Spiceworks releases app for helpdesk, systems monitoring and more
Amid all the fun and games — OK, legit business productivity tools too — IT-professionals-cum-iPhone-users can now find a management app from popular freeware company Spiceworks.
Philip Moya, IT manager for the San Antonio Kidney Disease Center (SAKDC), already has found the Spiceworks iPhone app a great addition to his IT toolbox, he says. “We had the app up and running in five minutes, and found it to be pretty amazing. It gives us a good, visible picture in a portable fashion of what’s happening with the helpdesk,” says Moya, who primarily uses Spiceworks for helpdesk administration.
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Although Spiceworks officially released the app just last week, Moya has been using it since early this year — “being picked as one of 48 beta testers among 1.3 million Spiceworks users was pretty nice,” he says.
Moya, who received an iPhone as a work tool when SAKDC rolled out the devices to its doctors, says he was keen to download the Spiceworks iPhone app to ease the pain of helpdesk management from afar. While he had been doing some remote helpdesk ticket management using Spiceworks’ Tickets Anywhere, that process was a tad cumbersome, he says. With Tickets Anywhere, uses can edit tickets by issuing hash commands in e-mail rather than having to log onto the Spiceworks application. However, that means looking at tickets in e-mail one by one.
“But the iPhone app presents a list of what tickets we have open and what’s currently happening with each ticket, giving us the ability to log in, make comments and do some of the things we have to do as we’re going about our day-to-day business,” Moya says.
“We have about 15 different locations, so it’s entirely possible that we’re not going to be where the helpdesk workstation is or at a computer where we can log into it, so being able to have this capability on our phones is phenomenal. We have our phones in our pockets, at lunch — wherever we go,” he adds.
Besides the helpdesk management features, the Spiceworks iPhone app lets IT professionals view the status of their servers, software applications and cloud services for inventory and monitoring purposes; access employee information; and participate in the Spiceworks community by viewing and responding to posts, the company says.
The Spiceworks iPhone app is available for download here.
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