After the successful ServiceDesk Best Practices webinar on Change Management, (if you have missed it, just hop in here), we at ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus bring you an exclusive webinar from one of our customers….

Surprised ??? Yes for the first time ever we will have one of our most valued customers, Digicel, sharing the best practices of implementing change management in their organization. The webinar is scheduled on 30^th, September,2009 at 2.00 PM Eastern Daylight Time ( EDT).

The webinar will be presented by Elsy Rivera, Senior IT Operations Specialist from Digicel, El Salvador. She has a vast experience in IT Service Management and was integral part of implementing change management in Digicel. She would be sharing her experiences on the topic “The Digicel Story : Implementing the quintessential Change Management”.

So mark the date in your calendars, outlooks, Blackeberrys and iPhones, I bet you would hate to miss this webinar. So September 30^th, 2009 is the date and 2.00 PM EDT is the Time.

Register now in the below link. Should I say we have limited number of seats available and it’s absolutely FREE.

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/155033347

What Are Heroes Without Assets? Can you imagine Bat Man or Iron Man without the right gear? The first step in setting up an efficient Service Desk is to get Asset Management right. Not just any independent asset tracking software but an efficient asset management that works closely with help desk, that helps you handle software license compliance, contacts and Purchase. Getting the right Asset Management System is Step One in managing your IT. Attend the exclusive Service Desk Best Practices webinar from ManageEngine to get a grip on asset management best practices.

Date: 29th July, 2009 (Wednesday)

Time: 11. 00 AM Eastern Daylight Time ( US)

Click the link below to Register Now

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/985650362

Manchester United in Champions League Finals

Oops, this is not the official blog of Manchester United and we are not announcing their path to Champions League finals... We at ServiceDesk Plus just feel like Manchester United at this moment. ServiceDesk Plus for the first time has made it to the Final 3 of SDIe Vendor of the Year Award 2009.

It's a privilege because ServiceDesk Institute of Europe (SDIe) has a very different way of finalizing the nominees. The customers of these vendors have to nominate their vendor for the award. Whoever has the highest nominations will make it to the final 3. And of course, we are one of them. We are just blown away by the response from our customers. You can get the detailed process in this post.

Thank you for your support guys and we will definitely make the product better and better, to serve you better. And most importantly, our special thanks to all our Resellers from Europe, who were part of the campaign.

A special thanks to all my fellow twitterers, who did their part to spread the word. The winner will be announced on the SDIe Annual Conference in London on June 9^th,2009. Fingers Crossed...

P.S: The picture is taken by terry6082 and has been reproduced under creative commons license 2.0

ServiceDesk Plus API interface helps you to integrate with your external applications. Now you can raise their request through external applications (Network Monitoring or ERP applications) or your own html form. ServiceDesk Plus has made the request creation simpler by its ability to log a request without logging in with the new API integration. This API also allows updating, assigning/pickup, closing or deleting request.

Now Some Technical facts!!!

SDP API integrates through Http post method for all request operations. The field values to be set in Request will be added as parameters in HttpRequest details. The form needs to be submitted to /servlets/RequestServlet (as http://machine_name:Port_Number/servlets/RequestServlet). Fields not available in request parameter will be set as empty (or default).

To view more about the configuration, click here

What does an IT Manager need?

A bird’s eye view of what’s happening in his IT support, the consolidated view of the operations and of course whether his team is doing its job in the right way. ServiceDesk Plus has this simple but nice  feature called Flash Reports. Flash reports provide a consolidated view of all the different issues, categories, technicians, statuses, SLA escalations etc. You can filter out details accordingly as per your wish. Flash Reports can be made on specific parameters, allowing the managers to get in-depth analysis of specific criterion.

A wonderful tool for the IT Managers, to get a wholesome reporting on his IT Support.

P.S: Flash Reports will need Adobe Flash 9.0 or above.

Folks, don’t worry we have not been nominated for any big bang movie awards ( let’s forget Oscars and Slumdog Millionaire for sometime). Service Desk Institute of Europe ( SDIe) has announced its annual flagship award event “IT Service and Support Awards” for the year 2009. We thought we would give it a try.  SDIe presents awards in 4 different categories.

• IT Service & Support Excellence Large Team of the Year

• IT Service & Support Excellence Small Team of the Year

• IT Service & Support Technology Supplier of the Year

• IT Service & Support Person of the Year

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus will fight it out in the “IT Service and Support Technology Supplier of the Year”. All the awards are presented based on the number of nominations a company gets in a category. For example, if ServiceDesk Plus is nominated in “IT Service & Support technology supplier of the year” for the most number of times, then ServiceDesk Plus will be presented with the award. But each of you who are nominating ServiceDesk Plus has to fill up a small customer satisfaction survey. They rate the suppliers based on the customer satisfaction on different criteria.

If you think we really deserve the nomination, please take some time out to nominate us in the below link

http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/217528/8b7b/

But if you think we don’t deserve it, give us your feedback@ support-servicedeskplus@manageengine.com

And you can get more information about the award in the below link..

http://www.sdi-e.com/sdie-events/the-service-desk-and-it-support-awards/it-service-support-supplier/

Last date for submitting the nominations is March 18, 2009.

Folks before you go; you can also get nominated for the award in different categories, check out the SDIe site for more details.

]]> http://blogs.manageengine.com/servicedesk/2009/03/04/and-the-award-goes-to-servicedesk-plus-only-if-you-vote Wed, 4 Mar 2009 06:00:23 -0800 http://blogs.manageengine.com/servicedesk/2009/01/12/the-role-of-service-desk-in-itil girish

With ITIL gaining popularity in the US especially in the last 2-3 years, more and more IT managers are looking at a ServiceDesk as the starting point to ITIL. It is surprising to see a lot of helpdesk managers  starting out with a search for a basic ticketing system and over time they start to realize that they need something more than just basic ticketing. They end up reinventing the wheel when they finally find out that ITIL actually has answers to all the problems that they wanted to solve. (atleast from a End-user desktop support perspective)



Of all the different processes in ITIL, I think most people have realized tremendous value on the Service Support side. And in Service Support most people start with Service Request management and Incident management first before rolling out Problem management or Change Management.



So if you are considering implementing ITIL Service Support here is a first step with a video on “The Role of ServiceDesk in ITIL”. I have taken the liberty of demostrating some of the key ITIL concepts with our ServiceDesk Plus software. Feel free to evaluate any ServiceDesk software that suits your needs but remember to include ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus !



Here are the videos - Part 1

and Part 2

We just kick started ManageEngine Euro Roadshow today at Copenhagen, Denmark. First, Copenhagen is a beautiful place that looks exactly like one in the post cards. I had a “Alex in Wonderland” feeling all weekend as we went around Kobenhavn. [as they call it here]

We had a packed conference hall with people running out of chairs [its a good problem]. Draware, our partner in Denmark had excellent arrangments.

Girish just finished his presentation About ManageEngine and Network Performance, Server Performance or Business Performance. Denmark got a taste of cost efficient IT management software- ManageEngine. Gibu also introduced the need for application management from the perspective of serving users better.

Me and Rajavel are taking over the afternoon.

From Copenhagen

Phew, finally we have a QA validated build that is ready to be rolled out as 7.5 Beta. Hold on, QA validated does not mean that the product is 100% tested. Our QA has unearthed a lot of bugs and we are fixing them daily. For this beta release, we have just made sure that the new functionalities that are added will work properly without major hiccups.

Two of the things that we didnt concentrate on this release are the reports module and internationalization.

We have about 300 registrations so far for the beta build. We will be sending the beta links in batches.

Last time when 7.0 beta was released, some customers installed it and started using them in their live environment. That caused a lot of problem for both of us, since upgrade patch was not be available for Beta builds. To avoid such problems, we have made some changes to the 7.5 Beta build so that you cannot apply a license to that installation.

Hi. I am Shan and I am Development Manager for ServiceDesk Plus. Most of the time I am the guy who is blamed for the delays in shipping even if there are a lot of scope creeps. I found that the main problem was that you (as users) are unaware of what is going on with the development team and what we do.

Here is my journal as we progress

Performance, Performance and Performance:

Our main focus for 7.5 is performance, quality and stability and it is not a overnite job. Creating such an environment and reproducing problem scenarios are getting to be a challenge. Our QA team is working in parallel to make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes we did in some of our servicepacks. Now-a-days QA team is reluctant to compromise on anything, siting that “for any problem, customers are not blaming development, but blaming only us”..

You, our customers are important

In the earlier 7.0 release we could not give the upgrade pack to the existing customers on the same day the release was made and we learnt a good lesson from it. We could understand your frustration and do not want to make that mistake again. We are working on the upgrade pack in parallel and this time will make sure we release both on the same day.

The site based implementation is back breaking

Initially we thought 7.5 should be an easier one with focussed team working on Asset features. The other key features include site based segmentation, request form customization, solutions enhancements, technician availability calendar. With Purchase module enhancements brought in a hotfix itself, we expected a smoother release as planned.

Not surprisingly we underestimated the time for some of the features which is now causing the delay. The multi site support is the main culprit for the time delay. When we took up the functionality, we thought that it could be completed in around 2 months. Myself and the developer were optimistic over the completion of the feature within the time !! We were proved wrong as it had a lot complications during the implementation phase which need to be addressed.

Phew, AssetExplorer is in…finally

The another key thing which kept us waiting is the completion of Asset Explorer 5.0 release which has support for remote desktop, multi site support for Assets and other enhancements. These have to be integrated into SDP 7.5. Now we are almost finished with the release of AE 5.0 and started on integrating with SDP. It could take us a couple of weeks to integrate it into SDP 7.5.

Integrating ServicePack’s

We are also currently integrating all issue fixes from service packs 7001 to 7019 to the 7.5 release. With a hotfix getting released every month, the amount of merge and testing gets higher. Release delay costs us here too !!!

Now we are into integration phase.

We are determined to give a good quality, reliable and a stable 7.5 release.

Further moving ahead, unlike 7.5, we look to go for shorter release cycles (3 - 4 months). Will plan that delay of one feature should not affect the release cycle and the worst case should be, that feature moved out of the release. This release model requires features to be build separately and integrated once completed. This could involve more integration effort, but lesser impact on release. This model was recommended by my higher ups for long time, but… may be time to look into that model.

I will look to update whenever a task (say Asset explorer integration, issues integration,..) on 7.5 got completed.