Web Development and Technology Blog

I just got an e-mail celebrating Spiceworks 1 year birthday, and I can’t rave enough about this ever-evolving network monitoring/inventory and help desk tool.

Less than a year ago, I read a review of it in some tech magazine and was intrigued. It said it would use Google AdSense to serve ads inside a network admin desktop tool, that would then be free to users, primarily small-business network admins (such as myself).

The AdSense part was an interesting angle and using Ruby to get some Ajax sparkle was cool; but the price was what got me. I had looked at other tools for network monitoring and help desk applications, and all of them either had too much stuff, bad UI, or most importantly, were way out of the company’s budget.

I downloaded the application, in like version 0.7 or something, and out of the box it found most of my desktops, servers, network printers, and did some cool stuff like tell me toner amounts and service tags (we use mostly Dell). But it was basically inventory in the beginning. Moreover, I don’t spend all my time on my network duties, so I didn’t get a ton of use. However, since they released 1.0 (up to 1.6 now), they have put a ton of new features in, so that now it is a part of my daily life.

The biggest added features are the help desk. I can create tickets and the end user can update them via a web site or they can create them via an e-mail. It is a great way to track issues, by machine or even for a piece of software. Also, at the beginning it wasn’t multi-user, but now my boss can log in, see the tickets I have open, make comments, assign them to me, etc. Another feature I really like is the community. Tons of other IT guys help you out with the software, or with general IT problems. (I am always finding new features, so I could go on for a while, but those are the 3 I use the most.)

Spiceworks keeps improving and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an easy help desk and network inventory program.It’s feature set now is as good as or better than many paid products, and they keep adding and making it better. Try it out on your network via the link below, you don’t have anything to lose.