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back to article Concerning Spiceworks' evil plans for world domination

Spiceworld 2013 In the first article in my two-part series on Spiceworks I discussed the company's ambitions for "owning the stack". Not only does it own the coalface administrator's eyeballs, it is starting to own the relationships that VARs, MSPs, and CSPs have with those coalface admins, each other, other vendors and, …

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  1. Roger Greenwood

    Is it just me?

    Based on the enthusiasm expressed by TP I signed up a few months ago to dip my toe in the spiceworks water. Since then all I seem to get is spammed to bits from the big boys. I know I must be missing something, but it doesn't seem to offer much for the very part time admin with no time to play around.

    I'm not giving up though.

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    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge
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      Re: Is it just me?

      Defanging the spam takes some poking around in your settings, but it's possible.

      Ignore the help desk and focus on the automated inventory and problem detection stuff. Get the GPOs right for the thing to talk to your various devices and I have found the software to be quite useful. There's all sorts of way better monitoring software out there. There isn't much that's free and in terms of both "free" and "remotely easy to use" there's basically nothing else available.

      I also suggest you explore the plug-ins. They make a world of difference, especially when it comes to integrating the existing applications and hardware on your network into the system.

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    2. Prairie Harpy
      Reply Icon

      Re: Is it just me?

      I think you have a point here. My e-mail inbox gets hit two or three times a day with Spice-spam. Some of it is useful (like invitations to local meetups) and some is advertising. The advertising is to be expected - it's how they make money - but if they don't get ratio of useful stuff to spam just right I think they risk losing valuable eyeballs.

      Certainly I'm irritated enough to poke through the settings and figure out how to throttle the amount of e-mail I'm getting. I'm not giving up on Spiceworks; I'd just like to reduce the ad factor.

      (I use Spiceworks more for the community discussions than for the monitoring app. Maybe people using the app more extensively would have a different take on the ratio of usefulness to spam that they experience?)

      If Spiceworks actually is trying to take over the social networking world, they're going to have to strike a balance between getting advertising dollars and pleasing (not irritating) users.

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  2. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    Additional comments thread

    For those interested: the official Spiceworks thread on this article (with some good jabs at yours truly by some of the Spiceheads) is here

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I truly love the idea of Spiceworks

    The platform and functionality is amazing.

    But I just can't stand the ads, so until they offer a proper ads-free commercial version (i.e. one where I can use the WHOLE of my screen) I refuse to use it. This might seem a little melodramatic, but it uses about 1/3 browser, which given the criticality and amount of meaningful data.

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  4. Slow Joe Crow

    Spiceworks is a very useful tool

    I work in a small part of a big company's IT department and we use Spiceworks heavily in our labs where big IT refuses to go. We actually have some of the largest Spiceworks installs with over 1000 nodes being monitored. We do have the ad-free version and I only get 2-3 marketing mails a week plus forum updates.

    I personally don't use it much but it is a huge time saver when you need to know the CPU stepping on 500 machines.

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