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I am the Director of IT for what was a fairly small operation, but is quickly growing into one that’s beyond the scope of our small IT dept’s SW skills. Basically, I’ve been using SW for almost 4 years here. It’s been utilized as nothing more than a straight-out-of-the-box inventory tool, up until now, but I want to change that quickly!

It’s just myself, a systems admin, and a software dev, and we split the help desk stuff between us. I’m the main SW person here, but have the least usable skill within our little dept. The most skilled is my systems admin, but he’s overloaded with everyday tasks just trying to keep up with our growth.

I’ve been approved for another FTE, a level-2-type, desktop support resource, but I want to see if I can’t get more out of my SW implementation (at least see if there isn’t some low-hanging fruit), before I bring someone new on board.

I know SW is superior tool, chocked full of great value that frankly I’m not even close to tapping into, and I know leveraging SW to a much greater extent is something I really want to do. I just don’t have the resources to do it internally.

I feel like I can do most of this myself without needing to summon our sys admin, but I need hand-holding. My question to the community is do I need to put this off until I can afford to bring in a consultant? I have trolled the community for a long time from the weeds, so I don’t want to just all the sudden pop my head up and jump in with a thousand and one questions (which is exactly what I’ve got).

I don’t really know where to start. I know I want to implement the user portal, for instance, and have had it up and running for more than a year (but not in production), but I have no idea how to make it do the things I want it to do. I made a list of 7 or 8 functions that I wanted the portal to include. I’ve got a few of them functioning, but want to get all of them out there before I go live with the users, if possible.

If I just focused on getting the user portal the way I wanted it, what questions would I need to answer to gain some input from the community? I really am so overwhelmed I don’t even know where to begin. Thanks, in advance to all of you who take the time to read this, and especially if you’ve got some input…

5 Spice ups
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Take the Spiceworks software out of the equation for a moment. You say you think you need a new employee, I’m assuming that it’s because you have the work that needs to be done on a daily basis that warrants a new employee correct? SW isn’t a magical pill that will make you need a body or not. It helps you stay somewhat efficient, but it’s not a people replacer.

4 Spice ups
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The first thing that I would want to know to begin helping you are the 7 or 8 functions that you need in the portal.

The portal is highly customizable and auto-assigning tickets based on answers from your end-user could be very useful in staying organized.

You can also set up a page where users would see the answers they have been given so that if they run across the same issue later, they can look it up there instead of asking you again. As well as setting up a how-to type page for some of the basic questions that are asked often. This could greatly cut your workload as far as the Help Desk is concerned.

1 Spice up
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Lets also start by finding out what those 7 or 8 items are that you are wanting.

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Can you list those 7 or 8 functions so we can help you figure out what to do? Some may be better off having their own topic, but they could also be simple fixes if you know where to look.

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All users log into user portal, which contains:

  • Help desk (Remote support utility, ticket tracking, reporting)
  • Company calendar
  • Employee directory
  • Content repository (how-to’s, etc)
  • HR forms
  • Nice but not necessary: Employee polls, Employee of the month, Activity feed type stuff
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I’ve got the help desk implemented but have no idea how it should be used, i.e. does IT staff and normal users alike log in through the portal, or does the IT staff actually go to the dashboard? Not sure how that’s supposed to be used.

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Sorry, one last entry. We’ve not put it into production, so when I say implemented, I just mean to say it’s up and running.

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I too have it up and running but not implemented yet. If it were me, I would have IT users log in through the normal dashboard. For end-users they would log in to the portal. If you set it up to autoassign tickets then your IT users would be notified in the dashboard when something is assigned to them.

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I was in your shoes 2 years ago. Same requirements. Unfortunately, SW won’t really do most of those things. The portal is great and you can post links, a KB, and add all kinds of other pages to it.

But in the end, we ended up moving all that stuff over to the free version of SharePoint (SharePoint 2013 Foundation.) In our environment, it runs on the same windows box as SW (a Win 2008 R2 VM on Hyper-V in this case). Its been so easy to use and saved me the headache of trying to shoe-horn extraneous functions into SW.

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Sounds to me like you’ve been approved for a FTE and you have a project (Spiceworks) for them to work on? Not sure I see a problem…

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Appropriately delegate: Work smarter, not harder.

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Speaking only to you about your Spiceworks installation - You need to get into a Spice U class! I am not sure who is teaching in the Texas area, maybe take a look here - you can also take training online.

http://community.spiceworks.com/university

2 Spice ups