If you have chosen to start Spiceworks immediately after the installation, then you will not have to log in. Spiceworks will open directly to your dashboard. If you have chosen to not open Spiceworks directly after the installation, then just open a browser and type the machine name you installed Spiceworks on and the port number. There will be a login screen, just enter the username (e-mail address) and password you created when installing and you will be logged in.
Let's take a look at the first thing you see once Spiceworks opens, the Dashboard. This is the interface you will see every time you log into Spiceworks. It is fully customizable and the dashboard that you will have after using Spiceworks for a while will look very different than the one shown in the following screenshot. Let's have a look at the different components and give you an overview of what each component does.
The area highlighted as 1 shows the navigation bar. Move your cursor onto each option in this bar and you will see the different pages within Spiceworks. We will be hitting on all these—Community, Inventory, Help Desk, Purchasing—in this book.
The area highlighted as 2 shows the notification area. When connected to the community this will show any messages that you have along with alerts from your network inventory and outstanding purchasing quotes you have active. Your username is also here in the top-right corner.
The area highlighted as 3 shows dashboard information. This tells you what dashboard you are seeing. You can create multiple dashboards that display different types of information, but we will get into that a little later in this chapter.
The area highlighted as 4 shows the Add Content button. Clicking on this will open up the widget menu and allow you to add different widgets to your dashboard.
The area highlighted as 5 shows the widget information area Here is where all your widgets are displayed. Right now there isn't much to display as we don't have any data within Spiceworks, but that will be remedied in the next chapter when we set up your network scan.
Whew! That is a LOT of information on one interface. You want to hear something crazy? We haven't even scratched the surface as to what Spiceworks can do yet. Now you should be realizing why more than two million IT pros use this software. Once we get some data from network scans and help desk tickets, we will be revisiting the Dashboard to walk you through customizing it to display the data you need.
Let's get to know the different types of users in Spiceworks. Here is an overview of each kind and what permissions each one has.
Admin: These users have full administrative privileges within Spiceworks. They can run any report, modify any device within Spiceworks network inventory, and can open, edit, and close any help desk ticket within the application. Only the highest level users should have this access.
Help Desk Admin: These users have full administrative access to the help desk portion of Spiceworks. They cannot change settings, see or modify network scans or inventory, and cannot see or run reports.
Help Desk Tech: These users only have access to help desk tickets that they are either assigned or cc'd on. Like the Help Desk Admin user, they cannot see or modify any of the other aspects of Spiceworks.
Reporting: These users only have access to the reporting portion of Spiceworks. They cannot see or modify any device, help desk ticket, or setting.
We will be going over only the Admin users right now. The help desk users will be covered in Chapter 3, Configuring the Help Desk and User Portal and reporting users are covered in Chapter 4, Configuring Other Spiceworks Features.
Even if you are going to be the only active Admin on the system, it is always a good idea to set up another user with Admin privileges. One of the reasons is password reset. If you need to reset your password, you can log in as the other user and easily reset it. There is a manual way to reset it as well, but this way is easier! And we are all about things being easy, right? The process is very easy, let's walk through it.
First, mouse over the Inventory menu on the top of Dashboard. You will see a Settings option. Click on it. The option is illustrated as follows:
This will take you to the Settings page and there is a lot going on here. We will be getting to all these settings, but right now we are only interested in the Personal section, specifically the User Accounts option. Click on this and it will take you to the User Accounts screen. This screen is how we add new users that will use Spiceworks Desktop (in whatever capacity, reporting, help desk, and network inventory).
Note
End users that will use the Spiceworks Help Desk Portal do not need to be added here. Their accounts will automatically be created as they log into the Help Desk Web Portal and they will not need access to the Spiceworks Desktop.
Since you just installed Spiceworks, there should be only one account on this page. The one you created at the last step of installation. There is an Add button on the lower-left side below the accounts, just click on it and blank entries for each column will appear.
Enter the e-mail address, the first name, the last name, password, and the user permission level (you won't have to change that as Admin is the default setting). Once you have entered all this information in, click on the Save button and like magic, a new user is created. See, I told you it would be easy! One more thing to know once the user is created is that an option on whether you choose for this user to receive email notifications will now be visible on the far right side where the Save button was. There are four options here. Let's go over what they are.
None: A user receives no e-mail from the Spiceworks app (default).
Alerts: If this box is checked, then any alerts that you set up will be e-mailed out to the user. If this box is the only one checked, the users will not receive any e-mails on Help Desk Tickets or Weekly Summaries.
Help Desk: If this box is checked, then the user will get all notifications on new tickets and also if a ticket has been assigned to them. If you are setting up for either of the Help Desk users (Admin or Tech), this box should be checked.
Weekly Updates: Spiceworks generates weekly updates on what has been added to your network and also some Help Desk analytics. Check this box if you want these to go to the user.
Since we are creating an Admin user, let's just go ahead and mouse over the None option under the Email column and once the menu bubble comes on the screen, click all the three boxes. There is no Save button. Just move your mouse off the menu and it will be saved automatically. If you know that there are multiple Admin users that you want to add, feel free to do that now. Since we are focusing on Admin users now, we won't worry about creating Help Desk or reporting users so just hold off on those for the moment. What we need to do now is get you logged into the Spiceworks Community.