Spiceworks -- Anyone use this?

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PTNL

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Has anyone else worked with this IT management application before? We've been experimenting with Spiceworks at my company, and overall we're extremely pleased with the product.

Just looking to get other opinions on this app, or potentially a list of similar products on the market.
 
Tried it a few times....
Too slow/sluggish
I find it doesn't find all nodes on the network

And it is ad-ware driven.
 
It works well. For it to see everything in the network you have to customize your settings to widen your network properties, make sure the necessary ports are open which you will have to do with any program you use anyways. You will need a fast computer, but who doesn't have one nowadays. Best of all it's free
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Tried it a few times....
Too slow/sluggish
I find it doesn't find all nodes on the network

And it is ad-ware driven.
Click to expand...
I agree completely. It also fails to properly identify a lot of things as well. (Identifying switches as windows computers, Macs as windows computers, and even some windows computers as linux computers) It also only found about 60% of our devices. I'd highly recommend not using it.
 
So far this thing looks great for small and mid-size companies. Its ability in recognizing and centralizing so much information on our mixed network is incredible.

The ad-driven nature of Spiceworks is a moot point given its "free" pricetag. It's no worse than any on Yahoo mail or other similar services.

Some of the comments I'm interested in so far are mis-discovery and speed. Obviously this is affected by numerous other factors, such as number of devices to be polled and the product manufacturers. Some details (at least) about the number of devices polled and the total time needed would provide rough metrics to compare against.
 
I have it running at work, though I must say I don't actually use it that often. The newest version is quite a bit better than the earlier ones were. Finally has AD integration, etc. I kinda like some of the reporting/alerts/events features it has. Being able click a couple times and get a list of everything installed on a particular PC is nice. We were looking at getting some office 2k7 licenses a while back and one of the dept. heads at work asked me what all versions everyone else was running. I fired up spiceworks and printed out a report that listed what versions every pc at our office was running. Found out our Executive Director was running office 97, ugh. Never had noticed that before.
 
I tried it and also had issues with it detecting everything. You generally do have to either disable windows firewall or configure it to allow certain ports to be open. The main issue I had with it was that a lot of our computers are not on site, but connected to other networks (I currently work in a school coop). This of course is no fault of the software, but just the nature of things. Unfortunately, the ability for it to scan the network and detect everything is the main feature of that software. Without it, there's little reason to be running it.

If I ever switched to a small / medium business with everything on site, I'd almost definitely take another look at it.
 
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