Unofficial Spiceworks

SpiceWorld comes to the UK tomorrow for two full days of IT training and sessions run by Spiceworks, big name vendors like HP and of course other Spiceheads.

There is still time to register and turn up to this great event where you get a chance to meet your fellow IT pros in the same situation as you are. The whole event is based around giving people like you the training and skills you need to make your job easier and save you money.

For the two day training its only just over £200 which is a bargain compared to some IT events in which you can pay double for just the one day. And considering all the Spiceworks staff are coming from the US its a huge bargain.

If your struggling to convince yourself or your boss checkout this and then register today!

Spiceworks have just announced what they will be doing about SpiceHead training this year. For the last two years they have done Spiceworlds and BootCamps in other countries like the UK, Germany and Italy.

Called “Spiceworks University”, or as Jen put it “Spice U” which sounds much better, they are the new BootCamps in which were held last year. The main difference is that all the training is provided by your fellow SpiceHeads or SpiceTrainers.

Hand-picked users from all over the world will be trained up by Spiceworks and provided with helpful materials to then cover topics like the Spiceworks Fundamentals, Intermediate Inventory and Intermediate Help Desk. As time goes on more topics will be added and harder sessions built.

Once they have all the training and are ready to go venues around the world will be picked and the trainers will rock up and teach you how to get the most out Spiceworks. It’s believed the trainers will also have contact with a Spiceworks employee during the events encase they get stuck on a question or just need a bit of a hand.

After attending the training, like the BootCamps, you will be provided a certificate to show you attended and probably a nice new shiny community badge.

Darren Schoen, David Scammell, and Justin Davison are the first three trainers and have already started to show off there talent at the South and Central Florid SpiceCorps last night. The team behind the universities picked some great beta testers and have been doing a great job in getting this all started.

We can’t wait to see what happens next and how the first sessions go, as soon as we have more information we will let you know

For more information checkout the official post on the community “Announcing Spiceworks University!” of course they don’t have the cool SpiceRex picture

As many of you should be aware Spiceworks is coming to the UK on there European BootCamp tour and Unofficial Spiceworks is going to be there to provide everyone who can’t make it with updates, photos, video and hopefully from Manchester a stream! Yes a stream, hopefully is the Manchester location has Wi-Fi and Spiceworks allows Unofficial Spiceworks to stream we will for sure we will be recording the Manchester and maybe the London one.

As well as that we will have twitter and blog updates throughout the day from both locations.

Topics set to be covered are:

• Getting a complete inventory of your whole network
• Setting up and using Monitors, Alerts & Reports effectively
• Mapping Your Network
• Setting up and getting the most out of your Help Desk & User Portal
• Making the Help Desk & User Portal fit your needs
• Getting the most out of the Spiceworks Community
• …& Learning How to Use the New Features in 5.0!

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Tabrez, David and the “Spiceworks European team” are coming to the UK, Germany and Italy next month to provide hands on training for SpiceHeads.

It will be a great chance to meet fellow IT Pro’s as well as learn how to get more out of Spiceworks. I will be attending both the London and Manchester events so it will be a great chance for you to meet me as well I’m looking forward to meeting all you guys

Unofficial Spiceworks (well I) will also blogging though out the day to keep the guys who can’t make it up to date.

Some commonly asked questions have been:

What is a Spiceworks BootCamp? – BootCamps are the new 2010 name for Spiceworks’ one day hands on training in which they are providing all around the world for cheap prices around £100 each. Last year they were called SpiceWorlds but this all got very confusing so there is one SpiceWorld and lots of BootCamps.

Why a BootCamp not a Spiceworld? – Spiceworld is about giving you the chance to talk to other SpiceHeads and Vendors about things not particularly related to Spiceworks. Its more of a IT conference run by Spiceworks. You get to learn a lot more about other products and services where as a bootcamp is about getting to know more about Spiceworks and meet your fellow SpiceHeads. Checkout http://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/2010 for more information.

What can I expect from the BootCamp? – There are going to be lots of topics about Spiceworks all based around 5.0 which will be out by then. These include: “Getting a Full Inventory of Your Network”, “Using Monitors, Alerts & Reports”, “Mapping Your Network”, “Setting Up & Running Your Help Desk & User Portal”, “Customizing Your Help Desk & User Portal”, “Maximizing Resources in the Spiceworks Community” Also checkout this topic.

From the Spiceworks UK forum

The dates

• 29 Nov. – Frankfurt, Germany
• 30 Nov. - Rome, Italy
• 2 Dec. – London, UK
• 3 Dec. – Manchester, UK

More info

You can find more information about the BootCamps on the following pages:

• Official BootCamps Website
• Official News
• 2010 UK BootCamp QnA
• 2010 BootCamp London
• 2010 BootCamp Manchester

Yesterday Jay Hallberg and the “european team” came over to the UK for 360IT (The IT Infrastructure Event) to do a talk on “The Future of IT is Social: How Spiceworks is Revolutionizing the Way IT Works” in which was a very interesting talk about where Spiceworks is at the moment and where its going. As well as how Spiceworks is going to help shape the way IT managers work aiming to make their day easier.

The night out

Well… As always when SpiceHeads clash with the SpiceLords people get a little drunk and have a cracking great time… 360IT London was no different.

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Following in our series of Spiceworks employee interviews I decided to bring it a bit closer to “home” for this month’s by talking to Oliver who is the Regional Manager Sales & Marketing guy for the UK.

What sort of thing do you do for Spiceworks over here in the UK?

I’am the Regional Manager Sales & Marketing UK at Spiceworks. Focus is very much on Sales so I am talking to IT vendors here in the UK and showing them how to reach a great audience – the Spiceworks usership. Furthermore, I’m involved in event organization, campaign planning, product development and whatever has to be done.

Are you looking forward to the UK Boot Camps?

Absolutely! Boot Camps are great occasions to connect with whom is most important for us – our users! Besides that it’s always nice parties afterwards.

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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.

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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).

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