Comments on: Why I gave up on Spiceworks

By: Nerd

Nerd — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 03:58:50 +0000

Yanick you are a little late to the party. 2 years and 4 months, also just a few versions of spiceworks have gone by. BTW, scanning a network still sucks, and you have to open your network to all kinds of nasty bits to get it to work right. Google the scripts people have running to unsecure their machines so that spiceworks can scan. Hideous. But i still love the helpdesk and the community.

By: Yanick Gosselin

Yanick Gosselin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:09:54 +0000

I don’t know what you are talking about. I am installing SpiceWorks at all my customer’s office and never had any problem.. only one crash.

By: Nerd

Nerd — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:25:44 +0000

Holy moly. I sure am glad that Tabrez set up the forums at Spiceworks. Yeah there are problems and there are a ton of useful tools. I think now my #1 value in spiceworks comes from the forums. #2 is the helpdesk. The community has become pretty strong. If you guys are in an area with a local Spicecorps, I would highly recommend joining. I think it is one of the best ways to make some contacts in the same job to share ideas with.

I have to say I’m still surprised at the power of the intarweb to bring in some peer review and criticism of what I say. It is a good reminder to document and show some screenshots. Test and repeat. Fun exciting times. Thanks for all the input yall!

By: Migraine

Migraine — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:47:35 +0000

I joined the SpiceWorks fanbase in the Feb-March 2008 time period, and I have to say, given that THAT is when this article was written, most of its remarks are spot-on. And the sad thing is, there’s still a lot not right with SpiceWorks. Lots of awesome sounding features on the horizon, but plenty of room for improvement as well. I guess that’s true of any package you go with. I tried out OpenManage’s AssetExplorer, before finding SpiceWorks, and I wasn’t impressed. I’m sure there are others who sing its praises but for me, I had a horrible time with it and wasted a lot of money.

And as Nerd pointed out, SpiceWorks isn’t really free. Sure the overhead of licensing doesn’t exist, good for getting it approved by the numbers-man, but without its users clicking ads, and providing support in the other methods Nerd talked about, SpiceWorks would die, or at least development would grind to a painfully slow pace.

Standardization is the key, but at the same time, not the big hurdle you might think. My previous bosses had no understanding of what standardization was, and so I’m left with a mess, SpiceWorks has actually done a great job of bringing MOST of my assets together, despite being in such a jumbled environment.

By: Brent

Brent — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:12:16 +0000

Hey Nerd,
Just wanted to say that I found this thread through the Spiceworks dashboard IT news. For me, the new version has been great and the fact that it is clientless has made getting it set up so much easier. There are other more full featured programs out there that have client and server applications but that was too difficult to use with my limited amount of time. Sure there are things that could be better such as having more control over the helpdesk and categories and having multiple email addresses, but Spiceworks has been the best combination of network monitoring and helpdesk I have found.

Probably not very interesting but here is what I said about it:
http://bdewong.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-far-spiceworks-has-come.html

By: GreNME

GreNME — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:33:00 +0000

Nerd– I’ve only been using Spiceworks for a few weeks, having been turned on to it from a friend who was helping me to find some alternatives to software that was very expensive and out of the range for my small company to buy. In just the few weeks I’ve had it here, I’ve seen both the wonderful aspects and the frustrating aspects of the software that you allude to. I agree with at least part of your assessment, if not most of your assessment. I don’t know what condition the software was in back in February, but I do also get the feeling at this point that the software doesn’t quite have that ‘finished’ feel that some of its competitors tend to have. I’ll freely admit to having to supplement some of the management duties by using Dameware, which does utilize a client service and gives me the things I need that Spiceworks can’t, whether because it would risk security or it would be too manually intensive to be reasonable.

I will say that I think the responses to you have been a little over-the-top and harsh. On the other hand, I’ll also chime in and say that some of the things I’ve found about Spiceworks that are wonderful are things you pointed out yourself: the inventory and reporting tools are splendid, and the graphing is very neat from a management perspective. I haven’t tried the helpdesk app (because we have a sharepoint site using the helpdesk module), but I found the product reviews to be a nice touch. So far, on my domain computers, access hasn’t been much of a problem (and where it has been I’m not going to be poking too many holes in my firewalls), but because this is an environment with at least five Vista machines in production– partly for testing purposes, but mostly to take advantage of better memory bandwidth and 64-bit support– the plain-jane methods SW uses for remote controls and remote commands/management are just slightly too clunky when I have a ‘sure thing’ (dameware) to handle those aspects of the IT support.

Then again, maybe I’m just stupid or a moron as well.

By: Craig M

Craig M — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:38:06 +0000

Thought you would be interested in the conversation in the Spiceworks Community that was started regarding this post.

By: Nerd

Nerd — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:53:38 +0000

Dave-O – thanks for calling it like you see it. Spiceworks is still not quite there… The helpdesk alone validates the need for it in a small IT shop. Once inventory works well we will all be happy campers and they will really start to see growth.

By: Nerd

Nerd — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:52:01 +0000

Jon – I’m working on the standards. That is the tough thing in my current 2 spaces. They are built over a long period of time before I showed up. Since Feb, I’ve made a lot of progress, thanks for the advice, you sound like you know whats up. As for other products? I’m a big fan of Hyperic, Nagios, Pingdom and a bunch of custom snmp work I’ve done in Openmanage. I wish everyone used openmanage and insight. Our lives would be so much easier if Dell and HP saw the usage numbers increase and dedicated more staff.

By: Nerd

Nerd — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:49:07 +0000

Gary – glad to hear it. Sounds like they are building a tonne of loyalty and I love to hear it. Good little company, good people.