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SpiceCorps of ChicagoLand – Q3 2011 Meeting, September 29, 2011

Meeting began at 7:00pm at Mount Prospect Public Library, Mount Prospect, IL

Pizza and drinks served @ 6:45pm

21 Spiceworks users attended meeting

Welcome and intro by Tim Loga

All attendees introduced themselves to the group, gave background, and how each uses Spiceworks (SW).

• Common problem mentioned by several involved automatic recognition of equipment in SW

• Network inventory hard to master, takes a long time to set up, tends to find some equipment but not all and hard to ID or avoid duplicates

• Help Desk is easiest to get going and works well, especially with User Portal

Next meeting proposed to meet Thursday, December 1st. Welcome to once again meet at MPPL, but standing invitation for anyone else to host meetings if they have meeting space and are willing.

Reviewed the new features of SW v5.2 highlights including:

• New means to track software by computer to detect, review, or remove unwanted software

• Detect and manage Cloud Services on your domain and show hosts

• Ability to create multi-vendor Request for Quotations (RFQs) from tickets, select vendors, send out anonymously or identify self, negotiate, and make purchases. One meeting attendee has already used RFQ successfully and found a cheaper price thru it.

• Ability to buy ink and toner directly from SW

Discussed other useful SW features:

• In Purchases, using Approved, Purchased, and Received to attach info to a Help Desk ticket

• Use Vendor component (previously IT Services) to keep contact information for all vendors and service contracts in one, central location where other staff can also use

• Can see all tickets related to a piece of equipment or to a person via People

• Discussed tips on getting SW inventory management to more accurately identify your equipment, including clearing out phantom devices and multiple IP addresses for devices, checking permissions, that antivirus software isn’t blocking detection, excluding a range of devices to avoid duplicates on both wireless and wired connections, and doing full scans (usually more reliable)

Discussed plug-ins in SW:

• Categorized, rated, free, easy to use

• SW Users create plug-ins to cover an issue they wanted to improve, then share it with others

• Can select and install from SW Admin, install quickly, can turn off but retain, or remove easily

• Discussed perhaps a better name would be SW Apps

Discussed Feature Requests posted in the SW Community where users can vote to increase a suggestion’s “Spiciness” including offering a knowledge base to do better searches.

Demonstration of SW Mobile App now available for Android and IOS by Peter Balingit, MPPL :

• Free for both Android and Apple

• Offers major SW features including Tickets, People, Inventory, and Community

• Help Desk probably most valuable to most. However, one big disadvantage of using App for Tickets is not being able to add Note, only Comment

• Inventory can pull up equipment by device

• App requests suggestions: Landscape orientation (not currently supported), barcode reader, desktop widget, notifications, merge tickets, access purchases, add new inventory items

If looking for help with reports, Extensions Center in Community offers lots of shared reports – can access and run instantly. Users who develop reports of possible value to others can share them there.

Discussed various other problems various attendees were experiencing, and others offered their suggestions and proven solutions.

SW takes user requests and implements user requests in future version releases. Our group is one of the most active SpiceCorps in length of time in existence, regularity of meetings, and number of attendees. Therefore, our group is a good source of such suggestions SW Users can vote on by raising Spiciness to increase likelihood they will be implemented. The group suggested the following specific features they would like to see in future updates, and we will highlight these requests to SW.

Requests the SpiceCorps ChicagoLand group would like to collectively make for future SW features or improvements:

1. Mobile App Request: Ability to add Note(not be seen by non-IT staff) to Help Desk tickets as well as Comments

2. Mobile App Request: Ability to change between Portrait and Landscape onscreen view

3. Ability to create a reoccurring ticket at a stated interval (i.e., for scheduled maintenance every month)

Next meeting:  Thursday, 12/1/2011 at Mount Prospect Public Library, Mount Prospect, IL from 7:00-9:00 PM

Meeting ended at 9:00 pm.

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