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I work as a network service technician for many small businesses around my area and would like to be able to take advantage of the many features within Spiceworks. We have it installed on our server in office but would like to include our customers data as well in order to track inventory, manage tickets, generate reports and so on. Problem is, many of our customers do not have servers, so a complete scan can be difficult at times, and to provide every customer with a system set up as a remote data collector can get expensive. Usually when I arrive on site, I plug my laptop on network, config and run a scan from installation on laptop to gather at the least the IPs, names, and types of devices on network, in order to complete task or simply to generate a network map for customer. Ideally we would like that data to be relayed to SW instance on our server in the office and have a more complete scan in order to provide a better service for our customers. How would I go about accomplishing that for our company?

1 Spice up
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Well, you either need a remote collector (doesn’t have to be a full fledged rack mount server, could be a cheap desktop), Scanning over VPN (I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS), or look into the spiceworks agent plugin.

How you’re doing it now works…but sucks for you.

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Its not that bad, it only takes a few minutes to plug-in and scan when I arrive on site, and it gives me a basic idea of the size and whats on the network. Detailed results of devices would be nice, but are rare.

We’ve considered the desktop as a remote collector, but don’t really like that idea. I did run across the stand alone agent plug-in and made note of it, but as of now, haven’t looked into it in detail. Thank you for your feedback, and any more suggestions are always welcome.