Spiceworks First Impressions

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 by Matt Hartley at 11:04pm
8 Responses (Add)

Today I had a chance to do something that has frankly been on my to-do list for sometime now — check into Spiceworks. Designed to run on Windows PCs, I opted to install it on my own VirtualBox installation just to toss a wrench into the mix to see how well the software reacted.

For those of you who are not familiar with Spiceworks, it is a software suite that allows you to monitor/manage/audit/inventory all of your network assets with amazing ease. The best part is the cost. How does NOTHING grab you for a price?

Installation and options

Installation was very easy. Setting up what appears to be a localized server running on port 80, Spiceworks immediately gave me the means to provide any of the following right away.

Inventory
Help Desk
Community (IT education, forums, etc – a place to post notices of outages and so on)

Due to the limited scope of time I had to work with, I opted for the Inventory function. As soon as I selected it, I was presented with a choice to either scan my immediate network or, instead, scan my PC. I opted to scan my network.

Here is where I found myself being impressed. I was immediately asked if I run Windows only PCs or if there are Macs/Linux boxes on the network as well. I, of course, chose both as we have a little of everything on this LAN. I needed to also provide both a yes or no as to whether any of the platforms in question had remote administrative privileges, along with the needed login info.

The initial network scan took a while, but considering just how many network devices I had, I found that it did a fairly decent job.

Rather than try to itemize all of the features this has, I would instead have you review the bottom of this page. From there, you will be able to see each of the inventory features available.

How is this free?

Keeping in mind that I only covered one of the many levels of functionality that this software can provide, you might be asking yourself just how in the world something like this could possibly be free? The answer might surprise you. It’s advertising supported.

Now before you instinctively balk at the idea, realize that this is allowing you to utilize pro-level IT management software without having to deal with advertising that would be considered intrusive. There are no pop-ups or other annoyances.

If you are looking to trim back costs by using a more cost effective means of managing your IT assets, then you would be insane not to at least look into using Spiceworks. It installs easily and I think you will be amazed at just how user friendly it is to use.

8 Comments

greywizard

July 15th, 2009
at 2:55am

I was glad to see your write up of spiceworks. I use this on a daily basis at work where I am the only admin for approx 300 users. I absolutely love this software. I would like to make the suggestion that you take some time and look at the other features it has also.

There are a couple of benefits that you may not know about also. The community portion is huge and has things like “how to’s”, video’s, product ratings from actual users and several other things. The spiceteam is also very involved in the community on a daily basis. Another unknown,what I will call a feature, is that spiceworks develops the software according to what the users need or want. We simply telll them we need a feature and if enough people agree, they make it happen.

Can a Company Take Social Networking too Far? | Chris Pirillo

July 15th, 2009
at 5:25am

[...] Have you checked into Spiceworks yet? If so, what are your thoughts? [...]

Gtech

July 15th, 2009
at 5:52am

I am looking something simmilar but without ads. Does anyone know where to find it?

Brandon

July 15th, 2009
at 8:05am

Gtech, I’ve looked into that a bit too, and the short answer I found was, not without paying for it.

I like spiceworks too, it didn’t do well in my environment of 1600 machines, but for smaller networks, it’s freaking sweet.

MakerBot BSOD ~ Windows Fanatics

July 15th, 2009
at 12:45pm

[...] you checked into Spiceworks yet? If so, what are your [...]

Myshell (Spiceworks)

July 17th, 2009
at 7:12am

I’d first like to thank Matt for this great review, we’re glad to hear that Spiceworks is giving you such a strong first impression!

To Gtech, if your organization cannot or does not want ads you could sign up for Spiceworks MyWay which will allow you to replace the ads with a logo of your choosing. You can learn more at http://www.spiceworks.com/myway

Thanks!
Myshell
Spiceworks Community Manager

Chuck Strickland

July 21st, 2009
at 4:26pm

I have tried several different products and I settled on Spiceworks several years ago and now use it on a network with over 400 computers and almost a dozen servers. It is invaluable. The ads are not a problem, they are not the “in your face” stuff that many ad supported products have and the benefit of the program far out weighs any minor annoyance with the ads.

I use this for inventorying my equipment and software for the organization. I have tried the help desk and If my users were intelligent enough, I would use it. We have a 4 man shop to maintain the equipment and this software has helped us a lot with accountability.