Did You Notice the Difference?

This past weekend we added another read-only database to ITRP's infrastructure. From now on, all exports and reports are generated using this new database. This reduces the load on ITRP's primary database. It is unlikely, however, that you will be able to notice an improvement in performance. That is because the primary database was still performing very smoothly.

So why did we add this database? One of the reasons is that usage of the ITRP service has been growing steadily. Eventually the increased usage would have required us to upgrade the primary production database. More importantly, however, we have some big plans for the Export feature and even bigger plans for the Analytics console.

Over the course of 2013 we will announce the enhancements that make use of the possibilities that this new database offers right here at this blog. So stay tuned...

ITSM in Higher Education

If you work in IT support for a large enterprise, you may think that you have some unique challenges. But imagine working in higher education. Think of the peak in your workload at the beginning of each semester when new students and visiting professors come to you for help. And they are not using a locked-down PC that neatly conforms to the corporate standard. They come to you with devices from all over the world. Of the international students, most do not even speak your language.

This is the reality of working in IT support at the Tallinn University of Technology (TUT), where they probably have more experience with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) than any corporation.

Implementing an IT service management solution for a university is different. Nobody would have been surprised if TUT had selected a toolbox ITSM application and customized it to fit their needs. Instead, they opted for ITRP because it was able to meet their requirements without any customization.
read more...

Receive an Email When Your Import Is Done

As of today, you will receive a notification whenever you import data into ITRP. You will receive this notification via email, regardless of whether you used the Import feature of the user interface or the Import API.


The email provides a short overview of the number of records that were created and updated, how many records remained unchanged and how many errors were encountered during the import. A hyperlink is included, which will take you to the log entry for the import. That's where you will be able to find the details if there were any errors.

This information was already available in the System Logs section of the Settings console. The email notifications just make it easier for account administrators to monitor their batch imports. This is especially useful for the imports that run fully automated, such as the daily import of the People data from Active Directory.

Ungrouping

To help organizations handle major incidents more efficiently, ITRP makes it possible to group together the requests from different people and system management tools when they concern the same incident. Thanks to this feature it is easy for service desk analysts to register an additional request for an incident that is already being worked on. It also helps the specialists because they only need to update the request group rather than each individual request.

But what if someone accidentally added a request to a request group? It could happen that some incidents are grouped together because they seem similar, but further investigation may reveal that one of them is in fact distinct. In such cases the incident that is different should be ungrouped so that it can be dealt with separately.


To ungroup a request, open it in View mode, click on the Actions button in the toolbar and select the "Ungroup..." option. You will then have the option to add a note to explain why you have decided to ungroup this request, but essentially that's all there is to it.

A Major Step for the ITSM Industry

In the early days of the IT Service Management industry (nearly 20 years ago) it was common to spend about 4 to 6 months on the implementation of just the Incident Management process. We learned a lot from these implementations. Ten years ago, these learnings had already helped us to reduce the timeframe to just 30 days for multiple ITIL processes.

One of our goals with ITRP was to reduce this further and we are seeing promising signs. Last month, Dutch service provider TWC went live with ITRP after just 2 implementation days.
read more...

Smaller organizations that do not have several hundred SLAs to manage should be able to do this even more quickly. Still, TWC's success marks a major step for the ITSM industry.

Another Service Hierarchy Browser Improvement

We recently added the Reset icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Service Hierarchy Browser (SHB). When you click on this icon, the SHB will return to its initial state, showing the service instances and configuration items of the requester.

But what if you want to undo your reset? In that case you can now simply click on the tab of the SHB to close it. When you open it again, the service instance that is related to the request will once more be selected at the top of the SHB.

Below this service instance, the SHB will list its child service instances, its configuration items, its open incidents and known errors, and even the changes that recently affected it.

A New Email Template Is Available

When ITRP needs to generate an email, it uses the email templates to look up the text for the message. Organizations can adjust these templates as needed.

Today we are happy to announce that a new email template has been added. This one is used to generate a notification after an email was sent to an ITRP account that did not process the email because its email policies did not allow it.


This situation can occur when an organization does not allow new requests to be generated for people whose email address is not already registered in their ITRP account and which do not belong to a trusted internet domain (see: Don't Know Your Users?).

In such cases, it is best to inform the sender of the email that a request did not get generated. This person can then contact the service desk by phone. If you have already included the telephone number of your service desk in the email signature, then the user will see that at the bottom of the automatically generated email notification.

ITRP Gains Steam in Europe

ITSM University periodically releases an update of its very insightful research on the State of the IT Service Management Market (SITSM). They just published Release 8, which is freely accessible to anyone.

When you read this update you get a sense of how dynamic the ITSM industry is right now. There's talk of BMC Software going private, Service-now is still gaining market share, HP is attempting a comeback with Service Anywhere, and ITRP is quickly gaining traction with large organizations in Europe.

The Improved Service Hierarchy Browser

The Service Hierarchy Browser (SHB) is one of the features that makes ITRP so unique. The SHB provides service desk analysts with a lot of meaningful information when they register a new request for someone. For example, when a new request is opened, the SHB shows the service instances for which the requester is covered by an active SLA, the current health of these environments, and the configuration items that the requester uses.

After a service instance has been applied to the request, the SHB looks up the relevant information about this service instance. This includes a list of the child service instances that underpin the selected service instance, the configuration items that make up the selected service instance, the open incidents and known errors that currently impact this service instance, and even the changes that recently affected it.

This information is also available when a specialist opens an existing request. In the past, however, the specialist had to click on the tab of the SHB to open it. It was a single click, but there is a big difference between providing information and asking specialists to look for it. This information is apparently so useful that specialists have asked for the SHB to be open when they work on a request. So, from now on, the SHB will open automatically when a request is placed in Edit mode.

In addition, we have added the Reset icon in the upper right-hand corner of the SHB. When a specialist or service desk analyst clicks on this icon, the SHB will return to its initial state, showing the service instances (SIs) and configuration items (CIs) of the requester. That makes it easier to look up the requester's CIs, or to drag and drop a different SI onto the request when it turns out that the issue is caused by an entirely different service than originally thought.

This One is Huge!

Last Thursday, at InfraVision's annual Customer Day, there was an important product announcement. In front of about 30 organizations that had gathered for this event at Schiphol airport's World Trade Center, a major new ITRP feature was unveiled.

Caution:  Before you read any further, it is only fair to warn you that the length of this blog post is directly proportional to the efficiency gain you may be able to derive from this new functionality (which is huge).

The functionality that was just added to the ITRP service did not come about overnight. Many support organizations already understand the benefits of offering their end-users a self service portal. It is possible to get even more out of an online self service environment when you are able to route requests to the most appropriate team depending on the service and the type of request that that the end-user submits. But apparently, there was another thing we could do to improve the return on an investment in self service.

Customers explained to us that, after a request has been submitted in ITRP's Self Service, the specialist who picks up the request often has to contact the requester to obtain some additional information before the request can be completed. This is a drag on the efficiency of an organization's request fulfillment process. If ITRP could make it possible to gather all the necessary information for each standard service request before it is submitted, then that could save a lot of time. This would benefit both the requesters as well as the specialists.

Essentially what was needed, according to our customers, was the ability to create custom forms for Self Service. These forms could then be related to request templates, so that when an end-user has selected the type of request he or she wants to submit, this user could be asked to provide some specific information.

During the 2012 ITRP Customer Advisory Board meeting in Tuscan, Arizona we committed ourselves to adding this functionality. Following several months of steady development, we are proud to let you know that, as of today, it is available for your organization in ITRP.

How does it work?
We'll take a simple example to explain how a few fields can be added to the Self Service user interface for a specific type of request. Let's assume that your organization offers its users the ability to order external hard disk drives. You already have a request template registered for this so that end-users can select this type of request in Self Service.

Because such requests require the approval of the requester's manager before they can be completed, the request template is related to a change template that automatically obtains the initial approval. But to give the approver some additional information, you would like the requesters to tell their managers why they require the external hard disk. So the first field we are going to add is a one-line text field in which the requester can specify the reason.

When you are in the Settings console, you will now find the "UI Extensions" option on the left side of your screen. After clicking on the New button in the toolbar, a new UI Extension will open. You can start adding a field by manually typing in HTML code, but it is much easier to open the Snippets section.


Here you can specify the field that you want to add without having to code.


After you click on the Append Snippet button, the code for this field will be generated and added to the UI Extension.

The advantage of this approach is that you do not need to code, but if you want to you can adjust the code so that it exactly meets your requirements.

Let's add one more field. If your company offers end-users the choice between a storage capacity of 4 TB, 8 TB and 16 TB, then we can add a field to allow the requester to select the desired option. Again, we can use the Snippets feature to add this field and its options.


Because we checked the Add to subject box, the option that the user selects will automatically be added to the subject of the request. Even though we have not been coding, the two fields are now defined in the HTML tab of the UI Extension.


If we save this UI Extension, we can test it by clicking on the hyperlink in the View tab. There we would see that, apart from the two fields that we just added, the default Subject and Note fields are still visible. If we do not want these fields to be visible to the user, then we can hide them.

To do that, we place the UI Extension in Edit mode, click on the CSS tab and open the Snippets section. There we hide the Subject field.


And we also hide the Notes field, including the Attachment hyperlink.


Again without having to do any coding, we have added some cascading style sheet code.


Now it is time to make sure that end-users can fill out the two fields that we added when they go to Self Service to order an external disk drive. To do that, we click on the Save & Activate button. Next, we open the request template that is used for requesting an external disk drive and relate the new UI Extension to it.


This makes the UI Extension available in Self Service.


The information that the requester specifies in the UI Extension is added in readable format to the request. This makes it easy for the approver and the specialist to see what has been requested. The same information is also stored in a hidden field of the request. There it is stored in a structured format that makes it easy to pass this information to provisioning tools (e.g. to automate the creation of a user account or the installation of an application on someone's PC).


A few final things to consider
1). Apart from adding HTML and CSS code, it is also possible to include JavaScript. This opens up amazing possibilities. You could, for example, add JavaScript to automatically show some additional fields when a user selects a specific value in another field. Or you could dynamically look up the options for a field from your organization's SAP production environment.

2). You can translate your UI Extensions in the languages that your organization supports. Translating the fields and field options ensures that they will be presented within Self Service in the preferred language of the requester. The translations of UI Extensions can be maintained in the Translations section of the Settings console. That is also where the translations for request templates, services and service instances are maintained.

3). All versions of a UI Extension remain available in ITRP. As soon as you activate an updated UI Extension, the previous version is archived. This makes it possible to perform a rollback when that is necessary.

Jetzt auch auf Deutsch

You probably already saw this one coming. After the recent partnership announcements for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, ITRP just had to become available in German.

Self Service was already translated some time ago for end-users who prefer to work in German. Now that the interface of ITRP has been fully translated, IT specialists and service desk analysts can also switch their language preference to German.

We know that quality processes are very much appreciated in the German-speaking parts of Europe. This additional language option will make the world's most advanced IT service management application more readily available for enterprises that operate in these countries.

An Exciting Emerging Player

Today, Forrester released a report on The State Of IT Service Management In 2012, a study they conducted together with itSMF USA. We were pleased to see that ITRP was already recognized as an exciting emerging player.

One of the interesting findings of the report was specific about Software-as-a-Service. Forrester notes: "The simplicity of the pricing models and the time-to-value of SaaS have proven attractive to enterprises."

We experience the same when organizations contact us or our partners to ask about our pricing model. The monthly price per user can be found at the ITRP website, but most experienced software buyers seem genuinely surprised that there are no hidden costs. There are no set-up fees, no extra charges for Self Service, and no minimum number of users. And daily backups, disaster recovery, security patching and upgrades are all included.

Such a straightforward pricing model is apparently still exceptional. A purchasing agent recently asked me to provide the pricing information in a spreadsheet. This is still common for on-premise software and some of the older SaaS vendors. For ITRP it was a really small spreadsheet...

The Finer Points of Usability

When a problem manager opens a new problem from an existing request, the Service field of the problem is automatically filled out. ITRP knows which service to select by looking up the service instance that is linked to the request and subsequently looking up the service that this instance provides.

Similarly, when a problem manager opens a new problem from scratch, ITRP will automatically select the service for which the problem manager is responsible. ITRP does this by looking up the service to which the current user is linked as the problem manager.

But what if the current user acts as the problem manager for more than one service? In that case, ITRP will now list these services at the top of the list of options.


This means that the presentation of this list is personalized for each problem manager. It ensures that problem managers will first see the services that are most relevant for them.

If a problem manager prefers to use the keyboard and presses the tab key to jump to the Service field, then the down arrow key can be pressed to select one of the services. In this case the problem manager's services will also be offered first.

Coverage in the Slovak Republic

Yes, another partner announcement. Today we welcome Step4word to the ITRP partner network. Step4word is a professional consulting firm in Slovakia with a refreshing approach to helping corporations identify their drivers of growth and profitability. Together with their customers they develop actionable strategies and offer a wide range of IT services to help them realize their goals.

When significant improvement opportunities have been identified in the area of IT support, the customer can rely on Step4word. Their ITIL experts can help them convert these opportunities into a concrete competitive advantage. Adding ITRP to their portfolio allows Step4word to deliver premium results quickly without exposing their customers to the risks of a traditional toolbox IT service management implementation.

We are excited about this partnership and are happy that customers in the Slovak Republic can now count on local support for ITRP.

Could It Get Any Better?

If you have been a service desk analyst for a while, you will probably have picked up a call already from an end-user who did not show up in the Service Desk console. Perhaps it was the user's first day on the job and his information had not yet been imported from Active Directory.

Now you have a quick way to register a new user without having to leave the Service Desk console. If the name you entered does not provide any matches, you can click on the New User button. This causes a simplified version of the Person form to appear right in the Service Desk console.

If you act as a service desk analyst for multiple organizations, you will first be prompted to select the account into which the new user needs to be registered. So this also works for the service desk analysts who provide first line support for organizations that have outsourced their help desk.

When you press the Save button, a new request will automatically open for the new user so that you can complete the registration of the request.

That's how the Service Desk console, one of the unique features of ITRP, makes the lives of the analysts a little easier again.

It gives your support organization the ability to provide a consistently professional support experience for your end-users.

ITRP in the Czech Republic

The ITIL experts from the Czech Republic have joined the ITRP partner network. Q4IT is the company that organizations in the Czech Republic turn to for ITIL training.

And even though theoretical knowledge is important, at Q4IT they know that it takes real-life experience to deliver successful ITSM implementations. That's their strength. They make sure that their customers get a solution that fits their culture and management style.

Adding ITRP to their service portfolio gives Q4IT the ability to address the needs of organizations that demand more than an ITSM toolbox. We are excited to be working with Q4IT and are confident that organizations in the Czech Republic will appreciate their support.

Replies to Automatic Notifications

ITRP generates different types of email notifications. For example, an end-user receives a confirmation after a request has been registered for him, a specialist receives an email when a problem has been assigned to her, etc.

The notifications used to ask their recipients not to reply, because the email was automatically generated. Those days are over.

From now on, people can reply to the email that ITRP generates for them. Each response will be added as a Note to the request, problem, task, change or release for which the notification was generated.

The response to an automatic notification could look like this:


When the Mail API processes this response, the result looks as follows:



You see that ITRP only adds the text of the reply, not the text of the original notification. If a response includes one or more attachments, then they will be added to the Note as well. Small graphics and legal disclaimers that are often used in signatures will automatically be ignored. The Mail API will also ignore out of office messages.

We know that many people have asked for this feature. We hope that the additional care we put into its implementation ensures that the information in the Notes remains easy to absorb.

Expanding in Germany

The ITRP partner network continues to expand. Today we are proud to welcome ncc solutions, an organization with a truly impressive IT service management track record. Since 1996, ncc solutions has been serving major European corporations from their headquarters in Munich.

ncc solutions offers only industry-proven solutions and includes a CIP (Continuous Improvement Process) in all their engagements. This, combined with their extensive ITSM implementation experience, makes ncc solutions an obvious choice for organizations in the center of Europe when they are looking for first-class ITSM advice and support.

We are looking forward to working with ncc solutions to help their customers reach the next level of ITSM maturity.

Securing Your Primary Email Address

Your primary email address acts as your ITRP user name. To improve security even further, ITRP will let you know when this email address has been updated.

The notification will be sent to your new primary email address and all other email addresses that have been entered for you in ITRP.


To make sure that you are informed when someone is trying to hijack your ITRP access, this notification is also sent to your previous primary email address. A little extra security that we hope you'll never need.

Local Support in Austria

ITRP is steadily expanding its partner network in Europe. We believe that our customers should get more than just expert IT service management advice. The ITRP experts who support them should also have a firm grasp of the local languages and practices to ensure successful ITSM implementations.

Today we are honored to welcome techwork to ITRP's partner network. For more than 10 years already, techwork has been Austria's leading IT service management solutions provider. Their mission is to help their customers simplify, giving them room to further increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their IT support organization.

Yes, we love their focus. This partnership was just destined to be.

Previews Perfected

You may have already noticed that we made a small adjustment to the previews. Previews are the small cards that pop up when you click on a related record. A preview offers a quick summary of the related record. They used to look like this:


When both the View and Edit icon were available, we saw that users always needed a little time to decide which one they should click on to open the entire record in either View or Edit mode. The icons were quite similar. This may have looked good, but it did not help people make the right selection. So we changed the look of previews a little. Now they look like this:


The View icon is gone. Instead the Name or Subject of the record is hyperlinked. So when you want to see the entire record, you can click anywhere on the Name or Subject. If you want to open the record directly in Edit mode, you can click on the Edit icon. As always, the Edit icon will only be displayed when you have the necessary access rights to update the record.

Ok, this is perhaps a trivial usability improvement, but hopefully you will also notice that it lets you jump more fluently from a preview to the entire record when you have the choice of opening it in View or Edit mode.