Combine social networking with Free IT management software, and all of sudden you build a huge network of small business IT managers. That is what Spiceworks has done.
I have been reading about these guys, talked to them and have taken a tour of their software and their community. For small business IT managers and owners it’s pretty powerful stuff, and it’s Free!
It’s more than a tool to manage your IT, it’s a social network where you can share ideas, best practices, reviews, etc with other small business IT managers and/or owners. They also have specific groups setup by application, or area of interest. Maybe a Seagate group is in the “works”.
Do you use Spiceworks? Are you a member of the Spiceworks community? Tell me more.
14 Comments
I use Spiceworks everyday. It is the most powerful IT Management application that I have seen, that includes all the necessary components. Everything from basic network scanning and inventory, to vendor tracking and a ticket system, it’s all free. Of course the most powerful aspect of Spiceworks, in my opinion, is the community. They have something like half a million IT professionals. Many of these people freely give of their time and expertise to help out others, it really is amazing.
Based on what I’ve seen from other vendors and partners in the community, I think Seagate would fit right in. I’d love to see you guys on there.
I’m an IT manager/strategist for a small IT company that writes our own software package and outsources IT for small businesses. We use SpiceWorks to manage our own environment and we manage SpiceWorks for some of our outsourced IT customers as well.
SpiceWorks has been great for us. We use it as our network inventory system as well as our helpdesk ticketing system. We are currently in the process of making SpiceWorks tie in to our traditional asset system. The price is right and the support from the SpiceWorks team is great
We very much appreciate the SpiceWorks community as well. It gives us an opportunity to interact on a daily basis with other companies of our size who are facing similar technical and business challenges. We are working very hard to leverage the community as a means of networking with our competitors (coopetition) as well as a method for increasing our market visibility.
SpiceWorks, the software and the community, have become major components of our ongoing market strategy and have been extremely valuable to us in the time that we have been using it. Our community involvement has directly contributed to our largest growth spurt which we have had during a time of economic downturn, so we are quite encouraged.
Hey Mark,
I use Spiceworks daily. I agree it is way more than just a network monitoring tool, it is one of the biggest IT social networks for SMB sysadmins.
Hit me up on IT: http://community.spiceworks.com/profile/show/jdorfman
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is….right? How many times have we heard this? Its an age old motto that is used frequently to warn the public about varieties of fraud, bad bargains, sharp practices, etc.
Apparently, these people have never heard of Spiceworks. I have two sides to my techy persona that have very simple, yet specific needs. As an I.T. admin by heart, I want to know whats in my network, whats going on in my network, and who’s going to be there when I.T. hits the fan. As the owner of a technology consulting business I want to know how much it costs.
So how does Spiceworks maintain the balance and fulfill the needs of both sides? I will explain.
Whats in my network? Every IT admin should know exactly what devices make up the infrastructure. PC’s, Printers, Servers, Wireless Devices, etc. Its a lot to keep track of. Spiceworks will scan your entire network and inventory these items for you. giving you all the details related to that device. Everything from what software is installed, to the last user that was logged on. It will group these devices into pre-defined categories making it easy to identify your network equipment. You can even create custom groups if you want to add something specific to your network. Its a powerful scan that even rivals some of the enterprise class auditing tools I have used in the past.
Whats going on in my network? An IT admin cant be everywhere at once. Let Spiceworks be your eyes and ears. Starting with logging in to the web interface that displays your customizable dashboard, giving you a birds-eye view into your networks activity. Charts and Graphs displaying bandwidth utilization, Computer Depreciation Forecasts, and alerts are just some of the customizable widgets you can add to your dashboard to quickly diagnose any potential issues. Monitoring and alerting functionality will contact you when something isnt right, giving you the edge to be more proactive and less reactive. If your users have any problems, they can login to the Help Desk Portal and submit a help desk ticket. The ticket can be assigned to IT staff who can enter time against it, and even add comments that your end users can see.
So who will be there when things go wrong? Spiceworks has a close knit group, family if you will, of IT professionals always willing to help. The Community is one of my favorite features of Spiceworks. Not only are there IT professionals waiting to assist, but the owners, developers, and advisors are there to lend a hand as well. This says a lot about the initiative and the dedication of the Spiceworks team.
And my fiscally responsible side wants to know how much for an application such as this. FREE! It doesnt cost you a dime……unless you download it with a Dial-up connection, in which case, you may incur some fees……..but Spiceworks will not charge you a cent.
Spiceworks has been an invaluable tool for me and my customers. I wouldnt replace it for anything. The Community alone has become like a family to me and that in itself makes Spiceworks a huge success in my mind.
I use Spicework everyday, its my first port of call in the morning. If it is utilized properly then it is a very powerful tool.
I first came across spiceworks when looking for a free auditing tool in order to satisfy Microsofts license policy. It was only then that i realised all the cool features within the program, you can run custom network reports and then output them in ways so they can be read in by other programs, it meant i could run a report of IP’s and MAC addresses and create a very useful WOL tool based on the information.
With every new release there is ‘User requested’ features added, all done from suggestions within the community- the spicier the request becomes, thw quicker its added within the program.
Im really excited about the next release which should include a network map, meaning i can lose yet another 3rd party piece of software.
I still cannot believe its free!
Hiya,
I am a user of both Spiceworks and the community, i love spiceworks for both the IT managment side and also the community side.
Spiceworks actively monitors my network for software installs, new machines, disk space user and so much more. Alerting me at posible issues or illegal software being install.
The community allows me to find anwsers to my problems and help other people with their’s. As well as being able to share product reviews create how-tos to print of for users.
Would love to see a seagate group
Hope to see you around on the community
Yes I use SPiceworks and I also help start a local spiceworks user group in greater Boston area called SpiceCorps. I worked with Jen S at spiceworks and they ended up rolling out a whole world wide effort to get local IT pro’s together to help each other learn setup configure spiceworks as well as a one stop local go to IT support group. I also help run / setup the first ever On the road Regional Spiceworld in Boston. For a long time I have had my own group of IT buddies that have always helped each other with problems ect. We always ask a buddy if they have done this or that before going out to look for a sales guy. It is kind of a check and balance of your own thoughts to make sure what ever project you are planning is the right thing. Well there has never really been an official group of IT people to bounce things off of with out going to a high pressure sale route. So spiceworks and spice corp does just this. It is a group of “GO TO” people who you can ask a question and get a real NON Sales answer. This is back bone of the spiceworks user community.
Wow! Thanks for the great comments.
Spiceworks sounds like a powerful and critical tool for you as an IT manager. Is there anything it doesn’t do for you? How crtical is storage/data management to you in the whole scheme of things, and what would you want from a group focused on storage?
I don’t know whats better, Spiceworks the software or Spiceworks the community.
The software does what two or three other programs might do in one package. And is constantly being upgraded with new stuff.
Its amazing just in the fact that the Spiceworks programmers TRULY listen to their users unlike other Software companies.
With one look at Spiceworks you can see your entire network (If setup properly) and document your network. OMG did I say document!? I started for a small company that had never seen documentation till I started. I started with Visio & Word and quickly implemented Spiceworks to see a realtime view of hardware and software installed on our network. Found a few things they didn’t know about but thats another story.
Suffice to say implementing Spiceworks on your network is not a bad thing and can really open your eyes.
And as I said the Spiceworks Community is in my opinion second to none in knowledge accumulated in one spot.
Oh and did I mention its FREE!
I have been using Spiceworks since V1.5, and now anxiously waiting for V4.0. For low level admins to totally monitoring networks it is a brill piece of software.
Would recommend it to anyone!!!
To answer your question Mark, the only think Spiceworks DOESNT do is fix my network issues for me. Which im grateful for that, otherwise I wouldnt have a job.
You will notice a lot of people that use Spiceworks, at one time had three, four, even five seperate apps to do the same thing that Spiceworks will do. Its a very collaborative tool that incorporates everything an IT admin would need to carry out his daily responsibilities.
With the recent boom of new technologies such as Virtualization, Data de-duplication, disk based backup solutions, and SuperSAN’s, its obvious the need for storage is at an all time high. The average amount of data in a typical SMB network has increased three fold in the past 5 years. If you go into the Spiceworks community and do a search for the term ‘NAS,’ it will produce what seems like an endless amount of pages containing comments and questions posted by the community about these storage technologies.
Having a Storage group would be an invaluable tool for the community, and who better to sponsor such a group than the leading manufacturer of storage products in the world. It would be an honor and a privilege, and a great asset to something as great as Spiceworks.
Took Mike’s advice and searched NAS…great level of involvement by the community around this subject. I also checked out terms like SAS, SATA, and RAID and saw the same level of communication. Thanks for the tip and the ringing endorsement…you may just see Seagate make an appearance.
to be continued…
I just started using spiceworks and I am amazed at how great this tool is. I launched the helpdesk ticket system this morning and all of senior management was ecstatic. Asset tracking is amazing also being able to do all of this in one location makes things so much easier.
I would differ slightly from Mike’s answer. Spiceworks is, without question, the heart of our network management. But it lacks the tight integration with Active Directory and the individual devices that software like Dameware offers.
Spiceworks also offers no imaging solution (BTW: MaxBlast rocks!) although there are some free open-source products out there, which I found out through the SW community.
Dameware tends to provides much more detailed information in real-time. Plus Spiceworks can be quirky, such as listing certain machines in quadruplicate.