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.

This year the team will be hitting up four locations in Europe:

• Frankfurt, Germany – 29th November – Sponsored by VMware it is set to be hosted at “BITKOM Servicegesellschaft” although I can’t read German so I can’t fully confirm this.
• Rome, Italy – 30th November – Sponsored by VMware and Aditinet this will be at the “Largo dello Scautismo (Roma Scout Center)”.
• London, UK – 2nd December – Sponsored by VMware and LogMeIn, this will be in the Cafe De Paris and will be the first chance of two to meet me akp982. Find out more about this event and join in the pre meet chat on the community 2010 BootCamp London or 2010 UK BootCamp QnA.
• Manchester, UK – 3rd December – No sponsor for this event but it will be hosted at Manchester United and will be the second chance me akp982. If you are going to attend why not chime in on the Spiceworks community 2010 BootCamp Manchester or 2010 UK BootCamp QnA.

Find out more about each event and register now on Spiceworks.com here, places are going fast!!! Please do note all training will be provided in English only.

For those unable to make any of the events we will hopefully be recording the Manchester event so that you can watch it back later

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!

The agenda is crammed full of really interesting topics not just presented by the SpiceLords (Spiceworks Staff) but also the SpiceHeads behind the community. Click here to meet this years SpiceSpeakers.

And of course like previous years there is a SpiceParty held after at the Highball to give you the chance to sing and be merry with all the Spiceworks employees and your fellow SpiceHeads.

Checkout everything SpiceWorld 2010 on Spiceworks.com

Boot Camps

Also as with previous years Spiceworks are hitting the road and bringing smaller one day training courses to help you get the most out of Spiceworks and find out about the interesting upcoming features and give your feedback.

Sign up for a 1-day Boot Camp to get in-person training on all areas of Spiceworks – plus the opportunity to meet other Spiceworks users and access Spiceworks product experts on a 1:1 basis! Hurry & sign up now- only 50 spots available per city!

Topics covered will include:

• Getting a Full Inventory of Your Network
• Using Monitors, Alerts & Reports
• Mapping Your Network
• Setting Up & Running Your Help Desk & User Portal
• Customizing Your Help Desk & User Portal
• Maximizing Resources in the Spiceworks Community

This year they will be in Austin Texas, Rome Italy, Frankfurt Germany, London UK, and Manchester UK.

For the first time some of these have major sponsors backing them like AppRiver, VMware and LogMeIn.

Checkout everything Boot Camp 2010 on Spiceworks.com

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…

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.

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.

Along came SpiceRex

After a fair few hours playing with ideas and walking around the office a few times I stumbled across the idea for a SpiceRex, quickly mocking up and building him I found it just worked. It looked cool and could hold a pepper in his mouth.

He was alive! and ready to take on the world.

Taking down SpiceVan

SpiceVan’s time was up, he spotted him on my keyboard and tor him up, the van I spent ages trying to ge t right was dead.

Nic upsets him

Nicholas Tolstoshev (the Spiceworks community manager) managed to upset SpiceRex by encouraging people to take part in the photo contest.

The less people taking part the more change I had to win, you can’t blame my new pet for trying to help me out?

Taking on Nic’s Profiles

To get Nic back for encouraging people he took over his Facebook and Spiceworks Profiles to warn people of his presence.

Traveling the world

Getting bored of being in the UK SpiceRex went on the hunt of new flesh and hopped across the pond in a cardboard box to Spiceworks HQ in Austin. SpiceRex then hit the road again on his way to Australia passing though Boston and a few other places.

After a long flight he arrived in Australia to enjoy the sun before helping out at a national wildlife park replanting trees.

In his busy schedule he managed to find time to appear in a video and even a advert.

Taking on the role as the mascot

On 2nd June 2010 SpiceRex was announced to be the first Spiceworks Mascot.

The kind people at Spiceworks HQ tidied him up a bit and made him ready to help out all SMB IT pro’s.

So why Pick SpiceRex as the mascot?

Well according to Jen (Spiceworks) it just seemed to work:

Ok, full disclosure: I am LOL-ing here b/c truth be told, there were *more than a few* peeps here at HQ who were scratching their heads and a bit stunned to see how quickly SpiceRex became an overnight sensation among you all (again, see Andy’s backstory on how SpiceRex came to be). But we chuckled and figured "Hey, who are we to judge what makes ‘em tick? Guess if anyone can rally around a great big orange T-Rex and bring it back to life as their very own, it’s the Spiceworks Community."

Translation:

SpiceRex: Of the SpiceHeads. For the SpiceHeads. By the SpiceHeads!

Read the original post here

You can sleep easier knowing that being “one in a million” – being a SpiceHead – means that SpiceRex has got your IT back!

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).

If you get a good social media and build up your presence with something like the Spiceworks community forums you will find people will want to help you out. The Spiceworks community brings all sorts of people together from all over the world. A lot of these people are willing to help Spiceworks out in there spare time, things like the Spiceworld 2009 poster contest, there were around loads of good designs and the winner is shown on the right designed by Denise Parrish. Companies like Experts Exchange (BOO HISSSS) and the Spiceworks community (well recommended lets make it bigger than experts exchange…) have managed to grab onto the fact that people in IT are often willing to help out others with IT problems. In my case this is mainly because its better than doing my normal job. This gives the helpers a good feeling that they are doing something with there time and the people being helped managed to get the job done quicker.

This brings a very wide range of people who have many different skill sets into one place doing this brings community, sharing, and connecting. I have used the Spiceworks Spicecorps to meet new people in my area that work in IT and Spiceworld London will help me expand my network of offline friends.

Building up social networks you can give you great feedback on your products. Just look at the Spiceworks community, the 4.5 and feature request sections all the Spiceheads have given feedback on the latest beta version to help make it better and there are 100’s of feature requests of things people want to see in Spiceworks all peppered up (voted for) by the people who use it. Spiceworks have harnessed this power and on many occasions got feedback on there ideas like the HTML emails they just added. They have also managed to get ideas from the community like a dummies guide to Spiceworks in which the community will start to build over the next few months. The community has proven to be a very powerful tool and lots of companies have there own community. Like the smoothwall forums. Spiceworks has managed to grab the market by making a multivendor forum where any question can be asked no matter what its about or how complex someone will be around to help from either the community of the vendors themselves. Microsoft, IBM, CDW and many more have active members of their staff in the community.

The downs (Disadvantages)

The main downside and the reason for writing this post is that news is easily leaked before you want it to be known publicly. My example of this is when Myshell was going to leave. Spiceworks-News managed to get wind of this and got it up on twitter and our wordpress blog around a month before Spiceworks wanted to announce it. Needless to say we quickly got moan at for this has had to delete it. For larger companies multiple sources can leak the information and it becomes hard to stop rumours being made and make covering up a difficult job. (Was a sad day when the famous Myshell (Spiceworks community manager) moved on and left Spiceworks, she did a great job and it does appear from time to time Spiceworks are still finding it hard to fill her boots.)

Information and pictures were published before the release of both the iPhone and the Blackberry Storm, both apple and Blackberry then found it hard to stop people reposting these leaked images even setting up websites about the leaked information. From there people will start rumours about what features the phones will have, this can damage the company if the end product does not have x feature that everyone was getting so excited about. Then again this can help with marketing, I remember stories about when Windows7 was first leaked people believe that Microsoft did this on purpose to get feedback and start all the excitement about the product around a year before it was going to be released. This allowed them to get a wider base of “testers” with different hardware even if they didn’t know they were testing it for them.

Anonymity… well there always has to be one or two people who want to ruin a company. Anyone can setup a website very quickly and with new sites allowing you to register domains without giving your details out to the public you can become even more invisible. This makes it easy for people to moan about products and services of a company without feeling as under threat. Finding people who want to be anonymous can be hard and companies will normally give up trying to hunt down the producers.

With websites so easy to make and publish we can end up with a information overload, it because hard to keep track on the information you want to. Say you want to keep a eye on Spiceworks there are loads of people to follow on twitter… @spiceworks, @spiceworksnews, @jdorfman, @dscammell etc etc etc then you want to follow windows 7 stuff you have to follow loads more people. This distracts from your real job and offline life. You always want to be in the know, for me its so that I can do this sort of thing and repost about 4.5 releases or the latest Spiceworld information even though I wasn’t there. So ok after writing that one I can see positives and negatives…

Social media can however be time consuming, its a Saturday at 14:03 and I’m writing this… I was up till 11 last night watching and taking part in Spiceworld and often find myself being distracted at work by the Spiceworks community all my lunches are taken up by it. If I don’t go out I’m on the community. On the right you can see my Spiceworks Community stats, 3000 odd contributions (these are not all my posts, you get 1 contribution per topic you post in or create) and 6000 odd posts. Ive spent time and written 6 how-tos and 5 plugins for the members off the community. All time I could have spent doing something else like walking the dogs or being in the outdoors enjoying the sun rather than the light bulb above me while sat in a room on my own on my laptop, or even just playing cod4… *must get ring of death on xbox fixed*

Things like twitter and sky player are coming to devices like the xbox making it easier for companies to share information with users in all sorts of forms but this brings another problem for companies that they may not care about us much… their real life morals, is it really right to give people ways to just write 120 words to each other? My anglish isn’t the best as you have probably noticed already and I don’t just blame myself, using word for spell checking and social media where people don’t always mind if you get it wrong. The community allows me to post words that are stupidly wrong and no one seems to care. Its just a fact of life on forums. This is not always something that companies need to care about either, people should have more control and if they don’t do it someone else will so I can’t blame them.

Most of the downs for social media are out of the control for companies like Spiceworks, even if they didn’t take part people would still post the information, but being in the know about what’s being posted can help you can control the impact it has on your products and or services.

That’s it…

Not the most interesting post I know but was mainly posted for the downsides… the big one being the Myshell leaving being announced before Spiceworks told everyone.

Social media does have its up’s and downs but I would suggest any company try to use social media. It doesn’t cost much if anything, but does take up your time.

Hope this helps someone? ok maybe not but hay it was nice to do my first real article the rest of my posts are normally very short and not very sweet.

Sorry about the spealing or grammer’s mistakse, I’m not the best.

And please leave a comment and let me know what you think

I hope Spiceworks don’t mind me using them as examples

Feel free to quote from the above if your going to link back

Again any comments would be lovely

Don’t know what Spiceworks is?

Spiceworks is the complete network monitoring and managment system, it includes a helpdesk, PC inventory, software and hardware reporting and a network map. Its the solution to manage everything IT in  small and medium businesses.

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

AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today at the SpiceWorld 2009 conference, Spiceworks™, Inc. unveiled dozens of new free IT management applications and plug-ins that are now available to the more than 775,000 users of the Spiceworks IT Desktop software. Several of the new additions include Spiceworks Application Plug-in Contest winners, which were chosen by the Spiceworks user community of IT professionals.

Read more on Business Wire at http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20091023005019/en

Watch the live stream over on Spiceworld2009.com or below.

Yesterday’s chat and video was a great laugh, we were talking baout windows7 spiceworks and all sorts. Today’s set to be just as fun.

Join in the live stream chat