Unofficial Spiceworks

Last nights community update was a success with all the mentioned updates being rolled out including the brand new look to go inside with the Spiceworks 5.0 release happening soon (more on the Release Candidate in a bit)

This new layout is also designed to provide

• Faster Loading – Using better styling and design the site should load better
• No widescreen support – Due to how we read on a screen the community will not stretch to the full width of your screen, there will be more room at the navigation has been moved to the top but as long stings of text are harder to read it will keep the original max width.
• Larger Search – Like the the application the search bar is HUGE this is designed to help you remember it’s there and find answers quicker.
• More features coming to the footer bar – We have already started to see more things added to the bar in 5.0 and we are expecting to see more added to the community, things like group updates or the facebook like links etc.
• Better mobile support – The community already works well on a mobile but the new design will enhance the mobile experience even more.

Spiceworks 5.0 RC

Last night we also saw the release of the 5.0 release candidate:

To all the SpiceHeads who have helped test 5.0 and give feedback – thank you! Because of it, the Release Candidate build of Spiceworks 5.0 is now ready for final testing. Remember to still install this in a test environment and retest any issues that you’ve found in previous builds.

The 5.0 RC build is available here.

This version contains over 200 bug fixes and no new features. Which all means the final version is on it’s way soon. It’s still suggested you don’t use this version in production as it may still contain a serious bug but its stable enough to be classed as RC what’s the worst that could happen?

As part of a new series of posts we will be asking SpiceHeads (Spicework’s users) how Spiceworks and Spiceworks 5.0 will change their professional life Dean M (Gonefishing), has done a fantastic job of getting this started.

I was asked recently to give my thoughts on how Spiceworks 5.0 will change my professional life. I feel in order to fully answer this question I first need to take a look back on how Spiceworks itself has changed the way I do things every day in general.

When I first started here three years ago, Help Desk requests were a mix between direct emails sent to individual members of the IT team and emails sent to the Help Desk address, which in turn was a custom mailbox that was access by each member of IT (at the time two techs and the manager). If we were assisting someone with a particular item, we would drag their message to our own folders within the Help Desk account and work from there. As you might imagine, this was a fairly cumbersome way to work and often resulted in an overlap of two technicians working on the same request, but it got us through.

Eventually we decided we needed a way to track things a bit better, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a Help Desk ticketing system. One member of our team had looked into various solutions, but they were all either too expensive to maintain or way too complex and required too much time from a group that was already stretched thin. Thus, we created a library in SharePoint to track requests. This just ended up being us working from the custom Help Desk mailbox as before, but now with the added step of copying and pasting each response into a separate system. It was cumbersome and added extra steps and time, but at least we had a little more tracking than before.

Read More…

Last night the eighth Spiceworks 5.0 beta was release:

The eighth build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try out. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

This build isn’t as fully packed as previous beta’s have been with most of the work being done of bug fixing to help ensure that when Spiceworks is release (according to Jay should be soon) everything is working and user’s can drive straight in without worry.

They have however managed to slide in a new first time user flow for the network backup configuration. This is designed to help user’s get started with the part of Spiceworks they want.

Read More…

Last night Nic announced the release of the seventh Spiceworks 5.0 beta.

The seventh build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try out. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

As always this build is full of cool new stuff as well as loads of bug fixes:

People View

The cool new people view feature has some cool new updates in which make it even easier to manage your IT:

• Welcome popup – There is a new popup when you first go into the people view in which explains what its about and how to get the most out of it. Of course SpiceRex is the keeper of this new feature and couldn’t wait to shout about it.
• Updated Search – The search included in Spiceworks will now also bring in the results from the people view. This makes it a lot easier to track down a user to help them fix their problems.
• Multiple devices to one person – If you have user’s in which have more than one device maybe a phone and laptop or even a custom device you can now link them all back to the user. This is all designed to help you get the most out of Spiceworks and make your day easier.
• Perform AD actions – Finally the people view is a true management system you can now reset passwords, unlock, enable and disable accounts directly from within the user interface.

Click a image to enlarge

Read More…

I’m sure you will have all see the new IT Purchasing Management system in the Spiceworks 5.0 beta which is designed to allow you to start a purchasing workflow, create detailed reports for purchases and track your ticket costs for better billing. It appears that in my earlier reviews of 5.0 I have only skimmed over this exciting new feature so here is a fully fledged review on what it does and how it can help you.

When Spiceworks went out and looked at what IT pro’s were finding hard to manage one of the things that came out was that they are finding it hard to keep track of things they are buying either for internal user or for their clients if they are MSP’s. Some people did have a system for doing this but being able to link this into the helpdesk was going to be a great help.

I’m one of those who doesn’t track purchases so no promises this review will be the best, I’m sort of winging it, but it will give you the idea of the power behind this new exciting system.

Track it.

When Spiceworks 5.0 is install you can get stuck straight into managing your purchases, one of the easiest ways of adding an item to be purchased is by adding it to a ticket. You can also add items on the purchase’s page but having a ticket for each item will make your reporting more accurate.

The form is simple to fill in just enter a few simple details like, description, quantity, price, vendor, PO number and department.

Once the information is entered and saved you will get given the choice to research the best product / prices via the community, CDW or Comparing prices on PriceGrabber.com.

Read More…

That’s right Spiceworks 5.0 is onto the 6th beta!

Spiceworks are dedicated to making sure IT Pro’s get the best product possible and so testing and feedback from SpiceHeads is a really important part of this process. There is no word yet on how many beta’s there will be or the release date for 5.0 they are however aiming to have it released by SpiceWorld 2010 so that they can give user’s hands on training with the latest product.

In this build we see some cool new features, bug fixes and updates:

People View

The new people view feature now starting to be marked as “Free Active Directory Management” has had a couple of updates:

• Delete User’s – You can now delete user’s from People View and then have this changed Synced back to active directory, this is another step forward in allowing you to completely manage your active directory in one place.
• Automatically associate devices with users – This is something I have been looking forward to, Spiceworks will now link up the owner or last login information picked up by the scan and link it to your user’s, saving you the time of going though all your devices linking people up.
• Confirmation message on first sync – One of the problems with the AD sync was that if you setup the people view and added user’s when you first synchronized with Active directory these changes would get pushed as well. From this build forward you will now be promoted with a confirmation message asking if you want to do this or drop all the changes you made earlier.

Read More…

On Wednesday Nic announced the 5th beta release.

The fifth build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

Read More

So what’s really new in this beta?

As with anything that Spiceworks do they have exceeded the expectations for this beta with some great new features/bug fixes and updates.

People View

The people view is one of the major things being added in Spiceworks 5.0 and we are getting close to seeing a fully working version.

• New Data Ribbon to allow you to see the more important information about a person at a glance. This is a great addition and allows you to quickly navigate though your user’s and find the information you want fast. As you build up your people view this cool overview will quickly allow you to work out where the user is, who the supervisor is for when they annoy you and what machine they use.
• This build now allows you to write / sync your changes back to active directory. Allowing you to quickly and effectively manage all your user’s from one place. You can change simple bits of information like number, location and department at the moment but soon you will be able to reset passwords and enable and disable accounts.

Read More…

Spiceworks 5.0 is set to be HUGE with some major new features being added, but there are also some smaller features in the background being added to help slim down the amount of feature requests and help keep user’s happy.

One of the things they are adding is the ability to add plugins to the User Portal this has been kick started with the ability to add the Ticket Gauge to the user portal with the “User Portal Ticket Gauge” plugin.

This allows your users to quickly see how many tickets you have to work on and will help give them an idea of how busy you are.

Once you have added the plugin to the portal, as with any widget you can move it around and even edit the points for when it changes yellow and red.

Read More…