Tec(h)tonic

Insights into building a solid I.T. foundation in the mid-size business world.

Spiceworks optimization & best practices

I’m getting ready to migrate my Spiceworks installation to a new system and thought I’d use this as an opportunity to investigate how to improve its performance. In the process, I stumbled onto this article – could be useful:

Speeding up Spiceworks

Some other steps I suggest:

  1. If you use Active Directory, take the time to audit it, looking for old user and computer records, as these will pollute your Spiceworks inventory
  2. Once you’re done with #1, audit the existing inventory in SW itself – look for scan errors, items that haven’t been successfully scanned in a long time and records that have less-complete-than-they-should-be records.
  3. Tweak your alerts – taking the time to get them set up just right can be a good “peace of mind” move (consider having all alerts sent to your mobile device by sending to the appropriate email address)
  4. Take the time to get ALL of your vendor info into SW – this is a pain but is worth it further down the line. Be sure to take advantage of the ability to attach documents (like contracts) to those vendors.
  5. Similarly, take advantage of the customizable “Tools” menu to add links to all of those other sites you rely on manage your systems; having them centrally-located (in SW) is a real timesaver.

For me, the name of the game with a lot of this information centralization is the old “hit by a bus” plan – how easy will it be for someone to fill in your shoes if you ever get hit by a bus? If you’re doing your job right then all of the core IT-related info is (properly) accessible to the right person.

Plus it’s just smart to have this info collected together.


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