Currently the group stands with 26 topics of which 15 are unanswered. That may seem like a lot of unanswered questions but if you have a scan though the unanswered questions page it’s all because the original poster hasn’t replied. Chris (Microsoft) has managed to reply to every question with a full and detailed answer and with 146 posts and just over 240 members in the group it appears to have been a success.

Although the group was not intended for SpiceHeads to get involved in both Billdozer and Justin.Davison managed to pull a best answer and helpful post out of the group as well just showing the power of the community and how people are ready and willing to help when ever they can.

Well done Chris though for getting a total of 8 best answers and 8 helpful posts.

Spiceworks are already starting to plan the next “Ask the expert” and unofficially we are expecting it to be with CDW about a wide range of products or CA about backup software. Only time will tell.

You still have one more day to get your questions in to Chris if you have any! So ask away on the community today! Before its to late! Ask The Expert: Chris (Microsoft)

Spiceworks has managed to get 1 million IT Pros using Spiceworks in under 4 years. With SpiceHeads in 196 countries around the globe, Spiceworks has managed to become the fastest growing and most widely used network management system.

With 1 million SpiceHeads and now SpiceRex it is now a ‘A force to be reckoned with?’

Now there are over 1,000,000 users banding together large companies like Microsoft, Dell, HP, CDW stand up and take part providing us with deals and help thought out the community. Its a great place to get advice and recommendations from other IT pro’s.

…IT feels pretty darn good to be 1 in a million, doesn’t it?

So make sure you join in the party tomorrow at 12:30pm CDT or 6:30 GMT. It will be streamed around the world, checkout the UStream Page here.

It will be a great event to watch with talks from:

• Scott Abel, CEO & Co-founder
• Greg Kattawar, VP of Dev & Co-founder
• Francis Sullivan, CTO & Co-founder
• Jay Hallberg, VP of Marketing & Co-founder
• Tabrez, Dir. of Products & 1st Spiceworks Employee
• Marcelo, Dir. of Support
• Nic, Your Spiceworks Community Manager
• (& more of your favorites!)

And even some SpiceHeads

• benhar (one of Spiceworks longest-time users!)
• akp982 (2009 Spicy Winner – The Champion)
• Scott Alan Miller (2009 Spicy Winner – The Innovator)
• DScammell (2009 Spicy Winner – The Hero)
• Spiceworks 1 Millionth User?!
• (& some other surprise SpiceHeads)

Checkout Spiceworks.com for more information!

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.

Hey UK SpiceCorps Members & Spice Heads!

Quick favor! We’re applying for a Techworld’s award in the UK and could use your help.

If you could chime in here (in 500 words or less) and post:

“Why I like using Spiceworks & think it’s ‘the best network management product’…”

….we’d really appreciate it! Anything goes — just be as ‘real’ as you always are here in the Community.

And thx in advance – your authentic Spiceworks-using voice will allow us to add a heck of a lot more spice to our submission than others will.

Cheers,

Jen

Read more and post yours

I’ve done my bit now your turn, you can see my attempt below; its not that great and not sure its really a “chime in” mainly as i don’t know what a “chime in” really is?

I like using Spiceworks and believe it is the best IT management product around because it provides me with all the tools I need to carry out my job in an effective manner for free. From the inventory to the helpdesk every little bit of Spiceworks is designed for IT pro’s by IT’s pro’s.

I find every aspect of Spiceworks useful; the inventory allows me to keep track of my whole network from new machines being added to new software being installed. With the added bonus of a helpdesk I can keep track of all my user’s problems and link them back to devices or software to help me gain the most out of the reporting features in which provide me with an accurate and up-to-date overview of my hardware.

Spiceworks is also great for alerting me when my servers go offline; with its powerful monitoring features I am able to keep track of toner levels and server uptime via email. It also provides me with a great way of keeping track of service providers that I use.

With new features being added and updated all the time Spiceworks is one of the fastest growing bits off software I use; there are so many great new things being added like the network map which now allows me automagically create a map of my network saving me time and money on network mapping software.

But by all means the best part of Spiceworks is the community; it’s a fun and exciting place to get answers to my problems and help people with theirs. It’s also a great way to keep to up to date with the latest IT news and get in contact with vendors about their products.

The Spiceworks team are also second to none for support; they all love their job and love being part of the community. They are willing to help you out where ever you need and regularly hold conference calls with members of the community about their product and services.

Spiceworks is the only bit of software that has adverts that I like; they are targeted to IT pros about things we will be interested in, also with people from Microsoft, AMD and IBM in the community we can keep up to date with product information and get hand on help with questions.

And that’s why I love Spiceworks in fewer than 500 words. There are bits that I have missed off im sure.

Also to show how much I love Spiceworks, checkout my website http://www.unofficialspiceworks.com/

Ohh and yes I did have to get some self promotion in there

Read more and post yours

Jun 18, 2009 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) — Spiceworks, which provides what it called the first free social IT management application for small and medium businesses, announced the release of the Spiceworks IT Desktop version 4.0.

Spiceworks stated that the new version has several enhancements that make it easier for small and midsize businesses to manage “Everything IT.” They include the ability to visually map a company’s IT network and the addition of 3rd party management plug-ins from Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel and Trend Micro. In addition, Spiceworks now integrates with Twitter and allows users to turn Windows events into social media alerts for collaborative problem-solving and to share real-time SMB IT trends with the world’s largest network of IT professionals.

Read more

Fredric Paul

The latest version of the popular free IT management tool for SMBs adds the ability to visually map your company’s IT network, Twitter integration, and 3rd-party management plug-ins from Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel, and Trend Micro.

bMighty has long been a fan of Spiceworks. The company sponsored the first bMighty SMB Theater and Pavilion at Interop in New York last year, and I moderated a couple panels at the inaugural SpiceWorld user conference in Austin, Texas last fall.

Read more

Receive additional information on how to deploy Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and other web apps to your employees. It’s all hosted by Google, saving your company the time, money and hassles of managing these IT solutions yourself.

New migration and sync tools make the switch to Google easier than ever.

By the end of this event, you’ll have the answers to these questions:

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Register Now for this FREE webinar.
Join over a million businesses saving time and money! Learn how switching from Microsoft Exchange saves cost and reduces IT hassles.

Title: Switching from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps Made Easy
Date: Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
Time: 11am PST / 2pm EST

Read more

The Voice of IT will help companies like HP, Microsoft and Netgear get the feedback they want about there products.

With surveys, polls, questionnaires in the making you could be part of the next revolutionary product.

Spiceworks News will have the latest news as it gets released…

The Spiceworks Exchange Health Widget has never fully supported Exchange 2007.

Once Microsoft releases the infrastructure for remotely querying Exchange information we will be able to add in the functionality seen with Exchange 2003 back into the Exchange Health Widget for Exchange 2007. This will be available with the release of powershell 2, which allows remote querying.

With the latest Exchange rollup Spiceworks loses all ability to communicate with the Exchange Health Widget (for Exchange 2007), and also will not show the Exchange tab in the Spiceworks Inventory.

NOTE: So far this does NOT affect Exchange 2007′s ability to communicate with Spiceworks with respect to email communication, this only affects inventorying aspects of Spiceworks. In fact, Exchange email functionality with 2007 has been significantly improved in Spiceworks 4.0.

Thanks Ben

Jay Hallberg VP of marketing and co-founder of Spiceworks has been reported to say: “We work with them to create self-contained applications they can plug into the Spiceworks interface to perform functions for users,”

Currently working with Microsoft, TrendMicro and CDW, Spiceworks 4.0 is said to include new app’s or plugins for things like a widget for Microsoft that lets IT managers manage their software licenses, LiveOffice archive management and CDW purchase management.

But Spiceworks may charge for these: “Hallberg says that Spiceworks is testing the program with four initial sponsors to glean best practices. Pricing varies and generally is part of larger marketing budgets, he says.”

More news as we get it

Source: http://www.minonline.com/mindigital/11240.html