So better late than never, Spiceworks have got 4.6 early access out for everyone to try it out and give feedback.

The early access window was meant to run from March 3rd-11th, but due to some last minute issues was released a day late.

Please read the following posts on information on how the early access program will work. Please be sure to test your favourite 4.5 features as well as the new 4.6 features!

• 4.6 Testing Guidelines
• 4.6 Testing Plan

Progress Bar as Spiceworks Starts Up The first thing you will notice when you start up Spiceworks 4.6 is the new splash screen. It will give new users the chance to watch some videos on how Spiceworks can help them.
The registration box has also been cleaned up and a “existing user” link put on to help stop confusion.

Click read more for the rest of the review

Read More…

Won’t be able to join us at CeBIT, but still have questions about Spiceworks you’d like to get answered?
Good News! Spiceworks would like to offer you the opportunity to submit your questions regarding Spiceworks & Social Media by posting in the thread below which will be answered in a live broadcast during the time Jay, Spiceworks Co-founder & Vp of Marketing, will be at CeBIT.

REMINDER! Spiceworks will also be hosting an event on 3 March from 16-18 in the “Frankfurt” conference room at the Convention Center. Here you will get the latest updates on Spiceworks’ new functions and product developments. Interested in attending or want free tickets to CeBIT? Send an email to katja@spiceworks.com
We look forward to hearing from you!

Read more and post

Free Pass for Spiceworks Users!

***Plus, as a special treat for Spiceworks users, we have a limited number of FREE DAY PASSES to the event – but hurry these passes will go fast! To secure your free pass email katja@spiceworks.com.***

Visit Us at the Spiceworks Booth (3-6 March)

Spiceworks staff will be available at our booth (Hall 2, Stand C31) to answer your questions, show you the product’s latest features…& hear your suggestions for future product development.

Meet One of Our Co-Founders (3 March, 16:00 – 18:00)

Join us in the conference room “Frankfurt” inside the Convention Center where Jay Hallberg, one of our founders from the United States, will speak on the origins and further development of Spiceworks. He will also be available for one-on-one conversations with you.

Read more

Spiceworks have finally announced all the details about Spiceworld 2010.

This is there 3rd Annual User Conference, this year it will be on October 21 – 22, 2010 in Austin, Texas

Its the best IT event around the world, and also one of the cheapest. Spiceworld brings together IT pros like you to learn about Spiceworks and other products.

This year again it will be 2 full days to:

• LEARN the latest practical IT how-tos, best practices, solutions & trends.
• SHARE IT ideas, advice & recommendations with other Spiceworks users.
• MEET & get 1:1 answers from Spiceworks product experts & leading IT vendors.
• (Oh, and let’s be honest – EAT, DRINK & BE MERRY too!)

If you sign up now you can get the early bird rate of only $249 U.S. ($150 off the regular rate) – the best bang-for-your-IT-buck (& one heck of a deal given it includes food, drinks, fun…& cool swag)!

Read more on the official website

Let me start off by saying these are not official Spiceworks email templates, they are made by “Unofficial Spiceworks”. I will do my best to support you with any problems.

The templates have been tested in outlook 2003, 2007, OWA 2007 and entourage. It doesn’t fully work with mobile phones. If you see something that should be fixed please leave a comment and I will try my best.

To install

Installing the templates is easy:

• Copy the HTML code from the community script centre.
• Login to Spiceworks.
• Goto Settings.
• Helpdesk settings.
• Then make sure your email content type is HTML, click view/edit.
• Paste in the code.
• Save.
• Done

The templates

Feel free to edit them as much as you want, we do ask you leave the link to Unofficial Spiceworks at the bottom but this is not required.

All images are hosted on Unofficial Spiceworks, we have a very reliable uptime and enough bandwidth to host them so don’t worry about moving them.

	Wake Your Users Up Spiceworks Orange This is a very bright email template designed to attract “slow user’s” attention, can be useful if your users normally ignore your emails. Click here to download it from the community
	Spiceworks Support This template was stolen from Spiceworks when writing my post about how good the free support is. It looks nice clean and very professional. Click here to download it from the community
	Cool Blue Using the same template as Spiceworks Orange I changed it to a nice cool blue to make easier on the eye. Click here to download it from the community
	Black n Yellow This was stolen from a Internal email at HPS in which I made, it follows our corporate guidelines of black and yellow. Click here to download it from the community

Let start this off right

. 

Happy Birthday Arno (ObieOne)

Now on with the story. For his birthday ObieOne has released version 2.3 of the much loved and used Spiceworks MobileHelpdesk.

The mobile helpdesk allows you to view, edit and update tickets on nearly every mobile device from iPhone, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry. There have also been reports of it working on some nokia’s.

MobileHelpdesk uses Tickets Anywhere to allow you to remotely update your tickets as if you were at your desk, allowing you to quickly resolve problems on the go. Its simple to install and setup using .NET, IIS and a SQLite connector. Its easy to setup, and once ready you just surf to the website you setup, login and away you go.

So far ObieOne is very pleased with all the feedback he’s getting and he sure hope people will enjoy it.

Read on for the new features and bug fixes or download it now

Screenshots

New and fixed in version 2.3:

• Fixed several issue’s with the data adapters after the Spiceworks 4.5 upgrade. (un-assigned tickets page works again).

• Open tickets page now also view un-assigned tickets.

• Changed some typo’s in the web.config notes sections.

• Changed some typo’s and instructions, so the installation procedure is more clear.

• Issue fixed with User Details and Change Password screen crashing.

• Home page now shows actual un-assigned open tickets.

• Add comment now sends to the right #ticketID again.

• Edit ticket statics now sends to the correct #TicketID again.

All these fixes are implemented and tested with special thanks to Ben, Barb E, Mark J Gosling, Mike384 and Miiiki.

If you haven’t tried it, then go ahead and do.

Download the MobileHelpdesk from the community.

So other than breaking the login the Spiceworks update did do some good. As mentioned yesterday there were 5 main new features.

1. Spiceworks Partner directory

Spiceworks have now implemented a “Partner directory”, this allows you to quickly see all the Spiceworks Partners so you can contact them with Questions.

You can also use this to quickly add partners your interested in to your IT pro’s list so you can quickly find them in the future as well as follow what they do on the community in the My IT pro’s section

One thing I found cool about this section is seeing everyone’s avatars. Some are cool, some are just the logos.

Check it out 

2. Public audit trail on discussions

To help people see what’s going on with a topic there is now a activity monitor which shows when posts have been moved, answers marked etc.

This is here to help Group Admin’s feel comfortable when marking answers that there not going behind people’s back doing it. Its also there to watch for people who are just going around marking there own answers and cheating the system.

You can see this at the bottom of all topic pages.

Read More…

  So I started this post off last year in December and seems fitting to actually get it done after my post yesterday Spiceworks Raises $16M.

I started off by asking around 20 people

Spiceworks is a gret product and really helps lots of people carry out there day to day tasks but there are all these "Little things that would make Spiceworks that much better".

I got a whole 6 replies thanks to benhar, Kimberlin, DigitalBlacksmith, Craig M and Texkonc for replying

In no real order here are some of the things mentioned…

Community

• Mobile version of the community – So you get emails from the community but when your stuck in traffic or on the train or maybe just at a family thing and you want to check out the community it either works but is very slow or you get a error. A mobile version of the community would allow more people get answer questions throughout the day.
• Top Contributor lists -  These don’t really seem to be updated at a regular frequency.  It would be nice if that list was updated every hour or so.  Maybe a counter added that counted down to when it would be refreshed/updated next.
• Download/Bookmark helpful posts, How-To’s, etc in the Community -  Not really a small one but one a lot of people have talked about, a way of book marking posts you want to check out later or need to remember about. At the moment you have to use a third party software and it gets messy.
• New post emails – Emails notifying you of new posts should contain the text of the post (like they do with PMs) to help people on the move keep track of what’s being said.
• Loss points if you don’t post – So if you leave the community and don’t post for a month you lose points, this will keep people coming back to the community even if they only login.
• Email notification when the BA is chosen – When a problem is marked with a best answer it would be nice if it emailed you to say it was resolved, this would stop people having to check back on every post.
• Email nudge to review whitepapers – So you get a email with the whitepaper link but it would be nice if you either got a link in that email to go back to review it or a email 5 days later to remind you to review it. This would help the number of reviews of products.

Spiceworks

• Grouping by client – This is a MSP feature, it would be nice to be able to group everything by client, hardware, software and tickets.
• Change the owner on devices – So you can so you can set who has the device but then it also has the function to look back on the previous owners. So you can keep track of who has had the device though out its life.
• Archive old devices – Be able to archive or delete old devices to help keep the scan clean
• Change the helpdesk view – Add and remove columns from the helpdesk overview section

Hmm so we can see people either love Spiceworks software or they use the community more…

And some of them aren’t really that small but ye… I was trying to get more people to reply to find those niggles that just get pushed down in the feature request section

Got any more?

Post them in the comments, I may update the list later on

So as almost anyone may have seen by now TechCrunch have announced Spiceworks Is Becoming The Facebook For IT Managers; Raises $16 Million Series C. Jay (Spiceworks) has post up there official word on the community news section.

I was reading though the comments and love how Jay managed to get my post about how good free support is in there.

Spiceworks official word on why they needed the money is

There was just one problem – we weren’t building new features and capabilities into Spiceworks fast enough. We were making too many trade-offs, pushing out too many features you asked for. And worst of all – too many of the innovative ideas the team had weren’t seeing the light of day. With our user base approaching 1 million IT Pros world wide, I just wasn’t comfortable with the speed at which we were enhancing the platform.

So what do I think this means for Spiceworks?

I think it means that Spiceworks will grow and grow fast. 4.6 is planned for sometime this month/early next and I have heard some very small talk off 5.0… That’s where the big stuff will come in.

If you read this blog regularly you will have seen my comment on the bottom off ”Spiceworks and Intel® Maintenance Manager Plugin”

So does this mean now if you have the knowledge you can start to execute commands on remote machines? Could we start too see plug-ins for remotely installing software?

We maybe able to start getting hands on with machines via Spiceworks, some of the top feature requests at the moment are

• Knowledge Base

• Auto-archive devices after a time-limit

• Get Information from Active Directory

• Multiple Client View

Spiceworks have been aiming at the MSP market for a while and I think that’s where they will aim. Sorting out the helpdesk to work on for a range of clients, setting up client views, being able to do more things remotely. Why? Because they have spent the time working on the remote collector and getting it secure.

Something else they might start looking into is real time monitoring. With the SQL plugin they have proved it is possible, we just now have to wait and see how real, real time monitoring from Spiceworks can be.

Well see what happens over the next few months, Unofficial Spiceworks will be here to keep you up to date though.

Something apparently not a lot of people know about is that in Spiceworks you can “Enable experimental fluid layout” this gives you a lot more room to work with in tickets the helpdesk and the inventory.

Read more below the images.

I use it all the time and there are some problems with some widgets where things are not able to stretch or just look funny. Most things how ever work perfectly, the network map, user portal editor, IT services, monitors and alerts and of course the inventory.

So how do you enable this?

• Settings
• Advanced & International Options
• Show pro settings (at the bottom)
• And the last one “Enable experimental fluid layout” set it to true

That’s it for now, have fun