Spiceworks is a free IT desktop help desk management application designed for small or medium businesses. Spiceworks IT Desktop is used to inventory, monitor, manage and report on software and hardware assets. It also includes an integrated help desk system. You might be wondering? If this software is free, where is the catch? Let’s find it out.

Spiceworks is a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas with an initial round of about $5 millions from Austin Ventures. Spiceworks was formed in early 2006. And here is the catch why Spiceworks is free; it displays sponsor ads on the administrator dashboard. If you look at the image below on the left sidebar you can see the non-intrusive sponsor ads.

If you don’t mind the ads then let’s look at the features Spiceworks offers:

Inventory everything on your network: run an inventory all of your hardware and software and other devices like printers, routers, switches, and basically any IP-based device.
IT Help Desk Spiceworks allows you to manage your daily help desk projects and user requests everything from one interface. Let users to submit help desk request tickets and check the status of those tickets through the web interface. It also let you run detail reports about overdue tickets, completed tickets etc.
Run reports of your network: Spiceworks comes with 20 ready-to-use reports to quickly run reports about the status of your network. See the software installed on your network, trouble tickets you have created in the past month. Export reports to PDF and excel.
Troubleshoot issues on your network. when something is wrong in the network, Spiceworks helps you identify the cause and resolve the problem quickly. You can also see software that is causing problems on machines, and let you remote control the PC is necessary. also make computer comparisons to see what settings are different.

Spiceworks also let you see what other IT pros using Spiceworks think about certain software and hardware and recommendations.

Any IT pro with a tight budget should look into Spiceworks when planning to setup a help desk system that works. You can get rid of the sponsor ads for a fee of 10 dollars a month. There is the catch again.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Free Tools Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.