Posted by Riaz Mohammed on Mon, Apr 23, 2012 @ 02:43 PM
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” We’re all very familiar with this adage and I think we all agree that it is true. A single image (i.e. screen capture) can convey a complex idea…or issue. An image helps us to remember better, it helps us to understand better, it helps us to communicate better.
In the service desk environment, screen captures help to streamline communication between the end user and support technician.
In the service desk environment, the faster the support technician understands the issue, the faster the issue will be resolved. In turn, faster resolution with less customer interaction improves customer satisfaction—a key metric for the service desk.
Unfortunately, many service desk software do a terrible job at handling screen captures, primarily because of the size of screen capture files. IncidentMonitor™ has built-in functionality that simplifies attaching screen captures and significantly reduces the size of the attached file. The benefit: reduced data storage requirements, better application performance and improved usability. IncidentMonitor also provides the option to add a screen capture using the built-in chat window for real-time troubleshooting.
Following are some problems with screen captures and how they are addressed in IncidentMonitor™.
|
Common Screen Capture Issues
|
How Addressed in IncidentMonitor
|
|
Requires many steps to add a screen capture to the ticket
- The screen capture has to be saved to a MS Word document
- The MS Word document has to be saved
- The MS Word document has to be attached to ticket
|
Requires one step, very user friendly
- User click on the “Attach clipboard contents”
- The screen capture is attached to the ticket
|
|
Screen capture file are very large (usually 4 – 10 MB) which significantly increases the size of the database
|
IncidentMonitor does not store attachments and screen captures in the database. The database is NOT the place to store attachments.
|
|
Because of the size of the file, attaching to the ticket or opening the file takes a long time, especially when network bandwidth (mobile devices) is an issue
|
IncidentMonitor automatically reduces the size of the file. For example, files will be reduced from 6 – 7MB to 200 – 400 KB.
|
The screen capture below shows the wizard for a new service desk ticket, with the option to attach a screen capture:
Please contact us to schedule a personalized demo of IncidentMonitor’s features.
Posted by Riaz Mohammed on Mon, Apr 16, 2012 @ 08:36 AM
Discover a New World of KnowledgeOpen your eyes and look to the industry’s future at HDI 2012, the leading IT service and technical support conference. Bringing together thousands of brilliant minds to help create and develop the most innovative approaches, practices, and resources, HDI’s conference will continue their advancement of the field through collaboration and meeting between you and our industry’s other visionaries.
Visit us at booth 418 to meet our engineers and have a first-hand look at IncidentMonitor(TM). You can also contact us to set up a one-on-one meeting at the conference to discuss your service desk requirements.
Posted by Riaz Mohammed on Wed, Apr 11, 2012 @ 09:52 AM
Monitor 24-7 Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IncidentMonitor v9.3. Over the last 13 years we have consistently added high-value features with every release of IncidentMonitor™. IncidentMonitor v9.3 continues with this tradition.
IncidentMonitor v9.3 is available to all customers, at no additional charge. In addition, one of our engineers will upgrade your application, AT NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. There is no need to re-apply any customizations. All customizations and application modifications will be available after the upgrade. Upgrading IncidentMonitor takes about 3 hours—not 3 weeks, as with other vendors! Welcome to the world of worry-free, hassle-free upgrades.
Some of the new features of IncidentMonitor include:
-
Request (ticket) notification subscription – Users with the appropriate security access can subscribe to receive notification for a specific request. For example, a manager can subscribe to a request for an outage on a service used by the department. With the subscribe option, the manager will be notified during lifecycle of the request.
Sneak Peek - we continue to work on new features. Upcoming releases of IncidentMonitor will be “Social” enabled, where we will integrate our chat, request subscription and a couple new features to provide a true Social Service Desk Software with usable social capabilities.
Contact us to schedule a demo of the new features and to discuss how IncidentMonitor can support your requirements.
You can reach us at sales@monitor24-7.com, or request a demo here.
Posted by Riaz Mohammed on Fri, Mar 09, 2012 @ 02:35 PM
According to industry analysts, companies will replace their service desk software every 3 – 5 years. Over the last 5 – 6 years there have been a slew of vendors releasing new service desk/ITSM solutions. Today, companies have hundreds of ITSM solutions to choose from, ranging from freeware to “high-end, enterprise” (i.e. expensive) solutions.
From a vendor’s point of view, the ITSM software market is very competitive. This is good for the customer. Vendors have added new features to their applications, in an attempt to be competitive and to differential their product from the crowd.
Vendors have also cranked up their marketing efforts, which is not good for customers.
As a result of a highly competitive market, vendors are pushing the limits in their marketing campaigns. I believe that companies are evaluating replacement solutions within such a short time because vendors may have “overpromised” on the capabilities of their software.
This is where it becomes a challenge to identify and select the right solution to support your requirements. It requires you to do more work to select the right solution. Following are some items you should pay attention to:
- Identify your current requirements – do not over pay for features you may never need.
- Understand your future requirements – do not limit yourself to a solution that will not meet your future requirements.
- Thoroughly review the application – many vendors spend a lot of time on the User Interface—which is great. However, have they spent as much or more effort ensuring that the application is technologically sound and can be easily adapted to support your requirements?
- How easy is it to upgrade after the application has been configured to support your business requirements.
- Understand the company behind the product – Is it publically traded? Are they funded by Venture Capitalists (VCs)? Companies that have to answer to shareholders and investors may place shareholder value above customer satisfaction. Corporate/product decisions may be made that are not in the best interest of the customer.
- Has the company been acquired? What is the turnover rate for management and key technical resources?
- How many products are offered by the vendor? Is the service desk application their main focus, or lost in the shuffle of many other product offerings.
- How are support calls handled? Do calls have to be re-assigned to a senior engineer? If so, this will increase call resolution times.
- The purchase price may be very attractive. What are the ongoing and future costs? For example, what the cost to implement additional processes as it relates to licenses, services, maintenance.
- What is the cost of maintenance? Does the vendor have a history of implementing new features which will provide significant benefit to your business? Are these new features included in the price of your maintenance contract, or an additional cost?
If you are in the market for a new service desk solution, give us a call. You can reach us at sales@monitor24-7.com or request a demo here.
Posted by Riaz Mohammed on Thu, Feb 09, 2012 @ 10:30 AM
This seems to be on the mind of every Service Desk Manager or Director of Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) after purchasing a service desk solution.
Companies start the process of evaluating/purchasing service desk software because of specific needs. For example: the current solution may no longer support their requirements; the cost of supporting the current system may be too high (consulting services and annual support); or, the need to replace a manual process with an automated solution.
Regardless of the reasons for acquiring a solution, the solution is one component or “dimension” which will allow I&O to become a full partner with the organization. Gartner’s research paper, “How Best to Advance ITScore Maturity for the Service Desk and Incident Management From Level 1 to Level 5”, defines the following levels of maturity:
- Level 1 (Aware) — beginning to take actions to improve
- Level 2 (Committed) — focusing and providing substantial resources to perform a sound job of providing I&O to an enterprise
- Level 3 (Proactive) — gaining efficiencies and service quality through standardization, policy development, governance structures and getting ahead of the curve (I&O is no longer as reactive as it is at Level 2)
- Level 4 (Service-Aligned) — managing IT as a set of services offered to the enterprise
- Level 5 (Business Partnership) — fully partnering with the enterprise as an equal
Most organizations are at Level 1. One of the targets to move from Level 1 to Level 2 is that the processes become repeatable. Implementing a service desk solution will support this target. It is critical that the service desk software is easily configured to support organization-specific processes.
If the organization does not have defined or documented processes, then implementing the out of box process may work in the short term. It is very important that I&O invests in bringing together the multiple dimensions within the organization to define the service desk processes. Once defined, the service desk solution must be easily configured to support the processes.
IncidentMonitor™ from Monitor 24-7 Inc. provides out of the box process to support the requirements of companies at Level 1 and is easily configured to support the organization as it moved towards Level 5. Please contact sales to request an online demo of IncidentMonitor.
Posted by Riaz Mohammed on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 @ 10:46 AM
Conference Highlights
Visit Monitor 24-7 at booth# 309.
Now in its 16th hugely successful year, our annual event is globally recognized as the world’s premier IT Service Management conference.
The conference is content rich and comprehensive – 15 tracks, 160+ sessions – covering a vast array of subjects from all across the ITSM spectrum: ITSM, ITIL®, ISO, Lean IT, Six Sigma, PRINCE2®, PMBOK, COBIT®. There is something for everyone – strategic, tactical, operational – we’ve got you covered! In fact, this is one main reason why so many organizations bring entire teams!
Attend “The best conference in the industry”
Pink has the undisputed reputation for developing an unsurpassed line-up of speakers and meaningful subject matter. As a result of our unwavering commitment, we are very proud to present what is widely acknowledged as the most content rich program in the industry.
“Pink12” Includes:
- Pre-Conference Courses – February 15-19
- Conference – February 19-22
- Post-Conference Courses – February 23-24
Who Should Attend?
There's something for everyone in the comprehensive and power-packed 15-track program.
- C-Level, including CIOs/CTOs/CSOs
- IT Directors, VPs
- IT Service and Support Managers
- Service Desk Managers
- IT Infrastructure Managers
- Process Owners
- Senior Support Analysts
- Quality Managers
- Service Level Manager
- Project/Program Directors and Managers
- IT Auditors, IT Consultants
- IT Suppliers/Vendors
- Anyone seeking to understand why and how to implement best practices according to ITSM, ITIL , ISO, Lean IT, Six Sigma, PRINCE2, PMBOK, COBIT
- And, anyone who is interested in building and managing a truly business focused IT organization
Posted by Frank Huitenga on Tue, Dec 20, 2011 @ 09:14 AM
One of the organizations that hands out certification for ITIL processes is the official ITIL foundation in the UK OGC. They wrote a very good white paper about the benefits of ITIL. What ITIL can do for your organization. Download the document.
Most organizations today rely upon IT to enable them to achieve their company vision, business strategy and goals.
Organizations use IT to:
- Revolutionize the way they operate, communicate and do business
- Develop and innovate, gain market advantage and differentiate themselves to their end customers
- Drive increased productivity and efficiency, improve business processes, make cost savings, and increase sales and growth
- Communicate with a larger, more global marketplace.
The quality of an organization’s IT is reflected in its reputation and brand, and has direct impact upon sales and revenue. The cost of IT is never insignificant – it is essential to get good value from IT investments, but often this value is not realized. For an IT investment to provide benefit, the resulting IT service must be well planned, well designed, well managed and well delivered. That is what the practice of IT service management is about.
IT service management is:
- The professional practice of planning, designing, developing, delivering and optimizing IT services that are both fit for purpose and fit for use, thereby providing best value and return on investment for the organization that uses them
- A specialized discipline, which includes the processes, methods, activities, functions and roles that a service provider needs in order to deliver IT services which provide business value for customers
- A growing profession of people, skilled and committed to delivering high-quality IT services which bring measurable value for businesses.
Good IT service management is essential to achieve business benefits from IT at an agreed and controlled cost. Without good IT service management, it is common for IT projects to fail or go well over budget at project stage, for ongoing IT costs of ownership to spiral out of control, and for businesses to fail to achieve the benefits they expected.
Good IT service management is the key that unlocks the value from your IT investments.
Excellent IT Service Management can only be achieved if a company invests in an easy to use service management software tool that grows with your organization.
Posted by Frank Huitenga on Thu, Nov 24, 2011 @ 04:29 AM
Productivity in the service desk is critical in todays business. Quick support, fast solving of issues. Users expect the service desk to come up with answers and solutions almost instantly.
In order to make the support agents life more simple we created various features to help the agent:
- new request wizard
- memorized responses
The new request wizard was discussed in yesterdays blog. This one really helps the agent to quickly catagorize, find related articles and related tickets, show the SLA and importancy and access the CMDB. Have a look at the video!
Memorized responses is one of those features in IncidentMonitor Service Desk Software that can really help in productivity. It is a very simple feature, yet powerful. Memorized responses allows you to define predefined text items that can be easily added to a request or task by a simple key sequence (Alt-R) or via a click on the item from a Quick Pick list. You can have both personal items and the Administrator can provide public items for all users to use.
Posted by Frank Huitenga on Wed, Nov 23, 2011 @ 05:58 AM
No support agent likes filling out forms. With the latest release of IncidentMonitor ITIL service desk software we greatly simplified the support agents work.
The wizard quickly goes through all steps necessary to log an issue. Using the smart knowledge base we are able to automatically catagorize an issue for your agent. This suggestion can simply be accepted or if your agent thinks it should be something different can be overruled. From now on you will not have the problem that your reports show bad results on the top category.
The way we do it is very simple, but smart. We throw the text someone types in through our intelligent knowledge base. The knowledge base software finds immediately matching documents and matching historical tickets. Based upon that information we know exactly how to categorise. Your agent also can use the knowledge presented in documents to solve the issue immediately. Or link a document to the request and send an email to the client.
Of course the wizard also shows the SLA linked to the request, gives the opportunity to link documents and already logged issues to the request and last but not least, allows the agent to explore the CMDB and link the affected asset. All from one single window!
Interested? Have a look at the following video to see it live in action!
Posted by Riaz Mohammed on Fri, Nov 11, 2011 @ 07:57 AM
According to Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF): "The Release Management service management function (SMF) is responsible for deploying changes into an information technology (IT) environment. Once one or more changes are developed, tested, and packaged into releases for deployment, release management is responsible for introducing these changes and managing their release."
Many companies have implemented service desk software with Change Management and Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM). For most customers, the link between Change and SACM is very clear. Any changes to the IT environment has to be reviewed, analyzed, developed, tested, approved and implemented. Change Management and SACM manages this process and ensures that all required steps, documentation and approvals are completed and reports can be generated for analysis and on-going improvement.
What is the process when changes have to be performed to multiple configuration items that are linked to a system configuration? This is where Release & Deployment will provide tremendous benefit to IT and the business. Unfortunately, many companies do not have a good understanding of the Release & Deployment process and its benefits.
For example, the order processing application has to be upgraded. The order processing system configuration (as defined in SACM) is made up of multiple configuration items (CIs), such as: database, web server, application servers, software modules, etc. Upgrading to the new release requires upgrading the database, installing a new application module and applying a service patch to the application server’s OS.
Since each CI is managed by a different group, a single change request cannot be used to manage the multiple changes required for this upgrade. A change request is created for each CI, and assigned to the group responsible for the CI. Each change goes through the change process: review, analysis, development, etc.
Release and Deployment manages the implementation of multiple changes. Testing occurs within each change request. Release and Deployment manages testing of all affected CIs and manages the deployment of all changes within the IT environment.
Each change request is linked to the Release and Deployment request after testing is successfully completed at the change level. The release group creates a new version of the system configuration and tests the deployment of all updated CIs. If a CI fails during release testing, the release manager along with the change manager will make the call to deploy without the failed CI, or not to deploy the release at all. If deployment continues, the change request for the failed CI is updated and removed from the release package.
During each stage of the release and deployment process, each linked change request will be updated, including the deployment schedule. After successful (or unsuccessful) deployment each change request will be closed, or the back out plan will be initiated.
Release and Deployment will update the system configuration and track the history of all releases of the system configuration including versioning and the change request for each CI.
Do you want more information on Release and Deployement? Click here to sign up for a web demo.