May 2, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Spiceworks™, Inc. (www.spiceworks.com) has announced the third generation of its free, ad-supported Spiceworks IT Desktop application, which is designed to meet the IT and network management needs of small and medium businesses. The 3.0 version includes a new user interface called Network Glide™, which lets IT professionals rapidly flip through their network inventory in a manner similar to popular consumer applications. In addition, Spiceworks added the ability to inventory SaaS services, extended the popular activity feeds to IT services to track changes, and added support for Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory.
“Spiceworks continues to combine the best aspects of consumer applications and powerful IT management software with the largest community of small business IT pros working together to help each other get their jobs done,” said KoKo Washington, I.T. Support Specialist, DATAprose, Inc. “It’s paying off by making it easier for small business IT managers like me to run our networks more smoothly.”
The user interface in version 3.0 also allows users to launch and view additional network and systems management tools directly from within the Spiceworks interface. Details on these and other new features include:
SaaS Inventory Management – new inventory features include the ability to track SaaS services – such as online back-up or e-mail hosting – which often account for more than 50 percent of IT spend and are becoming more prevalent as SMBs migrate to “Cloud Computing” services. Inventory items that can be tracked include service costs, related contract dates, help desk tickets, outages, contact information, documents and relevant news.
Network Glide™ – the new Network Glide™ feature allows users to flip through and view network devices, applications and services with a single click. This not only makes navigation easier but allows IT managers to view more aspects of their networks quickly in a single glance.
IT Services Activity Feeds – allows the history of IT services to be viewed in an activity stream similar to a social networking application news feed. This helps the IT manager stay on top of issues with IT services.
Report Sharing – users can now create customized reports and share them with other IT managers within the Spiceworks community. Users benefit from access to additional out-of-the-box reports customized to the needs of small business IT pros like them.
Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory Support – allows users to monitor their Microsoft Exchange server status, load, and mailbox capacity usage. In addition it integrates Spiceworks help desk email functions with Microsoft Exchange and simplifies end-user help desk authentication.
Third-Party Tool Integration – enables users to launch and view other network and systems management tools from within the Spiceworks user interface, making it easier to perform key IT management tasks.
The Spiceworks IT Desktop is designed for small and medium organizations with computer networks of up to 250 devices. The 325,000 Spiceworks users have access to a free IT management application that allows them to automatically discover, inventory, monitor, track, report on, troubleshoot and repair the hardware and software running in a network. It also provides a built-in help desk, remote control capability, and is the first to embed community collaboration features directly into an IT management application. The free Spiceworks application is supported by displaying relevant, non-intrusive ads on topics that are useful to IT professionals.
“We continue to take the best ideas from the consumer web – like free ad-supported business models, Web 2.0 collaboration, ease-of-use, and great UIs – and bring them to business applications,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks, Inc. “This latest version of the Spiceworks IT Desktop revolutionizes the way people interact with their networks and with other IT pros. And we believe it helps us to continue to achieve our goal of empowering small business IT managers to make their jobs easier.”
More than 40 top advertisers – including HP, Intel, Rackspace, Microsoft, Brother, Symantec, McAfee, Netgear, Sony and TrendMicro – have experienced success with campaigns to the Spiceworks user community, which now supports networks with over 14 million devices and more than 9 million employees.
