About 9 months ago we discovered that we were having a real problem managing our workload and keeping track of who was doing what. Several times we’d find that staff would send an email to all of the IT department and then we would be falling all over each other fixing someones problems two or three times over! I’m not a great manager but it didn’t take me long to realize this was not a good for our productivity. So we started the process of keeping our eye out for anything that might help us manage our workload. While we were at the IT Roundtable a few months ago the question was asked several times, and we even posted the results of those discussions here. In the midst of all those ideas lied a gem that would completely change the way we do business. I won’t lie and say we spent a ton of time looking at the other tools discussed their, cause we didn’t. We tried Spiceworks first, and we haven’t moved since. So here is the deal, I want to take the next 5 entries and discuss our experiences with Spiceworks in hopes that it might help you manage your own IT disaster.

For this first episode I’ll keep us light and just a brief overview of what Spiceworks is. First thing first, when your ready to take the plunge and get Spiceworks working for you visit Spiceworks and get to downloading. We’ll be discussing Version 2.0 which just came out this week. Spiceworks describes it’s self as an automatic PC and software inventory and IT asset reporting to simplify your job. A network monitoring and troubleshooting to keep things running smoothly, and an IT help desk for your company that’s easy to use and the fastest-growing IT community. Didn’t think you’d find a tool that did all that in one package did ya, and with a price tag of FREE it’s hard to pass up. That’s free as in Beer!

Now I know what your thinking, “yea it says it does all that but it probably does it pretty crappily” (is that a word?) Well I’m please to tell you it does it all well, very well. So as a way of inticing you to visit next time and read more about Spiceworks. I’ll only cover the “myspiceworks” page of spiceworks. Think of this page as a snap shot of all the information you need in a snapshot to get you going through the day.

As you can see from the screenshot it allows you to view your open tickets, an quick overview of your inventory, any alerts that may be happening on your network, tickets that haven’t been assigned to a staff member yet, and quite a bit of customizable info. You can’t see it on this page, but at the bottom we actually pull a list of Microsoft Security Bulletins.

I hope by seeing this My spiceworks page you get an idea of what is possible using this tool, and at the very least your interested in coming back to learn about the other features of spice works.

Next time we’ll be looking at detail the Inventory function of Spiceworks, and how you can finally walk up to your Comptroller and say, I can have that information for you in about 5 min. (and know that the information is right!!!)

Spiceworks, IT management