Network Management
SpiceWorks Desktop 1.7
By David Cartwright, Techworld | Techworld
Published: 09:00 GMT, 28 September 07
Price = Free
IT managers have traditionally been suspicious of free tools - wondering whether they'll really do all that they promise, and where the catch is. But Spiceworks is a tool that offers a range of features that many paid-for products would find hard to match.
Pros:
Excellent GUI; “My SpiceWorks” is very cleverly done; Impressive software inventory tools; Helpdesk is simple but well put together and useful
Cons:
We came across a couple of tiny buglets with RSS feeds and AV detection
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IT Pro | Published: 01:46 GMT, 09 September 2008
Allen Darrah: This product is not designed for an Enterprise environment such as yours. It is for small business.
Allen Darrah | Published: 20:45 GMT, 11 August 2008
What I'm running into in my particular scenario really are the limits of the free software, no matter its good intent and thought out design. The discovery mode, being agentless, is a true achilles heal. This plays into a potential nightmare scenario of feeding Spiceworks significant amounts of configuration time and labor to produce limited results. Example: our company has three domains across four locations, multiple DNS's, managed firewalls, over fifty servers, about 600 workstations, and more than one subnet mask. Spiceworks, try as it might, can't, out of the box, handle this type of network. From hours (now turning into days) spent researching and scouring their forums and community it is, in theory, able to handle this type of environment but the sheer amount of time and human resource involved is staggering and limits its claim as "free." The thought "you get what you pay for" keeps running through my mind.