Unofficial Spiceworks

Found a great deal? Share it with the community. Plus, when you buy from the vendors listed here, you’ll help us keep IT free!

The last in the what to do in the community Posts…

Well find something new and exciting to post about soon don’t worry.

Back to the real topic now though, The Spiceworks Store. The Spiceworks store is a great place to find and share deals.

The more you buy though Spiceworks the more money they end up with allowing them to make the product bigger and better. From small things off amazon to servers from HP Spiceworks can gain some much earn money.

Visit the store

You’ve seen the badges under the avatars of IT Pros in the Community. This page explains what they mean and how you can get one too!

The great team at Spiceworks have managed to call two features the same thing…

You have Badges and Badges…

1. Badges 1 – The one we are going to talk about in this article (or i have now named profile badges) show below your avatar on forum posts. These display things like where you live, or what versions you tested more coming up…
2. Badges 2 – This is something you can add to another website in which when people click though and download Spiceworks you gain points. More about these tomorrow.

Now the confusing bit is out of the way, Spiceworks Profile Badges are designed to help you show off your community achievements.

Badges like the country badge:

If you select what country you live in your Spiceworks Profile you will get a country badge to show other where you live. Giving you a personal touch to your profile and helping people understand why they cant understand you. Also picking your country in your profile will give you more information about stuff related to you, from Spicecorps to Spiceworld.

How do I gain other badges?

Gaining badges can be as simple as making a review, or as hard as winning a Spicies Award. Their are many different badges you can gain for loads of different reasons. Pop along to the Spiceworks pages to read more about the badges in which you can gain.

Click here for more information about badges

Did you think I wasn’t going to cover this? I thought I would leave it till near the end…

Extend Spiceworks to meet your needs

So your using Spiceworks but want to do more fun stuff with it? Have a look though the plugins, some are really useful while others are just for fun.

From ticket gauges to Dilbert comics plugins are easy to make and use.

Plugins make it easy to:

• Change how the user interface looks and make it match your companies needs.
• Create and add new widgets to the dashboards.
• Edit the way the data is displayed to suit you.

How could you use a plugin?

• You can add a subnet calculator to the dashboard
• Highlight tickets open for more than x days or that have been opened by managment.
• Show your teams colours on the spiceworks background.
• Add RSS feeds from the sites you love

The plugins are built by the Spiceworks team and the community the possibilities are endless. Use them, rate them, make them, share them. All plugins like Spiceworks are 100% free to use.

Using Plugins

So you want to use a plugin?

Make sure you are running the latest version of Spiceworks so that you have the best chance of the plugins being fully. Find the plugin you want to use and click install. This will then install the plugin directly into your Spiceworks. Once installed you simply activate the plugin in the settings area.

For more help read me

Making Plugins

Fancy giving development a try or are you a professional who wants to build something cool for the thousands to use.

In 3.5 you can now enhance parts of Spiceworks to make it work and look how you want. Why not give it a try, a plugin is a small snippet of javascript code, how hard can it be?

Spiceworks uses Prototype and Scriptaculous to help make things easier for you. Learn more about Prototype here and Scriptaculous here.

The Spiceworks team have also spent the time to help you out and created a API to make plugin writing even simpler.

For more help read me

Check out the plugins now

The latest news submitted by the community

If you want to keep up to date with the latest news in the world of IT then the news submitted here is for you.

The Spiceworks community are able to post IT news, from software “Panda introduces free, cloud-based antivirus for Windows” to hardware “HP launches new ProBook range” It provides you with the latest greatest news from the world of IT.

Check it out now

Download cool reports and extend the power of Spiceworks. Did you write a neat report? Share IT with the community.

Spice up reports you like and show your appreciation.

Ever wanted or needed to know more about your network but not sure what you want to know about? Why not look at the reports other people have shared that they use within Spiceworks? You could even post your own report and get a cool badge for your profile.

Instead of spending hours trying to work out how to create reports used the Shared ones on Spiceworks, such as the Microsoft Product keys report made by _Brian_

It will show you all the machines with Microsoft applications installed on and the product keys relating to it. A great report to help you keep track of those annoying licenses.

What about trying to find the last login? The Last Login report will help you.

Which machines have SP3 installed? Find out with the SP3 report.

With over 350 reports their is bound to be something you want to know just didn’t know you wanted to know.

How easy are they to use?

They are a like powering on a computer, if you have used Spiceworks reporting before just click install if not you need to hunt around the PC for the simple and very effective on switch.

Sharing a report

Again like turning a PC on if you have created your own report then you should have seen the share button… Just click it, fill in a couple of details and BAM like magic it appears on Spiceworks for 300,000+ IT pros to use.

Check out all the shared reports now

Keep track of the latest happenings in the world of IT.

Want to find out what’s going on in the world of IT? Why not pop along to the Spiceworks community IT calendar.

The calendar gets filled with all the latest greatest dates for IT events not only for Spiceworks but for Microsoft and other big name companies.

Have a look now

Helping IT people find others who are looking for work or offering work.

Finding it hard to get a job or just looking to change?

Pop along to the Jobs and Careers section of the Spiceworks community to find some help on:

• IT Career Dos and Don’ts – The community members share tips to help you manage your career.
  
• IT Certifications – What certifications are useful in getting a new job and why.
  
• Reporting structure in IT companies – Confused about how IT is structured?
  
• IT Interview Questions – Prep yourself for your interview, have a look at community users interview questions.

Want to keep on top of what’s happening in the community? Sign up for the Daily Digest. The digest allows you to keep your eye on interesting conversations keeping you in the loop for new techniques.

Pop over to the IT Jobs / Careers section to have a look