ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

The latest version of the popular free IT management tool for SMBs adds the ability to visually map your company's IT network, Twitter integration, and 3rd-party management plug-ins from Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel, and Trend Micro.

bMighty has long been a fan of Spiceworks. The company sponsored the first bMighty SMB Theater and Pavilion at Interop in New York last year, and I moderated a couple panels at the inaugural SpiceWorld user conference in Austin, Texas last fall.

And now the company has followed up the January release of Spiceworks IT Desktop version 3.5--which added support for up to 500 devices and lets businesses prioritize and customize scans of their networks at the subnet level, use an integrated SQL editor to generate graphical reports, and share widgets and reports with the Spiceworks community--with Version 4.0.

What's new this time?

VP of marketing Jay Hallberg emphasizes three key new capablities:

Network Mapping - network admins can create live visual maps of their IT infrastructures to identify bottlenecks, problems and bandwidth. Hallberg says that this was the most requested new feature in 4.0.

Plug-in Apps from Third Parties - Spiceworks has opened up its platform to third-party developers and Microsoft, Intel, LiveOffice, and CDW have all developed free Spiceworks apps to manage licenses, do backup, and other tasks with these vendors' technologies. Examples include the LiveOffice Mail Archive Widget that lets you archive e-mail accounts from within Spiceworks, the Microsoft License Organizer that automatically tracks Microsoft licenses and orders additional licenses when needed, and an Intel plug-in that shows which computers are vPro-enabled.

Windows Event Collaboration - users can automatically see all the background (user discussions, best practices, etc.) related to a specific Windows Event whenever they're generated.

Other new capabilities include the ability to control the Spiceworks help desk from any email-enabled device, including mobile phones and the ability to cc: Spiceworks activity updates to Twitter.

The free, advertising supported software is available at www.spiceworks.com. According to the company, some 700,000 IT professionals now use the system.

More From bMighty:

• Video: bMighty/Spiceworks Panels Show How To Keep Up With Technology & Justify IT
• What IT Folks REALLY Think

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