spiceworks community, lots of people shared ideas last year.

Don’t forget there are only 200 places and around half of them have already gone. So make sure you register before its too late!

Checkout our posts about SpiceWorld 2009 and of course Unofficial Spiceworks will be updating you as we get more as well as providing you all the gossip from the event well from the live stream at least.

On Friday, June 11th at 12:30pm CST Spiceworks are throwing a virtual party!

It’s not every day you make history. So we figured this was more than a good excuse to throw a big ‘ole party – Spiceworks style! And we want as many of you as possible to join us for the fun and festivities – no matter where in the world you are! So grab a drink, put on your Spiceworks gear and tune in to party with us here in Austin on Friday, June 11th at 12:30pm CST.

More info on the Spiceworks.com/million/stream

With some great talks from the staff at Spiceworks to start with and then going into “Beaming In SpiceHeads from Around the World” where you will get to listen to a quick interview with some of the SpiceHeads from around the world including me (akp982) all of this will be streamed to the million SpiceHeads!

Make sure you check it out!

So one weekend I enter the Spiceworks “Show the world your Spiceness” contest with some standard things to start with. Just bits and bobs I found around the office like a moose head and a random set of oversized batteries.

After a while I ran out of ideas and wanted to come up with something new and exciting, I started to think back about things I had done and seen before as well as doing a Google of bits and bobs.

Getting creative

I got creative and along came the SpiceVan failing to get peoples avatars into the windows of the bus I just stuck some logos on it.

Not very exciting, and well not as good as I hoped I tried something else.

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The ups and downs of working with social media my experiences with Spiceworks

First off… This isn’t really all Spiceworks related but just had the idea for a post along these lines and Spiceworks-News is about the only place I could put it. It is however all based on my experience with Spiceworks.

So everyone knows what social media is now days? And that big buzz word of “web 2.0” and companies like Spiceworks are starting to exploit it to market there products and IT conferences like Spiceworld. Places like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg and Ustream are regularly used.

So what do I think are the advantages and disadvantages of Social media and networking…

The ups (Advantages)

There are many pro’s to social media and well they do outweigh the downs.

A great example of this was at Spiceworld 2009 Austin, I (akp982) was about to receive a Spicies award when Justin Dorfman (from Frugal IT) had the idea of using Skype to allow me to give my acceptance speech. I ran around and got a microphone ready and he ran off to the Spiceworks Staff to hand him his laptop which got pushed onto stage. This was great, I was watching the live stream though Ustream and also talking live to the presenters. It was a very weird feeling I was in the UK and talking and watching people in the US. Without the Ustream chat to get me on skype with Justin and without skype for allowing us to make a “call” it would not have been possible. It was organised so quick the presenters were shocked to hear that I was ready to talk to them.

Social media mainly things like twitter can really help promote your products very quickly by telling lots of people instantly. When Spiceworks 4.1 was released it was mentioned by over 100 people on twitter and Spiceworks are expecting more people to spread 4.5 when it comes out. From this people will quickly write reviews to jump on the back off this and give their blog or website a boost in traffic and hope for some regular readers. Frugal IT is and example of a site that did well at this with there Spiceworld 2009 coverage (http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009) they were able to get multiple people to tweet, blog and just share their link. With this link spread all over the world, people would then visit the site pickup on the ads and information around the Spiceworld page and may then come back in the future. I know we (Spiceworks-News) jump on even the oddest of things. We often pickup on blog posts about or mentioning Spiceworks and re post the first paragraph in hope for a ping back. Posts like (Getting IT spicey at your church) got a ping backs out there and we may have got another 1/2 visitors (they all add up over time to now around 300 people looking at Spiceworks-News on a daily basis according to Google analytics… if only some of them posted comments).

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Click here to checkout all our Spiceworld2009 posts.

Missed Spiceworld 2009? Why not checkout all off Spiceworks-New’s Spiceworld 2009 posts.

There are so many cool things going on, we tried to post about them, from the live streams to just funny tweets we got abit of everything.

Spiceworks-News is already setup ready to start posting about Spiceworld London (http://www.spiceworld2009.com/london/) want to help us out? Well be there but we want some extra tweeters and posters to try and make it bigger and better than Spiceworld Austin.

Some people on twitter said the virtual event was just as good as being there thanks to the tweets and chats. Lets do the same for London and make Spiceworks want to come back.

Our Spiceworld2009 posts

Checkout some of the feedback

“Not only were the sessions very informative and fun, I also enjoyed the opportinuty to meet so many amazing people. Coming to Spiceworld truly gave me a better understanding of how close our community is. Scott Abel’s welcome keynote gave me goosebumps and motivated me to want to be even more active.” merlinpr in the community

“Loved it! Great info, great food, great “peer interaction”. I loved getting to meet so many SpiceHeads in person. I have noticed that when I read posts now I do so in the voice of the person that wrote it. Definitely worth more than the price I paid to go. ” SCAdmin in the community

More feedback on the community here