One of the Spiceworks features often undervalued or overlooked is the ‘Community’. For many MSPs, IT Service Providers generally and particularly small or one man (person) shops there can be a feeling of relative technical and social isolation. This feeling is also common for many IT Pros, even if they are in quite large businesses. There is commonly an attitude from the user base that the ‘IT folk are a breed of their own’ (rightly so too, in most cases).

The Spiceworks Community is a great group of like-minded IT Pros, all very friendly and encouraging each other’s efforts both in IT and elsewhere. There are often spirited debates and conversation in the community, both technical and social, but always good natured and in the best spirit. If the conversations ever get out of control or strays outside the community guidelines, Nicholas Tolstoshev (Nic (Spiceworks)), Spiceworks super-efficient community manager is there to get things back under control.

Sharing is another great benefit of the community. Answers, Reports, How-tos, Ratings and Reviews, Articles from other sources, methodologies, tips and techniques are shared freely by most community members for the benefit of all. If you have an issue or problem you are having trouble resolving or just getting your head around, the community is sufficiently broad and in many cases experienced enough that someone somewhere in the global community will have either the answer you are looking for or suggestions to get you on the trail of a solution very quickly.

For those of us who experience those feelings of isolation, having thousands of friends all round the world prepared and very willing to help is a wonderful thing and should not be undervalued.

Most Spiceheads have their own ways of navigating and using the community but one of the best places to get started is the Community page. From here you can catch up on the Featured Conversations, What’s New in the Community, Spiceworks News, Upcoming events, Top Contributors, Recent Reviews and more. Most of these sections link to their own pages revealing even more useful or interesting information.

At the top of the Community page there is the Sharing or Shared content section, four panels (Research, Get Answers, Connect and Share) with useful links to all the various types or shared information in the community, from product reviews and white papers to shared scripts and plug-ins for Spiceworks and all sorts of cool stuff in between.

If you click on the ‘See More’ link at the bottom of the list of ‘Top Contributors Today’, this links to the Top Contributors page. you can view a very detailed listing of the top 11 contributors by ‘Most Best Answers’, ‘Most Posts’ and ‘Most Reviews’ for the week, month or all time. There is also a list of the top 11 ‘Most Active Groups’ in the Community, a great way to track your level of contribution and who’s contributing most.

Not surprisingly many IT Pros have an active sense of humour and that too can be seen regularly in the community, if you ever feel like a laugh or have something off topic and entertaining to share with the community or just need to get something off your chest, visit the Water Cooler group. This group is analogous to the water cooler in a large office, where co-workers stand about discussing not business related gos, jokes and the like. Always good fun, if you want a good example of the type of random stuff you might see in the Water Cooler group on the community take a look at Totally random thread – anything goes! This usually titters right around the fringe of what is allowed in the community and is quite often good for a serious belly laugh.

A special highlight this last week in the community has been the arrival of the second community member to the ‘Pure Capsaicin’ level of achievement and contribution, as announced here on Unofficial Spiceworks “akp982 is no longer the only Pure Capsaicin”. We offer our congratulations and admiration to Scot Allan Miller for his huge contribution and ongoing support to the community. Scott, for those of you who don’t know, is a key technical lead, adviser and consultant (among other things) for Niagara Technology Group, a significant MSP in the United States.

Of course Andy (akp982) was the first community member to make the landmark ‘Pure Capsaicin’ level and both Andy and Scott make good examples of the quality and quantity of contributions and also the commitment and dedication of many community members to provide other IT Pros the help they need. The Community is definitely a valuable part of what you get with the Spiceworks ‘Free’ product and clearly contributes to making your IT day easier.

Also for those of you who didn’t catch it Andy posted an article here on Unofficial Spiceworks 23^rd of July “Spiceworks 5.0 and MSP’s”, pointing to a post I wrote in the community last week highlighting some of the tremendous new features in Spiceworks 5.0 beta 1 from an MSP point of view. “Spiceworks 5.0 MSP accented features.”

Next time we’ll be back to discussing program features of Spiceworks for MSPs and we’ll look forward to seeing you active in the community till then, enjoy.

This is a Guest Post by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) of Lawrie Dalman Consulting from Australia.

Today Rackspace and NASA announced the OpenStack Project, an open-source cloud platform. Along with 25 other tech companies we announced our support for the project. You can get all of the details on the Open Stack website and follow developments at @openstack on twitter.

Read More

This announcement comes shortly after releasing the Spiceworks Reach program which is aimed to bring companies like Rackspace into the SMB (Small Medium Business) market though the community.

The OpenStack announcement is designed to do the same sort of thing, SpiceHeads are not normally going to be running networks with the complexity of NASA or Rackspace but can still largely benefit from cloud technologies and solutions. As many will know the Spiceworks’ mission is to “simplify everything IT for the world’s SMBs” and managing IT in a hybrid cloud/premise world is increasingly part of that.

By participating in the OpenStack project the Spiceworks team are able to look into the future and start to think about new and exciting ways to manage cloud apps from Spiceworks as well as providing the management solution first. Last week co-founder and CTO Francis Sullivan and some developers went to the OpenStack Design Summit to get a sneak peak and start to learn about the product(s). They have already come up with some “interesting ideas” on how they can implement it.

With some great cloud based integration already in Spiceworks including Rackspace Hosted Email and Dell and HP warranty the development team have proven they can already quickly and effectively integrate with cloud solutions, the OpenStack project will only add to this and help bring large enterprise solutions to the small and medium businesses quicker, easier and cheaper.

Read Jay’s write up on the community for more information.

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

IT Service Providers have needs not dissimilar to those of IT Departments in medium to large organisations where costs and time need to be attributed to the departments or cost centres, for MSP this is Customers.

Being able to track and account, also attribute these costs is critical to MSP business profitability, in order for accounting and invoicing to be adequately attributed and reimburse all costs associated with delivering services to clients. The second part of this attribution of costs is derived from accurate and detailed record keeping. For many MSPs this can be difficult to get and get right.

As described in the previous article, MSPs doing more with Spiceworks – Part 1, there was extensive use of Custom Attributes to make changes to IT Services to enhance record keeping. Likewise, in this article Custom Attributes are a critical part of the methodology to enhance the cost accounting and record keeping through Helpdesk operations. This plays heavily, once again, on one of the great features of Spiceworks for MSPs, the configurability and versatility of Spiceworks. Out of the box Spiceworks has many excellent features and functions, but the ability to make a few customisations to further enhance Spiceworks usability and enhance functionality is a unique and valuable aspect of Spiceworks, not just for MSPs but IT Pros all over, wanting to do more with less and make their IT day easier.

At the heart of this week’s article is another useful How-to: Tracking Costs for Service, Repairs & Maintenance using Spiceworks. This How-to is written from an MSP point of view, but the principal and methodology can be usefully deployed for monitoring and accounting departmental costs in a larger business or individual businesses costs too.

The first section of the how-to deals with the Custom Attributes used to good effect to enhance the Helpdesk ticket records to allow for reporting a number of additional metrics for accounting and cost attribution.

The attached image as included in the how-to, shows some samples of the attributes added for both this methodology and also those shown in the how-to discussed in the previous article “Use Spiceworks to record IT Services consumed, on-sold and provided directly to clients”.

This article and the associated methodology described in the how-to links to the previous methodology in a few interesting ways. One of the main ways is the embedded feature of Helpdesk tickets which allows you to ‘Relate to’ a ticket, inventory items and devices, as well as linking a ticket directly to an IT Service.

Yes that’s right, in the same way you can link a ticket to an inventory item or device, when you begin typing in the ‘Related to’ field of a ticket you are presented with a list of devices and IT Services that you can ‘Relate to’ the ticket. What a great feature. So using this technique you can, not just track costs associated with maintenance and service, but any costs associated in time or materials with IT Services too.

Secondly the methodology where IT Services and Helpdesk tickets both have Custom Attributes for recording ‘Customers’, these Customer ‘Enumeration’ attributes have the same list of Customers in their enumeration values, which makes reporting a lot easier. Keep in mind that the ‘Customer’ enumeration attribute could just as easily be used for Departments.

The how-to goes on to describe how these new Custom Attributes are to be used for reporting. Detailing how to find the exact field names and how to use them for reporting, either using the embedded Spiceworks reporting engine or reporting outside Spiceworks if needs require.

In order for this methodology to be accurate and effective you need to develop work practices where all services and service delivered to client and/or departments is recorded in association to a ticket. Whether it is maintenance of a server or workstation, or remedial actions to ensure the operation and performance of an IT Service, everything should generate a ticket. So regardless whether it is a ticket raised by a client or a department in your organisation, or a routine maintenance task, that involves no client input at all, having a ticket associated with the task or service ensures it and all the time and components involved in the service are accounted for.

In our case, since developing an integrated business model using Spiceworks as our core technical business system, all services of any type delivered to any client for any reason, are ticketed in the Spiceworks Helpdesk system. This allows us unprecedented ability to accurately account and report on all client based activities, while more accurately than ever tracking and monitoring our In-house activities at the same time. Spiceworks has made immeasurable difference to the economics and profitability of our business.

Again we have highlighted the versatility and configurability of Spiceworks, making your IT life easier.

For more details about how MSPs can and are using Spiceworks, have a look at the Spiceworks MSP Guide.

See you next time…

This is a Guest Post by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) of Lawrie Dalman Consulting from Australia.

What state was the network in when you first started?

Ha! A single flat network defined by an unmanaged managed (meaning they were not actually managing it) Layer 2 switch with a Linksys router attached to it. They had tried to get an Asterisk-based PBX system to work, but were having a lot of problems.

What’s the infrastructure like now?

I have a hierarchical network with a core/distribution layer and an access layer. I have a mix of Cisco, Dell, and HP ProCurve switches providing access, and a Cisco core. The edge network is made up of a Cisco ASA 5505 firewall and a Celestix MSA VPN appliance. Wireless is provided by Cisco 1130AG access points. We are running multiple LAN segments, divided by function. Telephony is provided by an NEC IPKII PBX/Voicemail system, which is a hybrid VoIP/TDM system. We use Active Directory for central user and object management and I connect as many of our devices as possible (Windows, Mac, and Linux) into AD.

How do you cope with having to have lots of versions of Microsoft, Linux and Mac products for developers to test the Spiceworks Scanner with?

It can be complex. Many of our users prefer to use Mac, so we have integrated them pretty well. We have MSDN developer licenses, so we have access to MSDN versions of Microsoft products. Most of our test servers and workstations are run in a virtual environment hosted by VMWare ESXi. As far as Linux/UNIX goes, I am a real Linux geek, so I enjoy being able to play with different versions. We have Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, and even a FreeBSD (I think) in our environment.

We all have a server go down and ruin your day, what’s been your worst outage?

Probably the one on Saturday. That was the first time we actually had anything in production fall down hard and not automatically come back up. At my prior gig, I had a really bad Sunday where the building suffered a major water leak which drained into the central telecom room, destroying all of the edge routers and telecom equipment.

If there was one thing that would make your day easier what would it be?

Honestly? To have me-clones. Although I think (and others may agree) that one of me is enough for the world.

If you weren’t in IT, what would you be doing and why?

Well, I originally started out wanting to be a helicopter pilot in the Army. However, I found out that I get terribly airsick in those vibrating death machines, so I ditched that pretty quick. Ever since, I have really only worked with computers (and really, since I was 8 and my parents got a TI 994/A, computers is all I have been about). So, I am not sure. However, if Iron Maiden needs another guitarist, I am available.

When you’re not keeping the peppers alive, what do you do with your free time?

I have two kids and am in IT. I have no free time. However, I do find time to play my various guitars.

And of course the all important question, how do you like your bacon?

And now for the most unpopular reply in the history of the Spiceworks Community….. I don’t really like bacon. Too salty and crispy.

Hopefully over the next few months we will be able to corner some more Spiceworks staff and ask them similar questions.

IT Service Providers are in an interesting position, many of them/us use Spiceworks ‘In-house’ like everyone else, but also use Spiceworks to make managing their/our Clients IT systems and infrastructure easier and more effective too.

A number of aspects of Spiceworks seem very well targeted at the ‘In-house’ use of Spiceworks and not always as well applied to management of outside, ‘Client IT’. One thing we noticed shortly after starting to use Spiceworks is how flexible and configurable Spiceworks is. Use of features like Custom Attributes, Language Packs, Remote Collectors and Ticket Rules, along with a number of other features can make Spiceworks even more useful for MSPs, as they do for ‘In-house’ users.

This is the first in a series of articles for Unofficial Spiceworks discussing how one small MSPs in Australia, uses Spiceworks with a few minor additions and changes to make their MSP business more efficient while providing their clients better service.

‘Use Spiceworks to record IT Services consumed, on-sold and provided directly to clients’

This how-to: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/1357 , the associated Language Pack: http://community.spiceworks.com/language_pack/370-msp-pack and 5 accompanying reports deal directly with the methodology used to make this happen.

‘Language Pack’ you say?.. Yes, Language Pack. One of the main things that changes to make this methodology more intuitive and rational is changing the terms and labels in the IT Services section of Spiceworks to better reflect the business of consuming, on-selling and supplying IT Services. Some fields have been added to further emphasise the difference in the three classes of IT Service, one to record the Customer, one for what class of IT Service and one more for service or agreement status.

All the existing Spiceworks IT Services functions can then easily be used for all three classes of Service. You can use ‘Related to’ to link services to tickets in the Helpdesk, you can set monitors to alert when any of your services are coming up for renewal, regardless if they are services you consume in-house, services you on-sell to clients provided by a third party Service Providers or services you provide directly to your clients.

This image shows the Edit details of an IT Service, with the additional Custom Attribute fields in play, in this case it is a service provided directly to a client by the MSP and the custom fields are adjusted accordingly.

Some more of the standard features of the IT Services section of Spiceworks include adding Notes and Documents to IT Services, we even attach a copy of the Services Agreement for the services we sell/supply to clients directly and also copies of the Agreements where we are on-selling service provided by a 3^rd party Service Provider. We also attach copies of the SLAs and contracts for services provided and consumed by us In-house.

This method of using Spiceworks not only provides very useful additional functionality for MSPs, but very well demonstrates the flexibility and versatility of Spiceworks itself.

For more details see the how-to: Use Spiceworks to record IT Services consumed, on-sold and provided directly to clients and follow the links from there to the MSP Pack Language Pack and the five sample reports. For more details about how MSPs can and are using Spiceworks, have a look at the Spiceworks MSP Guide.

Also watch out for the next article in the series!

This is a Guest Post by Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) of Lawrie Dalman Consulting from Australia.

• Classification of Software Reviews – The first new feature is designed to allow SpiceHeads to categorize the software reviews by software type. This is aimed to help people find the right solution for them as well as related software packages they maybe interested in checking out.
• Mobile View – This has been a long awaited feature for some people, with more and more smart phone devices being used to checkout the community Spiceworks have added a mobile view. The community will automatically detect if you are using a mobile device and display a simplified view to allow you to read and reply to topics. This feature will be released as beta while they fine tune it to ensure it works on as many mobile devices as possible so if you have a problem let them know.
• New User Permissions – As the community is growing some people have spotted a increase in junk posts, scripts and how-to’s. After the release tonight Pimientos will be restricted to asking only 2 questions, and restricted from sharing how-tos, scripts, and reviews.
• Advanced Search Options – You will now be able to search the community based on date using the new advanced search options link.
• Unanswered Questions on What’s New in the Community sidebar – As well as the recent, popular and news tabs in the “What’s New in the Community” box in the sidebar of the community we will also have a unanswered questions one to help you quickly help your fellow IT pro’s.
• Improvements to Group Admin Weekly Update email – Some more information as been added to the group admin’s weekly update emails to help you manage your group better.
• Upload SpiceCorps meeting notes as attachments – You will now be able to upload your meeting notes as a document rather than coping and pasting.
• Speed up subscription & verification emails – The priority for subscription and verification emails has been raised so they go out before the digests. Finally this looks like it might get fixed, some people have been having this problem for a good few months now.
• And as always plenty of bug fixes.

The full official notes will be released onto the community news section soon.

The update will happen at 00:00 tonight for people in the UK (GMT) or 7:00pm CDT. Convert it into your time zone.

Update: The notes are out see them here

SpiceRex has finally made it to Cole1436 (Cole Lakes) in Montana. His stay in Montana will be followed by another visit to Spiceworks HQ when Cole takes up his new job as Software Support Engineer. After a flying visit to the Spiceworks HQ he will be off again in his little brown box to San Antonio with Slava.

Does make you wonder what customs think when they see a box labelled “Paper Dinosaur”

Checkout all the photos and comments on the community here. For all the latest SpiceRex news checkout the SpiceRex community group.

So recently you may have seen a stream of tweets along the lines off “Spiceworks Launches Cloud Partner Program” and wondering what its all about and when its all going to be ready?

This new partner program is designed to bring cloud service management into one place making it easier for the 1 million SpiceHeads to manage cloud services like Rackspace email. As more services have moved into the cloud more IT pro’s have found it harder to manage there wide range of networks:

“As my company adds more and more cloud services, switching between 10 different web-based portals to monitor and provision cloud resources is not an efficient approach to cloud management,” said Justin Davison, Systems Engineer, RJ Lee Group. “With Spiceworks, I can learn about new cloud services and then manage the ones I use in the same place I manage all my in-house IT assets.”

This new program was released at the GigaOm Structure conference by Scott Abel:

“Our new Reach partner program offers cloud vendors a simple and effective way to make their offerings instantly available to over 20 percent of SMB IT professionals worldwide,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “It’s a win for them and for small and medium businesses, which represent one of the fastest growing markets for cloud computing services.”

The program is designed to help Spiceworks accomplish their mission to simplify everything IT, to try and engage as many vendors as possible they have designed 3 levels of participation:

• Cloud Services Inventory and Monitoring – This is the basic level and gives account and service information to users ready to be monitored.
• Cloud Management Plug-ins – Stepping it up a level this allows vendors to have a plug-in which provides granular management and monitoring capabilities. Over 140 Spiceworks management plug-ins are currently available for both cloud services and on-premise technology, including the Storage Advisor sponsored by EMC and the Maintenance Manager sponsored by Intel.
• Cloud Service Distribution – The most involved level, this allows people to add, manage and monitor cloud services within the Spiceworks application. Giving SpiceHeads near complete control of there cloud services. Some companies have already taken this up like Rackspace’s Cloud Email Services and LogMeIn Rescue.

There are a few more vendors planned to get involved in version 5.0 and we can’t wait to see who these are. As always as soon as we get some information we will share it.

Checkout the Spiceworks Press Release for more information.

• Helpdesk Aliases causing CC emails – We have previously mentioned that this was going to be fix and should help a lot of people with helpdesk email problems. (Note: anyone using this workaround should upgrade and turn off the Regex workaround)
• Exclude specific email addresses from the Help Desk auto reply and update notifications – This is aimed to help prevent emails looping between each other maybe between two helpdesk systems or postmaster bounce addresses.
• User Portal plugins – We can now start to make plugins for the User Portal, first off in this release you can now add widgets using iFrames but more things are being planned.
• IP Phones not filtered from backbone list in network map – fixed, not fully sure what thing one is about but its there
• Warranty: NULL ship_date prevents Inventory summary from rendering – Some devices did not have a ship_date provided by either Dell or HP and would cause the inventory view for that device to lock up.

The biggest new feature though is the new Security Center Widget in which can be added to a dashboard and give you a quick overview of your antivirus software status.

Using the widget you can very quickly see:

• Machines that have up to date antivirus
• Machines that have out of date antivirus
• Machines that have no antivirus
• Machines that have an unknown status
• And what antivirus is installed.

This is a great addition to Spiceworks allowing you to very quickly checkout what machines you need to update or check.

With version Spiceworks 5.0 being worked on at the moment its great to see that they still care about the current version and want to ensure as many people are happy with the product as possible.