Spiceworks 5.0 has just been released and includes some great new features. If you have followed our beta reviews you will probably know about all the cool new features. If you haven’t checkout the below for a quick over view of everything.

All of these great new features are designed to help you manage your network and make your day even easier.

If you already know what’s changed get stuck in now and download it here.

Purchasing

To help you manage your IT purchases better Spiceworks 5.0 has now brought in a new purchases management area. This allows you to track and manage everything you buy for clients or for your company depending on if you’re a MSP or a lone IT guy.

You can use it to track every aspect of a buy from picking the product to getting it delivered and then the man hours required to set it up. Of course like with everything in Spiceworks you can then use the powerful reporting system to give management or clients with details about what you brought for them and when.

Checkout more about the free IT purchasing system here.

People View

The people view is another great addition to Spiceworks which allows you to track your active directory users directly from within the dashboard as well as link them to devices, enable and disable accounts, checkout the user’s open tickets and edit basic account information.

You can setup departments and even photos for all your user’s to make it easier to find that person who you should know but can’t remember where they sit or what they look like. In the future we may even see this rolled out more so that you can allow human resources to view the information or pull out telephone lists from it to make things even easier for you, your team and your company.

Read more about this great new free active directory management here.

Multi-site Helpdesk

One of the things MSP’s wanted was the ability to be able to run a helpdesk across multiple sites, they were already able to set up remote collectors to scan the network on a remote site but now you can turn these into a fully fledged remote helpdesk. It has its own user portal and email setup, when a ticket is created or updated it sends the information securely back to the central site.

MSP’s have been an increasing part of the community with more and more getting involved using it as a solution to check and manage clients better. The Spiceworks team have listened to this and have started to add feature dedicated to them. Using the feature request section they are able to quickly work out what SpiceHeads want and build it.

Want to know more about how Spiceworks can help you be a MSP? Check it out here.

Configuration management capabilities

With the new built-in TFTP server you can now backup, restore and watch network device configurations. Once setup and working Spiceworks will also keep track of the configurations and allow you to view the changes so you can quickly spot what’s caused a network outage.

You can even use this to push out new firmware updates, you give it the firmware file, tell it what device(s) to update and let it do the hard work.

Checkout what you can use the TFTP server for here.

Better Network Map

The network map already included in Spiceworks has been updated to help provide you with a even bigger and better picture of your network.

There is more “real time” support for the bandwidth charts, depending on the device it can poll up to every 15 seconds allow you to checkout network spikes quicker and easier.

They have also updated the way the map is built to help build a better picture.

Find out how you can start mapping your network.

Discover more virtualized Machines and manage them

5.0 brings enhanced virtualization management allowing you to check on and manage both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware.

You can get detailed information about the host and the virtual machines very quickly. You then have the ability to turn the machines on and off and in the future you will be able to do even more.

Start discovering virtual servers.

Cleaner and faster Interface

The user interface (UI) has been updated to make it easier to view your network and it brings speed improvements.

This layout is also being rolled out to the community to keep everything looking the same and to speed up the community.

More Access Levels

There are now more user levels ‘help desk admins,’ inventory admins’ and ‘portal admins’. This makes it easier to manage who can use what as well as securing your Spiceworks install.

So what are you waiting for?

Download Spiceworks 5.0 NOW and start making your day even easier. Remember if you get stuck there is a HUGE IT Community ready and waiting to help you.

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)

Chris Le Texier has been a member of the Spiceworks Community since 2008, and this week (9/8/10-9/16/10) he’ll answer all of your Microsoft Licensing questions right here. If you’ve ever had a licensing question that you’ve never gotten a chance to ask, this is your week!

Chris (Microsoft) has been working for Microsoft close to 5 years. As a Senior Project Manager, he supports the LAR (large account reseller) and DISTI (distributors) community for the Windows Client OS in presales and licensing. He also supports Windows Client OS, SA, MDOP & Windows VDA. Chris has his own Partnercast series on the Microsoft Partner Network, and is an MSCE, MSCA and MCP.

Read More

In the future Spiceworks will be getting other vendors like Rackspace, CA and HP involved so that you can get questions answered by experts in those area as well.

Checkout the community group “Ask The Expert: Chris (Microsoft)” now and get your questions ready for tomorrow.

5.0 delivers the next frontier of “everything IT” with features to help you manage your network, people & purchasing: Config Management. Newly Tuned Network Map. Microsoft Hyper-V Support. People View. Purchase & Cost Tracking. ….& more, letting you navigate your wild-frontier of a workday like the IT maverick you are!

Spiceworks 5.0 is set to be their biggest release yet with some huge new features for managing your network, the people and purchasing.

The major thing for a lot of people will be the speed, Spiceworks believe the start-up will be around 40% quicker and after that the pages will load 30% quicker. This is a major boost to help allow you to navigate it quicker and more effectively.

Managing Your Network

Backup and restore network device configurations

Spiceworks 5.0 brings some great new network device configuration features that are designed to make it a lot easier for you to ensure all your network devices like switches, routers and hubs (who uses hubs these days?) are configured correctly and that if you make a silly mistake you can quickly restore it to a working version, keeping your network up for longer. With Spiceworks 5.0 you will be able to:

• Quickly and automatically back-up network device configurations
• Receive alerts on device configurations changes
• See how a rule change can and will impact your network
• Compare the current configuration to backed-up versions to find issues
• Push configuration changes to devices or restore configurations to a previous version

More devices and details in the network map

The developers have also been hard at work on the network map in 5.0 aiming to delivery you a more complete picture of your network and its overall health.

• More devices like Network Application Storage (NAS) thanks to the SNMP v3 support helping you get rid of more unknowns!
• Get more bandwidth information with better detection of end-point devices like desktops and laptops.

Discover and manage virtualized machines

Spiceworks already has the ability to discover VMware virtualization servers but 5.0 will add support for Hyper-V hosts.

• See all the virtual machine data on MS (& VMware) virtual servers as well as details like allocated RAM and hard disk space.
• Start and stop your VMs when the need arises – allowing for more sophisticated virtualization management.
• See and report changes over time for a VMs state and configuration
• See all your VMs across all your hosts

Manage Your People

See the people and the devices in a whole new way

5.0 will include a people view in which will allow you to track all all your user information plus perform key tasks like locking accounts.

• See all of a user’s devices (including the manual ones who have a habit of disappearing)
• View which ticket volumes by department (or user!)
• Access all of the info you already have on your users (via Active Directory) as well as do things like unlock accounts and reset passwords.

User Permissions

Spiceworks 5.0 will bring user roles into Spiceworks allowing you to manage who can access what withing Spiceworks better. Some of the new roles will be ‘help desk admins,’ inventory admins’ or ‘portal admins.’

Management dashboard of helpdesk activity

Get a new insight into your team’s workload, progress and clients helping you get the big picture on how productive your team really is.

• See who is working on what client & how long tickets are taking them
• View total number of open tickets
• See ticket trending to identify any abnormal spikes or dips in ticket volume

More MSP features!

You will now be able to run separate, custom portals for each of your clients and still manage them all in one location, allowing you to quickly deploy a single helpdesk system to everyone and manage it all in one place.

• Manage multiple, custom user portals – all of which are integrated to your single, central Spiceworks installation
• Manage all of your clients’ tickets from a single location – and see them all in the same interface!.
• Allow local authentication for your users

Manage Your Purchasing

Streamline and control your purchasing

After researching the right solution (hopefully in Spiceworks!) and placing your order, keeping track of purchases as well as how much you’ve spent on products (or even departments or users) can be a royal pain in the you know what! 5.0 makes purchasing smoother for you by letting you track the process and costs.

• Use a pre-built workflow – “approve-purchase-receive” – to track your purchase process from request thru delivery
• Quickly see which orders have been placed – but not yet delivered
• Access the shipping status of your purchases in one-click
• Track and report on the time and equipment costs associated with your tickets
• See how much you spend by department, device or vendor – including the breakdown of hardware vs. time-and-labor

Manage Your Equipment & Labor Costs (Especially for MSPs!)

Want a quick and easy way to manage your costs – straight from within Spiceworks? 5.0 delivers!

• Track , view and report on equipment and labor costs of your tickets – including things like price/hour, total time spent, cost of equipment and cost/ticket.
• Track, view and report on your clients including things like total cost broken down by time, equipment, departments, or even individual users

Checkout the Spiceworks Feature and News group for more information

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!

Not using Spiceworks?

It really can help free up your time so you can spend time with your family and loved ones more without worrying about work.

Lots of people have started to think of there new year resolutions so why not make yours to use Spiceworks in the new year? Spiceworks can save you time and money and its FREE.

So the word free has grabbed your attention?

Spiceworks is 100% free and provides you with so many great features all designed to make your life easier.

• Inventory all of your Network, PCs & Macs
• Monitor & manage your network
• Manage changes
• Manage configurations
• Map your whole network quickly network
• Audit software
• Troubleshoot network problems
• Run an IT Help Desk
• Manage power consumption
• Monitor SQL Servers
• Talk to IT Pros Like You

Still unsure if Spiceworks can really help you? Have a read off a day in the life off and see just how all of those great features help you become a IT pro. Setup and use the Helpdesk to manage your time and then report on it and show how much work you do to get more pay or more time off.

Anyway, what is there to loose in trying? Spiceworks is 100% FREE and supported by a HUGE community of experts on not just Spiceworks but anything from Dell to Microsoft or even Intel. The community is there nearly 24 / 7 powered by people like you who may just have the answer to that question you have been thinking about for 3 weeks.

Already using Spiceworks?

You can save time too, with some simple plugins

• Keyboard Shortcut plugin – Navigate though Spiceworks quicker with this simple plug-in.
• Power Manager sponsored by Intel – Save not just time but money with this one, you can save money by shutting down machines in the evening but also time by not having to hunt around for ages trying to fine or make software to do this.
• Dell Search – Quickly search Dells website for machines and parts from within Spiceworks
• License Manager – This one will help you keep track of your licenses and make sure you are “legal”
• SQL Server Monitor – Monitor your SQL servers for problems before they happen.

There were talks started back in September about on the community here but we didn’t believe it would happen.

We currently have no idea what it will look like but so fair it appears it will include information like

1. Graphs of the server performance over time, things like the transactions per second, IO reads/writes per second, number of active transactions.
2. The current metrics, so you can see close to real time what’s going on, from disk space to long running transactions.
3. Static information like database names, host name, ip, version.

Could this be something Spiceworks have partner with Microsoft with?

I’m definitely going to be trying it out here. Just hope it supports the three main versions of SQL being used not just 2008.

This plugin will be something special, alot of SQL monitoring tools are very expensive. This will definitely bring Spiceworks even closer to being “everything IT”

When we hear more well keep you up-to-date

The Spiceworks Community team have put together a huge amount of resources and sponsors together to help make your life easier and get that bit closer to being “Everything IT”. There are currently near 20 PDFs, 2 calculators, a zip and many web links to help provide YOU with all the information you need to help make a informed decision.

• Step 1 – Learn – If your just looking at getting more information on virtualization from companies like VMware, Microsoft, Sun, Citrix and even Oracle this is the place to start. There are great resources here from all the vendors as well as ones Spiceworks have made for you. Its a great place to start to look into virtualizing even if your a bit unsure about it. The buyers club will also slowly start to fill up with information about other peoples experiences with the different technologies. So jump on into the community and learn about the different types virtualization solutions available to you.

• Step 2 – Decide – So your ready to decide and using the resources in step 1 you have managed to work out virtualization is the way forward for your company? Good on you. Now comes the make or break bit, picking the solution that’s best for you. With 5 vendors and each of them having 3/4 solutions it can be a messy place to be, you could be looking at up to 20 different solutions. Checkout the Awesome Product Comparison Guide this is the first community powered or “crowd-sourced” comparison guide on the community with more planned. Martin9700 did a fantastic job kicking it off, but it doesn’t stop there more people will be adding to it over time and even you could contribute. Once you have check out the Comparison Guide Spiceworks have provided you with the contact details for all there virtualization sponsors. Pickup the phone, drop them a email, use the web forms. Fire your questions at them or just post your questions into the community.

• Step 3 – Buy – Don’t want to be flooded with LOADS of sales calls? Spiceworks broker the quote so you remain anonymous! Going to quotes can be the pain of the job, loads of calls to make then loads of people phoning you back never sure you gave them all the same information. Spiceworks are here to help, you can use their simple form to get quotes from VMware, Microsoft, Sun, Citrix and Oracle for their virtualization solutions. The form wont take more than 5 minutes to fill in.  Get your quotes now

What if I’m not looking to buy just yet?

What? Your not going to buy virtualization right now? Well that’s ok! The Spiceworks resources will stay up and around for as long as the community is there. You can pop over to the Virtualization Buyers Club any time you like to get the latest information. All the information from the Backup Buyers Club is still there waiting for people to read and use. Don’t feel pressured into buying now if you can’t. Just remember when the time comes it will be there ready waiting for you.

So what are you waiting for?

Jump on over to the Virtualization Buyers Club now!

Please note you have to be part of the Spiceworks Community to access some of the resources to sign up you will need Spiceworks, Download it here.

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.

• Scott Abel, Founder & CEO of Spiceworks

• Jay Hallberg, Co-Founder and VP Marketing at Spiceworks

and of course

• Tabrez Syed, Director of Products at Spiceworks

Just another great thing that came out of Spiceworld. Loads of new people have been introduced to Spiceworks and the friendly staff. VARvid or is read by LOADS of microsoft resellers and small business specialists as well as lots of Microsoft fans.

Below are the videos, checkout the read more links for the original posts or go to http://www.varvid.com/ to checkout other videos.

Scott

The Founder and CEO of Spiceworks, Scott Abel discusses the history of Spiceworks and it’s goal to build the “iTunes” of network management by offering free software that was a simple, easy-to-use and yet very powerful tool for small businesses. Read more

Jay

While at Spiceworks’ “Spiceworld” User Conference in Austin TX, Aaron had a chance to chat with Spiceworks Co-Founder and VP of Marketing, Jay Hallberg.  Jay shares his vision of offering Spiceworks software for free and explains the birth of their annual Spiceworld events. Read more

Tabrez

Aaron caught up with Tabrez Syed, Director of Products for Spiceworks while attending their Spiceworld User Conference in Austin, TX.  Tabrez’s role at Spiceworks is to determine the next generation of Spiceworks products and how best to implement them into their current lineup. Read more