IT software maker Spiceworks is launching version 4.0 of their desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is currently being used by 700,000 IT professionals at small to medium businesses to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. The company says the upgrade will be rolled out later this week.

The interesting part of Spicework’s software is that it includes a social network for IT pros that they use to help each other out. Its product roadmap is visible to all members, who can vote on which features they want to see next. The top feature, which will be in the new release, is a network map, visually showing every computer and network device on a company’s IT network, along with their relationships and bandwidth consumption. Spiceworks will be integrated with Twitter as well, allowing activity updates to be published to Twitter.

IT pros at small and mid-sized companies can band together in buying clubs. And allows users to see how other IT pros have prioritized and managed various Windows Events. Users can now view Windows event background pages and read community group discussions on how to best troubleshoot and resolve related problems. Spiceworks calls this crowdsourced troubleshooting.

The new version also offers plug-ins to manage apps from vendors including Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel and Trend Micro. For example, the LiveOffice Mail Archive Widget will let IT staff archive email accounts from within Spiceworks from the dashboard itself. The Microsoft License Organizer allows users to automatically track Microsoft licenses and to order additional licenses when needed. Spiceworks charges companies like Microsoft and Intel to add these features.

Spiceworks has ramped up its virtual help desk feature, letting users now control a help desk from a mobile phone. Users can create new tickets, edit & update existing tickets, and delete tickets remotely.

Spiceworks recently added a host of plug-ins and social media widgets, letting users keep track track of alerts, tickets, new software, and new hardware, as well as inventory summaries. Spiceworks also lets users add themes and skins to the desktop, create customized user portals, and lets users drop in news widgets from RSS feeds and social networking widgets for Digg, Facebook, and MySpace

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IT software maker Spiceworks has developed a set of customized plugins and widgets in a variety of categories for the Spiceworks desktop. Spiceworks’ ad-supported, free IT management software allows IT managers at small to mid-size businesses keep track of their network assets, run a helpdesk, monitor activity, receive reports and troubleshoot network problems.

The plugins let you keep track of alerts, tickets, new software, and new hardware, as well as a inventory summaries. Widgets include a help desk widget and reports and inventory widgets and allows users access this information easily. Spiceworks also lets users add themes and skins to the desktop, create customized user portals, and lets users drop in news widgets from RSS feeds and social networking widgets for Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and MySpace.

Spiceworks has also created an IT news community destination for the users of its software. In the community, you can see information that other Spiceworks IT professionals have submitted and also features content that is directed towards the small to medium sized business IT professional community.

Spiceworks says that there have been over 16,000 downloads of its 53 widgets in the past week. The company says that the most popular widgets are the help desk widgets and there have already been 16 language plugins created by the software’s users. Whats Up, another IT network management software, has created mobile access for clients but doesn’t seem to have incorporated the social networking features into the platform.

Spicework’s software has been built around creating a community among IT managers, so its no surprise that the company is now rolling out social media features to its platform. The software lets users connect with other IT managers. When problems come up users can post questions, submit answers and use group-edited wiki articles, etc. The software, which now includes a dashboard, RSS feeds, social networking widgets and a IT news sharing community, seems to almost be turning into a pseudo-social network itself.

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CleverSet—Best of Show went to CleverSet, a Seattle-based company that takes a sophisticated statistical approach to product recommendations and personalization. This is not exactly an unknown company. It’s technology already powers 85 sites, including Sephora’s, Wine Enthusiast, and part of Overstock (I also wrote about them last summer in Business 2.0). CleverSet is applying some advanced math to improving recommendations, and claims to increase revenues for Websites that implement its technology by 18 to 30 percent, on average. If that’s true, they deserve to win. But then I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult.

TripIt—A company that presented at TechCrunch40, TripIt builds a personalized itinerary starting from your airline confirmation. A useful travel organizer. See Mike’s previous post.

G.ho.st—All of our data and applications are moving online, why not the operating system? G.ho.st is a Web operating system of sorts that ties together all the data and applications you may be using across different Websites with one password and URL. Conceptually, I’m with them. But getting people to change their behavior and abandon everything on their desktops except for their browser is going to be tough. (G.ho.st was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit)

SpiceWorks—Ad-supported enterprise software. Already 160,000 IT professionals use SpiceWorks to help manage their computer networks. SpiceWorks then serves up news feeds and product deals targeted at the specific devices on the networks they manage. It’s a consumer approach to enterprise software. This will work—until the ad bubble pops.

ClickForensics—The CEO claims that the click fraud rate is nearly 16 percent (and over 25 percent on distributed advertising networks like AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network). ClickForensics offers a neutral service to both advertisers and publishers that audits the quality of the click traffic generated by any given ad campaign. This is a community approach to solving a growing problem, although some argue that the click fraud rate is already priced into what advertisers are willing to pay per click, so it is already being taken care of by the markets.

Realius—Combine casual gaming and real estate porn and you get Realius. The fantasy real estate site, which will launch in beta in two weeks (and was also in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit), will take real listings and let people guess how much each house is worth (using a slider that shows where other people have voted). Revenues will supposedly come from advertising, referral fees, and service fees from brokers who can use the game for training purposes. The game is based on actual real estate data. The CEO lost me, though, when he said that you don’t find out if your guess was right until later when they send you an e-mail (which is designed to drive you back to the site). Any game that does not generate instant feedback on how you’ve done is dead in the water, IMHO. Check your e-mail to see if you’ve won! That’s going straight to the junk folder.

Other startups that didn’t quite make the short list include Castfire, Kango, Footnote, Lemonade, Search-to-Phone, WooMe (another TC40 company), Sprigley, and GoXDML.

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SpiceWorks’ software is an IT Desktop suite, consisting of a Network Inventory, Help Desk, Reporting, Monitoring and Troubleshooting applications. Taking a page from a lot of the consumer applications we profile on TechCrunch, their software is completely free and ad supported. Ravi Mohan of Shasta calls the shift toward ad supported systems the “consumerization of the enterprise”.

The ads are served via Google AdSense along a sidebar as you use the application. The idea is that IT professionals get a free suite of the basic tools they need and advertisers get access to a targeted audience that spends a lot of time in front of those ads (lots of page views).

Are we going to see the ad-supported model spreading across enterprise applications? Not likely, considering the great support and set up costs associated with most enterprise installations. However, SpiceWorks’ free bundle of basic IT programs helps differentiate themselves in the highly competitive category of SMB IT tools.

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