Hope all you guys are having a great Christmas holiday with family and friends. I know I am – with my family. I also want to say thank you to all our readers and to the One who is the “real reason for the season”.
Merry Christmas, everybody!

ManageEngine announced a managed services edition of their help desk software – ServiceDesk Plus. The new release is a complete web-based integrated package, including incident and service request management, self-service portal, knowledge base, IT asset management, even purchase and contract management. The new software is available in either a Standard Edition, providing the full range of basic help desk management functions, with a knowledge base and self service portal; or Professional Edition, which includes all the features found in the Standard Edition plus complete asset management.
Managed services allow organizations outsource …

Cloud-based IT Service Management pioneer, Service-now.com is holding their annual user conference titled “Knowledge” at San Diego on April 18 – 22, 2010 at the Omni San Diego Hotel. The 4th annual conference of the SaaS player will officially start on April 20, with pre-conference sessions happening on the days before. The agenda has not been fixed yet and the call for papers is on.
Last year’s user conference was attended by 300 people, most of them being customers and partners from the Service-now eco-system.
User conferences are a good thing. It …

Spiceworks, the Austin-based free IT management software vendor, is making strides with the release of a new version of its software. The new version – the 17th release from the company – comes with support for larger networks (upt0 1000 computers). To put this in perspective, the previous version supported networks with fewer than 500 computers. Other key feature additions in this version include real-time SQL Server monitoring, enhanced scan scheduling, editable network maps, help desk queues and SSL support.
For the uninitiated, Spiceworks offers free IT management software that lets …

So now the proverbial “rubber hits the road”.  You’ve purchased a service desk tool, and you want it to support your ITIL process initiative.  So how do you get there?
This is part 3 of a three part series (Part 1, Part 2) discussing how to “Bridge the Gap” between Service Desks, IT Processes, and Workflow.  Part 3 offers some practical advice on how to get from what the ITIL Processes describe, and really getting the benefit through automation tools.
In the two parts that preceded this article, I discussed the value …

In our ITSM Consulting Practice, we regularly work with customers on the implementation of service desk tools.  One of the common misconceived requests we receive is…  “Can you implement the ITIL (name one) process in our service desk tool?”   What follows is that we need to educate the customer that you can’t implement a process in a tool; we can only implement a workflow, and documentation.  The process is larger than that.
Last week, we saw “Bridging the Gap – Part 1: Process and the …

IT management has become an integral part of any enterprise and the choices that are available out there make it easy for any IT team to keep watch. Vendors like IBM, BMC from the Big 4 league and solutions from the point-product vendors like IpSwitch, Solarwinds, ManageEngine etc. have given IT across the globe the ability to keep track of what is happening in their bedrooms! These tools also become important for the IT support team during incident management or problem management.
Some of these tools have integration for mobile devices, …

It is Friday. And I am a fan of Dilbert toons. Today’s Dilbert reminded me of the often situation some of us find ourselves, when we take a project or a thought or an action plan to our bosses. Well, the good ones would be jubilant (maybe an exaggeration!) and the bad ones would beat the idea down because they feel insecure that someone else thought of something better than them.
Anyways, the toon also reminded me of the how we approach the help desk or ITIL. Documentation, even though a …

This is interesting. I just made my post yesterday about Social Networking and the help desk and I hear about a vendor who has integrated some sort of social media into a help desk software product. In this case, ManageEngine integrated Twitter with the customer help desk software.
A little background first. When customers feel satisfied or frustrated, they generally vent out their feelings and opinions by calling support or emailing them. If they don’t get any response, they blog about their experiences. With Twitter, it just became easier. 140 characters …

What would happen if our regular help desk integrated with social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, etc. Would it be possible? Will it be useful? Will it increase the load on the help desk or reduce it? Will it help the end user or hamper him?
ITIL itself defines the help desk as a “single point of contact”. Social networking talks about collaboration – multiple points of contact. Aren’t they really paradoxical?
Let’s look at how organizations function. They have multiple end users, an IT department with a support team  …