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.

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

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!

Where else is Spiceworks going?

This year Spiceworks will also be traveling to Frankfurt in Germany and Rome in Italy you can checkout more on the Spiceworks Events Page. If you want to Meet up with other Spiceworks users that live in your local area then checkout the SpiceCorps area of the community to find your local event or start your own.

You can also checkout the videos from SpiceWorld 2010 on Spiceworks TV to get a feel for what these events are about.

More information

You can get more information in the United Kingdom Group on the community:

• 2010 UK BootCamp QnA
• 2010 BootCamp Manchester
• 2010 BootCamp London
• What are you most looking forward to about the BootCamps?

And the best bit about the BootCamps… You get to meet me akp982

Hopefully see loads of you at both events, its only 2 and a bit weeks away now.

P.S. I have heard the pepper costume maybe coming out again…

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.

About 6 of us met up at the Pembroke for free beer and food, we stood around and chatted about Spiceworks and random IT things while getting merry. There are apparently some more pictures and a dreaded video on the way…

Was a great night though and a great chance to talk to Jay and the team about Spiceworks and give our feedback direct.

5.0 News

So I promised some 5.0 news… We have a rough Spiceworks 5.0 release date! They seem to be aiming for the first or second week in October. Meaning in a few weeks you could be running the new people view, purchasing and interface on your network for real.

In the run up to the release we will see at least one more beta and probably 2/3 more although they may just be small quick fix style updates.

Of course we will let you know as soon as we have more information!

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

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.

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

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

So many names to mention. It was also great to see some vendors there and the talks they gave were great.

Have fun on the unofficial piss up

Time to get the plans ready for Spiceworld London

Why & How’d You Do It?
Too good to be true, you say? Not at all! One benefit of being our last SpiceWorld-On-the-Road of 2009 is that we’ve received feedback, learned lessons…& applied our findings along the way. Meaning we figured out how we can scale back all the bells-and-whistles and bring the most popular elements of a SpiceWorld (i.e. Spiceworks training, access to our product experts & the chance to hob-nob with other IT pros) across the Atlantic to you in a no-frills fashion – one that’ll cost us less than we originally anticipated.

The Bonus?
We know economic times are still tough, so hopefully the lower the price means more SpiceHeads who’ll be able to come…meaning you’ll meet more Spiceworks users from your area… and swap more Spiceworks tips & tricks + IT recommendations.

Where Do I Sign Up?
Visit the SpiceWorld London website to register — but hurry there are less than 100 spots available!