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Hi everyone,

The developer team at Spiceworks is working hard on the next generation of Spiceworks apps (you can check out the first few here Free Tools for IT Pros & SysAdmins - Spiceworks ), and in the meantime we’re only releasing patch builds for the On-Prem Help Desk when there are fixes needed for critical issues (things like total service outages, security fixes, etc.).

Those of you waiting on bug fixes for your help desk will be happy to know that we still have the bugs on the books. Resolving these bugs may take longer than usual as we finish up some of the initial work on our new tools. The same general delay will be in place for the Inventory app bug fixes.

Our developers are always multitasking across multiple Spiceworks products, but we wanted to make sure we keep you informed on what we’re going to be doing for the next few months, as this is an unusually slow time for bug fixes and we’ve had some questions about it.

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Great to see additions to the SW family.

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So fixing issues with your existing software is not nearly as important to you as pushing out new software? Will fixing issues with the new software also be pushed back, while you release even newer software?

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It’s a tough line to walk! We know we have a lot of people using the existing apps, and those people are important to us. We’ve also never been able to fix every bug that gets reported, so its a balancing act between what will help the most people or fix critical issues, and creating new functionality or new apps. Nothing new there - this has always been the trade off. So I would say both are important to us.

In talking with our dev managers I think the new tools bring a new challenge for our developers - the domain knowledge and tech the new tools are built on is quite different from the On-Prem Help Desk and Inventory code base. It makes working in both areas inefficient, slowing a developer down if they try to work on both sides at once.

To balance this out we’re going to work on the new tools, and then carve out some dedicated developer time to loop back around to pick up on the bug fix work.

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What about new features that have been requested and spiced-up for several years? They take even more of a back seat than they already have, by the sounds of it.

This disconnect with the IT Pros that actually (try to) use the Help Desk and Inventory apps is one of the main reasons that I hardly participate in the Community anymore. Since my activity is what drives your bottom line, there’s no benefit to me if you don’t improve and maintain the programs in a way that helps me do my job.

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Hi Limey. We are actually listening a lot to user’s feedback and do the best we can, to avoid the “disconnect”. In other words address the “(try to) use…” part of your comment.

For example, we are looking at the possibility to improve the Inventory scan accuracy, usability and performance. As Ben said, it’s a difficult balancing act and we believe that our time is best spent taking the Inventory infrastructure to the next level, as opposed to continue to build features on top of the current one.

I’d love to hear if you think our plan to improve the Inventory infrastructure, is something that would help you do your job better or not.

Like always, thanks for the candid feedback! That’s what helps us build a better Spiceworks!

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What does that mean? That sounds like political doublespeak. Does the next level involve the inventory actually working correctly?

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I think it means another change in the backend so that they can do things that are not possible with the current version. But I also think you know that as well, you’ve been around a long time, too :wink:

The problem with that is there’s so many things that don’t work, features requested that haven’t been added or otherwise missing that it’s got to be a real hurdle to make a new version that pulls info from the old version.

If they are really going for a clean start then I’d rather they actually do just that. “Sorry, but we can’t take your info from the old system. The new one is too different and it would handicap us to try and shoehorn them into the same box”

Make a viewer for the old inventory data, support it for a couple years. Or make an export to PDF so you can attach the old version of “ComputerXYZ” to the new versions scanned ComputerXYZ.

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Agreed, that sounds like a good plan. Possibly allow export of a field or two, like serial number, to be imported into the new version.

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I wonder if this is related to a long awaited 64bit app and the fact this handles things differently.

I am all for change if it is going in the right direction, but if this is true perhaps putting the existing on hold and putting all focus in the new one is a requirement - but let everyone know if this is the case.

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Hi guys, I think you are all on the right trail, I know it sounds vague and that is intentional for now - we aren’t ready to go into details. We’ll be ready to talk more about the future of Inventory soon. The new tools are definitely a glimpse, and I think we’ll have more details (and bits) ready for SpiceWorld.

To that end, we’re definitely invested in learning about the challenges with Inventory and working to both solve problems and build the right products for the future. Ideally what we spend time on checks both boxes.

Do you think app performance/scalability, and the process you go through to setup and maintain discovery/scanning are the two biggest hurdles with Inventory, today? If you were focused on getting “the biggest bang for your buck”? If not, we can add a few things for consideration to Francois’ list. :slight_smile:

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Since the HP split, warranties for HP Servers aren’t being picked up yet. I think due to HP server group moving to HPE. Just noticed this today. Currently on 7.5.00063 and will be upgrading latest in a few minutes. Be nice to fix the code so that works.

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We do have warranty issues right now with HP - it was related to the certificates they issued expiring. We’re planning to put out a patch for that in the next week or so…

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Thanks. I’ve relied on that feature quite a bit. Glad you are on top of this.

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Wow…two month from last release…i thought that something happens…

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While I can’t speak for everyone, discovery and scanning works great when it works but there’s often constant tinkering and the documentation of how the underlying components work can be lacking causing confusion about how to set it up properly (if you visit: https://community.spiceworks.com/help#Current it says that the current version is “7.4”).

If I remember right there was a posting since the beginning of the year that a few devs had re-created the ticketing portion in a language other than Ruby and a significant performance increase was seen. I think there was also a mention of this being incorporated, but I couldn’t figure out how the two languages would be meshed together. It’s possible that the entirety of the desktop app is being re-written in this new language - but for the life of me I can’t remember where I saw that.

It is interesting to note that in one thread I saw Jackie(Spiceworks) mention something about “Spiceworks 7.6” but not only did it not appear in the “Beta” forums but all threads for previous versions also mysteriously vanished.

That said, considering how much manpower (and womanpower) is going into development of the “cloud” version of the help desk and that it became “free” last year, and that agent updates were recently de-coupled from the desktop app, one could extrapolate that the “future” is “cloud-based” - which caused a huge row when the Knowledge Base was first released and people didn’t want to store documentation of internal systems and processes on Spiceworks’ servers.
I sure hope that the on-premise version does not vanish. I really, really do.

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J_L, definitely agree that discovery/scanning is challenging to get right. We hope our current work will help in tackling that, specifically. While a lot of our work is exciting I think Inventory will always be one of my favorites to work with and help people use. We should see some of these topics discussed at SpiceWorld (the topic of future direction of Help Desk and Inventory apps).

I can tell you we don’t expect folks using the on-premise Help Desk and/or Inventory to suddenly stop using it. As I said earlier on, we know we have a lot of people using the existing apps, and those people are important to us. We’ve also never been able to fix every bug that gets reported, so its a balancing act between what will help the most people or fix critical issues, and creating new functionality or new apps.

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Also note that one reason we are focusing on the agent is that it makes the product easier to use and potentially more reliable. People talk about how hard it is to get scanning to work (or it requires constant tinkering) and an agent will alleviate that problem. We already put a bunch of work into the agent to help some of the scalability issues and allow people to use more agents if they choose to do so.

We decoupled the agent from the product because it’s easier to produce agent updates without requiring a product update - so in the longer term, this simplifies things.

We are also currently working on building a new agent - it will be one agent for everything - which means you’ll be able to use it for the on-prem version (and it will support Linux and Mac when all is said and done) and anything cloud. It doesn’t mean that you have to go to Cloud, but if you wanted to use this agent to do your workstation inventory and your Connectivity Dashboard, you’ll be able to. It gives users more flexibility AND will allow us to have one agent instead of many. Kind of a win-win all around.

Jackie.

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I understand completely and I’m glad you’ve done it.

But, reading between the lines, it sounds like I was pretty close to being correct?

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Hi, Ben.

This may be the only time I can speak for much of the community when I say that the recent large patch releases have been extremely welcome. I know there have been skirmishes off and on over the years regarding features v. fixes. Unfortunately I, personally, think part of the problem is that features have gotten so far ahead of fixes. I think most people would that that (in most instances) fixes released during the latest release lifecycle are from that release but often the bugs fixes may have been reported several versions [or years] ago.
I don’t think this is unique to Spiceworks but that you probably have a smaller team than many other companies, which makes it seem like a larger problem.

I’m placing bets on the future being scanner-free and either (1) agent-based to a cloud-hosted system, or, (2) agent-based with an on-premise system.

I can say that for us we use the scripted-reporting quite a bit (and by that I mean daily) to expand functionality or integrate with other systems. We don’t complain because it allows us to do a lot of customization (for instance - exporting a CSV, parsing the data, and sending an HTML formatted message using BLAT).