Every year in living memory I’ve sat in the obligatory “how to complete your annual goals in the HR system” meeting, and each time I’ve been told: make sure you make your objectives “SMART” – Specific, Measurable, Achievable and so on. Our HR cousins have been telling us this for years, and yet we seem to continue to measure …

Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise Hosted by Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. This week Ed and Sarah are in Austin for Spiceworks' annual convention – Spiceworld – where they discuss China, Citrix and selfie deaths, while digging deep into Spiceworks' culture with special guest Scott Abel, former …

Analysis Yesterday, a security screw up with the Spiceworks application was noticed, and reported a little earlier by our good selves. Anyone with a Facebook or LinkedIn account could log in to Spiceworks installs running the latest version and it would create an administrative account for them. This is not OK, not at all. Many …

A serious security flaw has been discovered in the Spiceworks network administration application. The issue, uncovered by Spicehead Darren K Smith, allows anyone with a Facebook or LinkedIn account to log in as an administrator. Spiceworks has responded by temporarily disabling social sign-in until the flaw can be addressed. …

Podcast speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise This week, Speaking in Tech regular Greg Knieriemen has fled the country, leaving the ever-capable Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela to host our weekly tech-cast. Today's episode was recorded at Spiceworld with special guests Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks, and …

Spiceworks, the Texas-based web-2.0 platform for sysadmins, has announced that it has closed a $57 million round of funding - which it expects to be its last before an IPO. The funding is led by Goldman Sachs and brings the total amount raised by the company to $111 million. In exchange for the cash splash, Goldman Sachs gets …

Analysis Spiceworld 2013 In the first article in my two-part series on Spiceworks I discussed the company's ambitions for "owning the stack". Not only does it own the coalface administrator's eyeballs, it is starting to own the relationships that VARs, MSPs, and CSPs have with those coalface admins, each other, other vendors and, …

Analysis Spiceworld 2013 Austin, Texas-based Spiceworks used the opening keynotes of its 2013 user conference – Spiceworld – to challenge all rivals. The challenge wasn't as overt as walking up to Zuckerberg with an iron glove, slapping him across the face and casting it upon the ground, but a challenge was made nonetheless. LinkedIn …

Sysadmin blog My second Spiceworld has wrapped up. I've safely returned home to Edmonton, trading the smothering humidity and overwhelming heat for a far more civilized 15cm of snow. This year's Spiceworld has some differences from the last; the biggest change being that it has moved into the Austin convention center. In many other ways …

Sysadmin blog I've talked before about Spiceworks as a social network. It's time to look at the application that serves as the carrot to get you hooked on that social network. Spiceworks has an organic development history; it has grown through developer vision but also through end-user and vendor feedback. This is both Spiceworks's greatest …

Sysadmin blog Spiceworld 2012* was in Austin, Texas. I spent my time there grilling vendor reps at the booths, talking to attendees and collaborating with Spiceworks employees. I'll save the article on "what's new in Spiceworks" as well as the feeds and speeds for later, after I've done some compare-and-contrast in the lab. Instead, I bring …

Spiceworks, the system-administrator's toolkit which thinks its a social network, now comes in a fondleslab-optimised flavour for BOFHs who like to oversee their empires from the pub. Spiceworks already comes in a handset version, for iOS and Android, but it loses some functionality in squeezing the layout. There's a web- …