Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Spiceworks 1.5

Spiceworks 1.5

Spiceworks 1.5
VIEW ALL 5 PHOTOS IN GALLERY
MSRP
$0.00
  • PROS
    Free, intuitive, and supported by a helpful community.
  • CONSDisplays ads. Doesn't scale well for larger businesses.
  • BOTTOM LINE
    The free, easy-to-use Spiceworks offers small-business IT admins a powerful tool for creating and updating an inventory of end-point devices such as printers and network nodes.
BY ROBERT P. LIPSCHUTZ
Unless a business has just a few network-attached devices, all located in a relatively small area, keeping track of them by making house calls burns too much of IT's valuable time. Spiceworks—a supremely useful tool—lets IT administrators inventory and monitor networks of up to 250 devices. Best of all, the app costs nothing (though you do have to endure some ads running down the side of its browser-based interface).
VIEW ALL 5 PHOTOS IN GALLERY
Spiceworks, which doesn't require you to deploy agents to monitored devices, includes a basic help-desk component and gives you access to a helpful user community. The app's ease of use, however, is what stood out most in my testing. You can install the Web server on any PC simply by telling it which port to bind to (80 by default) and where it should put itself on the hard drive; from then on, you interact with it via your browser. Loading pages seems fairly CPU-intensive, though, so if you plan to track more than a few dozen devices, I'd recommend installing it on a server.
You kick off Spiceworks' inventory process by giving it an IP range to scan and some Microsoft Windows or SSH (Secure Shell) log-in credentials to try. The software will scan the network to detect devices, determine what they are (Windows PCs, printers, switches, or something else), and gather whatever additional device-specific information it can.
For Windows PCs, the product reports the manufacturer and model, hardware configuration, available hard drive space, TCP/IP settings, and installed software, services, and Windows hotfixes. A diff feature, similar to the popular Unix program, lets you compare two computers to see how their details differ—useful information for troubleshooting or for standardizing configurations. The utility also ties in with Windows-aware antivirus packages and can show you whether they're up to date.
As anyone who's ever had to inventory a company's equipment can tell you, Spiceworks' ability to do that is enough to make the app worth installing. Better yet, however, you can also run reports with the information it gathers, letting you see, for example, all machines that lack antivirus protection, or all machines with Microsoft Office installed. You can also have the software alert you via e-mail when certain conditions occur, such as when a printer's ink supply drops below 10 percent (if your printer already reports ink levels). This sort of reporting and alerting is just the sort of handy force-multiplier that can really save an overworked IT department's bacon.
So the app is good at IT exams and preventive care; but what about emergency care? Most IT departments spend a good deal of their time putting out fires. Can Spiceworks help there, too? Yes, thanks to a trouble-ticketing system that helps IT manage its workload. With the default setup, users submit tickets via a Web interface, but you can also configure Spiceworks to accept e-mail requests, if you provide it with the necessary credentials. The help desk supports multiple users and standard features such as tracking ticket status, due dates, priority levels, and issue-related correspondence. The integration of the help desk, inventorying, and monitoring capabilities lets you attach a ticket directly to the machine it affects—an especially convenient feature. The software also ties into the Spiceworks forums, helping connect you with a community of other IT administrators who might have similar problems. I'd highly recommend that any small business IT department without a similar system already in place should give Spiceworks a look.
Overall, I was impressed with this intuitive utility. It provides many of the capabilities small-business IT administrators need, letting them gain a more detailed view of their networks, keep track of issues, and seek help from a convenient community resource. Spiceworks 1.5 isn't the right choice for larger companies or those needing a solution that's oriented more toward performance monitoring, but it's an excellent tool for a smaller business—and paying nothing for it adds to its appeal.
More Network Software reviews:
•   Wire (for iPhone) 
•   Metageek Wi-Spy + Chanalyzer 5
•   HostGator Web Hosting
•   Google Hangouts (for Android)
•   Rotten WiFi (for Android)
•  more
Back to top
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)