Friday, November 13, 2009

Spiceworks 4.5 Beta III is out; my adventure

I use Spiceworks to keep track of everything connected to our network and also as a help desk solution. To tell you the truth, I use it as a help desk solution much more than any other of the millions of tools built into Spiceworks.

So when I heard that version 4.5 was going to be released, I immediately signed up for the beta so I could test out all the new and cool features.

I installed the Beta I and couldn't get the service started. I ended up uninstalling it and didn't have time to troubleshoot the problems before Beta II came out. So I installed Beta II and ended up with a "503 service unavailable" error. I reinstalled once and came up with the same error. Since the Spiceworks team is so fast at coming up with new versions, they had already come out with Beta III by the time I had gotten a chance to look into the problems I was having. I installed that version the day it came out. I tried to log in and received another 503 error. It was really pretty frustrating.

I came in the next day and logged in to my computer only to find it was running really really slow. I opened up the task manager and found that spiceworks-finder.exe was running and hogging all my resources. I thought to myself "hmm isn't that executable only running if Spiceworks is running?" So I went to the login screen, and voila, it was running. Needless to say I was excited.

Looking back, I realize that I probably wasn't having any problems with the Spiceworks beta, I just have too many things installed on my machine and too many services running so it took forever to load.

So far, I've only taken a quick look around and am quite excited by what I've seen so far. The first place I looked was the plugin screen. It looks so much better than before with customizable ticket rules and views built in.


The next place I looked was the plugin editor. I had heard that there were improvements made to the editor so I needed to check it out. All I have to say is wow. They separated out the title, description, and versioning to keep you concentrated on the actual code in the code area. And you can separate the code into different files inside the editor. These are really nice improvements.


Here is a video sneak-peek of 4.5 from Spiceworks.