Spiceworks was founded in by four former employees of Motive -- an Austin-based broadband and data service management company that was acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in -- and they brought experience from a wide range of other tech outfits as well, including Apple, NeXT, Tivoli, and 3M.
According to co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development Jay Hallberg, the new company's mission arose from conversions he and the other founders had with various system administrators and other IT pros. Hallberg says that when he asked system admins what software they loved, he got blank stares. But when Hallberg asked what software people hated, they went on and on. With Spiceworks, Hallberg and team decided to build an IT management tool that was actually easy to use.
The original product offered an inventory tool and a hosted application for help desk workers, but the company now wants to make it possible to manage, not just monitor, your IT infrastructure from within Spiceworks.
It made its first foray into cloud services in May when it released a tool that enabled system admins to determine which cloud services were being used within a company by monitoring network traffic. If a department was sharing files through Dropbox, for example, IT could easily find out. The new Cloud Program expands on this service by adding tools for monitoring, managing and deploying cloud services. The applicable business sizes were ascertained using the business size of the reviewers.
Senior Content Analyst Capterra, sharing insights about marketing and business operations. I hold a Bachelor in Engineering from BITS Pilani India and have created thought-leadership content and research reports that help businesses make better technology decisions. Outside work, I am an aspiring musician passionate about learning Spanish guitar, and love to jam with like-minded music enthusiasts in my free time.
Comment by Marc-Henri on Jan. Helping businesses choose better software since About Us FAQs. Log in. Sign up. Software Categories. Who We Are. For Vendors Write a Review. Wondering how? Spiceworks makes money from ads, but those ads can be obstructive for some business users. There are other products with advanced functionalities that may better align with your business needs. This article looks at four highly rated Spiceworks alternatives.
See the full list of Spiceworks alternatives here. Looking for IT Management software? Check out Capterra's list of the best IT Management software solutions. Check out these alternative options for popular software solutions.
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Use our research library below to get actionable, first-hand advice. Spiceworks IT help desk takes just minutes to set up online and is totally free. Then again, you get what you pay for, so its limited functionality may not meet the needs of organizations with a large IT footprint. We may receive compensation from partners and advertisers whose products appear here. Compensation may impact where products are placed on our site, but editorial opinions, scores, and reviews are independent from, and never influenced by, any advertiser or partner.
Are you tired of having emails requesting support sent to your IT department and falling through the cracks? At the same time, you're probably leery of potentially paying hundreds or thousands of dollars every month for a comprehensive service desk solution.
If so, Spiceworks help desk software could be the answer. It's totally free, and what you get is stripped-down IT service management. We'll go over its features and limitations below to help you determine if it's a fit for your needs. Spiceworks is not a software developer per se; instead, its primary focus is an online community of approximately six million IT professionals and 3, vendors who trade information, collaborate, and seek advice from one another.
Spiceworks generates revenue from its marketplace for IT products and related services and through ads embedded in its software. Spiceworks IT help desk is one of several free software products available from Spiceworks. Other free tools include inventory management, a contract tracker, and remote support.
Spiceworks software employs a no-frills approach suitable for companies that want basic functionality in lieu of advanced features. You get what you pay for in life and software, and given that Spiceworks products are free, it's important to know the limitations of Spiceworks IT help desk. On a practical level, the self-hosted version only runs on Microsoft Windows servers, and you will get no document storage, multi-channel communication options, or remote support abilities without installing extra tools and apps.
The left-hand navigation menu in the main dashboard provides access to your help desk and other tools you may choose to use like the Spiceworks network monitor or inventory management.
Content modules such as a Spiceworks inventory summary and a purchase list can be added, rearranged, or deleted to meet your needs. The main Spiceworks dashboard can be customized to meet your needs, but you will have to get used to the ever-present ads.
Spiceworks advertisements can be intrusive for a dashboard that's already crowded with menu options and widgets. Spiceworks does offer an option to remove the ads that we'll go over in the pricing section below. The agent help desk dashboard displays an overview of the Spiceworks ticketing system: new tickets , open tickets, your own tickets, and unassigned tickets.
Basic performance metrics such as average first response time, average time to resolve tickets, and ticket churn can also be displayed in graphs, bar charts, and pie charts. The ticket dashboard is similar to an email inbox but contains extra fields for an ID number, priority level, ticket creator, ticket assignation, and due date. Individual tickets can be selected to pull up all submitted information. The ticket dashboard displays recently submitted tickets, and help desk agents have multiple action options after selecting an individual ticket.
A help desk agent can add notes inside a ticket to create a running narrative, send an individual or company-wide response with a knowledge-base article attached, or provide a canned reply. The help portal to submit help desk tickets is cleanly designed and easy to use. Users provide their email address, a quick summary of their issue, and any additional details and attachments as needed.
The help desk email is also provided, so users can add it to their address books to directly email support tickets. The reporting features in Spiceworks are very limited. Users have three categories of options to define reports:. You'll have to choose from the available Spiceworks apps and plug-ins to build out additional reporting capabilities. Spiceworks' web-based free help desk can be set up in a matter of minutes, and you'll immediately have a custom help portal for users to submit support tickets.
The server-based version is reportedly easy to download and install, too. The lack of built-in advanced functionality also contributes to its ease of use.
The graphical user interface GUI is easy to navigate and customize. The number of actions help desk agents can take within individual help tickets also contributes to their timely resolution. Spiceworks pricing is simple: It's totally free. Want to use the web-based version? Download and install it on your own Windows server? Also free.
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