Anyhow, I did want to mention why I have been so busy and haven’t posted and also follow up on a previous post.

• First, the previous post about InstallShield and error 1327.  I was looking at the blog’s logs and have gotten a few hits to this post, so I must not be the only one having this issue. It continues to be a problem, and probably will be for a while, since people will use the version of InstallShield for a while, even after they come out with a new one that fixes the issue (which hopefully they will do soon). Of course, the new install pain is for Quicktime. I now have to register and then unregister VBscript.dll every time I load a new version, and Apple is aware of the issue, but of course they haven’t corrected it and you can’t blame this one Vista, you MS haters!

• Secondly, what I have been up to is working on learning Visual Studio at work so I can work on ASP to complement our new ERP program we have.  I have been doing PHP programming for a few years now, and have used Macromedia’s (nee’ Adobe) Dreamweaver for almost 10 years for all my design and development. So using a new IDE is a bit daunting, and interesting to read all the back and forth between the two and their camps. So far best I can determine is that Dreamweaver is not particularly ASP-friendly, but that VS is not a great designer interface.

But I guess both sides knew this, because Adobe hasn’t put a lot into ASP, I guess they figure if you are a MS shop, you will use VS. And Microsoft has answered the designer complaint with their Expression line, which I have only used to play with once. The crappy part for me, is that in my position, I will continue to have to use both, since MS doesn’t do PHP development (although they have opened up to do MySQL work) and Adobe hasn’t improved ASP support with CS3 from what I can tell.

I will be curious to see what VS 2008 has in it, since MS said Beta 2 that was released this week had some of the design and CSS improvements that came from the Expression Web product. Hopefully, I will know by the end of this week, since I actually think I have learned enough C# to actually do some real coding this week in ASP.

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.