Unofficial Spiceworks

Well ok a week and a day until the main event but the SpiceWorks University day starts in two weeks time with Spiceworks Fundamentals. Then on the 24th May the main event opens, giving you the change to learn about Spiceworks from the people who built it, hear from fellow IT pros on general tech topics, rub elbows with tech experts … and bowl, dance, and laugh the nights away at our killer parties!

SpiceWorld 2011 in Austin was a huge hit with many people still talking about it on the community and this year its finally coming to London in all its glory!

Checkout what I have to say on why i’ll be at SpiceWorld London or even why some of the marketeers / sponsors will be there.

Make sure you register now! And i’ll see as many of you there as posible! Its going to be a great event.

So this week has been a busy week for the Spiceworks team, they have cam all the way from Austin, Texas to London to join SpiceHeads for a SpiceCorps, 2 Unplugged events and lots of press releases so many infact that poor old Chief Spice (Scott) lost his voice by the end of day 1!

For those of you who don’t know the Spiceworks unplugged events are pretty much panels for IT Marketers to ask SMB IT Pros’ questions about how what and why they buy to try and get more vendors to engage with the community. Combine this with the opening off a 6 staff London office (more about this later), the SpiceCorps and also various press meetings with high profile papers and IT article writers its been a packed time for them.

The SpiceCorps London Event

We were lucky enough to have around 10 Spiceworks employees turn up to our SpiceCorps UK event on Tuesday giving all the SpiceHeads that turned up the chance to talk to the team directly to give feedback on the UK / Europe Spiceworks developments.

During the event we spoke about the upcoming release of Spiceworks 5.3 (set to be out of public within around a week and a half but you didn’t hear that here ) Hubba Bubba (Ben) also spoke about the SpiceUni program where you can pay for training in various locations though-out the UK to help you get more out of Spiceworks. Finally I (akp982 – Andy) was presented with a star for managing to get to pure capsaicin twice!

Checkout all the photos on Unofficial Spiceworks’ Google+ page here and keep an eye on the community for more events early next year.

The launch off Spiceworks Europe Limited

To help Spiceworks grow in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) the team have worked hard to launch a new office in London with a starting staff of 6 people it promises to help get more vendors in the UK geared up and involved in the community. Unofficial Spiceworks is planning to do a tour of the new office, take lots of pictures and report back as soon as we can.

“Spiceworks has become the best place in Europe for technology brands to connect with IT pros at small and medium enterprises,” said Scott Abel, Co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “Our online traffic in the UK alone is expanding by 70 percent year-over-year. The Spiceworks Europe team will help us take advantage of this tremendous opportunity and better serve our marketing partners and users in the region.”

This new office really will do great things for getting more vendors into the community and hopefully even some more giveaways

For those of you interested you can checkout the full press release here.

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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As many of you should be aware Spiceworks is coming to the UK on there European BootCamp tour and Unofficial Spiceworks is going to be there to provide everyone who can’t make it with updates, photos, video and hopefully from Manchester a stream! Yes a stream, hopefully is the Manchester location has Wi-Fi and Spiceworks allows Unofficial Spiceworks to stream we will for sure we will be recording the Manchester and maybe the London one.

As well as that we will have twitter and blog updates throughout the day from both locations.

Topics set to be covered are:

• Getting a complete inventory of your whole network
• Setting up and using Monitors, Alerts & Reports effectively
• Mapping Your Network
• Setting up and getting the most out of your Help Desk & User Portal
• Making the Help Desk & User Portal fit your needs
• Getting the most out of the Spiceworks Community
• …& Learning How to Use the New Features in 5.0!

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Yesterday Jay Hallberg and the “european team” came over to the UK for 360IT (The IT Infrastructure Event) to do a talk on “The Future of IT is Social: How Spiceworks is Revolutionizing the Way IT Works” in which was a very interesting talk about where Spiceworks is at the moment and where its going. As well as how Spiceworks is going to help shape the way IT managers work aiming to make their day easier.

The night out

Well… As always when SpiceHeads clash with the SpiceLords people get a little drunk and have a cracking great time… 360IT London was no different.

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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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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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Its coming, its going to be big. Its Spiceworld London, it all kicks off in:

Spiceworks-News will be there!

Will you?

Lets make Spiceworks want to come back to London by making it a great event for everyone. Lets big it up on twitter lets get it up on google and spread it though the globe with facebook.

We can do this!

We can make Spiceworld London famous world wide.

Get your ticket and read more here

I know a bit tacky but hay… Got a better countdown we could use? Use the contact form to get in contact with us. I don’t have a great deal of Spare time so using something like above was quick and easy