Join us for an IT Service Management Lunch and Learn at The Bank Restaurant in Chicago
April 10, 2013
When: Wednesday, May 15th
Time: 11:30-1:30
Location:
The Bank Restaurant
121 West Front Street
Wheaton, IL 60187
Please RSVP at:
http://go.cherwell.com/great-lakes
Topic: Real-World Service Catalog. How Do I Build This Thing Anyway?
Industry leaders StrataCom and Cherwell will lead an interactive discussion surrounding real-world challenges facing IT Service Management teams.
Eric Krueger, Principal Consultant for StrataCom, will lead attendees in a discussion surrounding best-practice Service Catalog processes including: how to go about building your service catalog portfolio, integrating service catalog workflow into your organization’s teams, and how to present and market your service catalog to your end-users.
A $100 Visa Gift Card will be given away to one lucky attendee!
StrataCom Exhibiting at the HDI Conference, come visit booth #514 for a chance to win an iPad!
April 9, 2013
The StrataCom team is looking forward to attending another yet another fantastic HDI Conference. This will be StrataCom’s 9th year exhibiting and our team is looking forward to meeting more of the ITSM community again this year.
The HDI conference will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada April 16-19th. Stop by the StrataCom booth #514 for a chance to win an iPad!
HDI is the leading professional association and certification body for technical service and support professionals. Facilitating collaboration and networking, HDI hosts industry conferences and events, produces comprehensive publications and research, and connects solution providers with practitioners, while certifying and training thousands of professionals each year. For more information about the conference, click here: http://www.hdiconference.com/
Join Us For an HP Service Manager Networking Party
March 28, 2013
Laura Walker, Director of Business Development elected Vivit Board of Directors
February 7, 2013
Laura Walker, Director of Business Development at StrataCom was elected to the Board of Directors for Vivit Worldwide, the official HP User Group Community. Laura currently holds the Education Chair position and is responsible for educational programs within the Vivit Community as well as the Advanced Training courses offered at the HP Discover conferences.
For the last several years, the officers, board of directors, and dedicated staff have been working together to grow the international mix of Vivit membership. Success has occurred by building a bridge over to Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), as well as South America and Australia. In their physical and virtual communities, Vivit has Chapter and SIG leaders evenly mixed from Europe and the United States.
Vivit is the independent, non-profit service organization that represents the broad HP Software community and is the endorsed HP Software users group. For almost two decades, Vivit has been the unbiased, trusted and field-tested community for thousands of HP Software customers, developers, and partners from around the world and from all areas of business and industry.
laura_walker@vivit-worldwide.org
Upcoming HP Service Manager User Groups
January 14, 2013
Vivit NY/NJ Local Chapter Meeting- February 1st
Join us in person for an HP Service Manager user group event in the New Jersey area on Friday, February 1, 2013!
Our agenda has been finalized and will include:
9:00-9:15 – Vivit Overview and Updates (Viral Desai, Vivit Chapter Leader for New York/New Jersey)
9:15-10:15 – Notifications and Mobility for HP Service Manager (xMatters)
10:15-10:30 – Break
10:30-11:15 – HP’s Brand New HP Service Manager SaaS Offering (Kate Seamans, HP)
11:15-12:00 – HP Service Manager Reporting – Client Success Story (David Blair, Fiserv)
12:00-1:00 – Lunch
1:00-5:00 – CMS Training – free offering by HP
5:00 – Door prizes, closing
Location: Fiserv 10 Exchange Place, Jersey City, New Jersey
Please RSVP as soon as possible. Space is limited and we need to ensure an accurate headcount for lunch. RSVP at the following link on the Vivit website. Vivit New Jersey/New York User Group
For any questions, please email Laura Walker: lwalker@stratacominc.com.
Orange County Vivit User Group- March 14
For the West Coast folks, we also are planning the Orange County, CA Vivit user group event, set for March 14, 2013. We hope you will be able to join us in person for this HP Service Manager focused gathering!
Our agenda has yet to be finalized. If you would like more information on this event, please continue to check out the Vivit website or email Laura Walker: lwalker@stratacominc.com.
The Pink Elephant Conference is Back
January 14, 2013
The Pink Elephant conference is next month and being held in Las Vegas, Nevada.
StrataCom is pleased to be in attendance again this year. The Pink 2013 conference is scheduled for February 17 – 20 at the famous Bellagio Resort.
If you are planning to attend, please do plan to stop by our booth #201. We love to meet our clients and potential clients in person. An iPad will be given away to one lucky winner.
The Pink Conference is widely recognized as ”the world’s best IT Service Management conference.”
The Pink Conference’s content is rich and comprehensive – 15 tracks, 160+ sessions – covering a vast array of subjects from all across the ITSM spectrum.
Pink Elephant is the world’s #1 supplier of ITIL and ITSM conferences, education and consulting services. To date, close to 200,000 IT professionals have benefited from Pink Elephant’s expertise. Pink Elephant has been championing the growth of ITIL worldwide since its inception in 1989 and was selected as an international expert to contribute to the ITIL V3 project.
Service Manager Mobility Client
November 2, 2012
The HP Service Manager Mobility Client
Transcript of the video follows:
Good afternoon. My name is Kim Euker from StrataCom and today we’re going to be taking a look at the SM Mobility Client in the Service Manager 9.30 application.
The SM Mobility Client enables users to get up to date information about their tickets from either their smart phone or other mobile devices. Users may view, update limited information, or close tickets that are assigned to them or their groups. And additionally, any approvals that are pending for a user may also be viewed and approved or denied, using the Mobile Client.
With that, we’re going to flip over and take a look at the SM Mobility Client.
We’re going to go ahead and log on.
And this is the home screen of the SM Mobility Client. There’s a section for incidents and there is also a section for changes. Under the incident section, you can see incidents that are assigned to you or incidents that are assigned to your groups.
Under the changes section, you can see changes that are awaiting your approval, and/or you can see changes that are assigned to your groups.
Here we have one incident that is assigned to us, let’s go ahead and take a look at that.
And here is the incident number and we can drill into that by clicking again.
And here is some information about that particular incident. We also, by clicking on this particular item with the icon to the right, can go ahead in and drill in and change the status. We’re going to go ahead and change this to “pending other.” When we do that, we’re asked if we want to make sure if we want to update the status to the pending other and confirm that. Click okay and this status is now updated.
We’re going to go ahead and flip over to Service Manager so that you can actually see that this ticket was indeed updated to pending other.
All right, let’s go ahead in and search for that ticket.
And it was IM10170.
Here you can see that the status has indeed been changed to pending other.
We’re going to go and flip back to the Mobile Client now. And from here we can keep drilling up the chain by clicking on the upper left of the client.
We can also go into incidents that are assigned to our groups by clicking here.
And here you can see that we have a number of items. We’re just going to pick one of those. Again, you can see information about that particular item here, and we can see more information about the title by clicking. We’re going to drill back and we’re going to go ahead and close this particular incident.
So we click the close button. We need to select a closure code and we’re just going to say, “not reproducible” and go ahead and click close, and you can see that our incident was closed. We’re going to go ahead and confirm that it was closed inside the Full Client.
This ticket was 10063 and as you can see, this was indeed closed. And it also has our closure code of not reproducible, and so you can see that it did update and it updates almost instantaneously, it is a very, very fast update.
We’re going to go ahead and go back to the Mobile Client and we’re first going to drill in and just look at some of those changes. Just as in the incident area, when we drill in, we can see a number of information, bits of information about our particular changes, and that may be very helpful in helping us make decisions on whether or not to proceed with a particular change or not.
We don’t have any changes that are currently pending for us to approve, so we’re going to have to go and escalate one to our approval.
So let’s go back over to the Full Client and bring a change through to the approval stage.
We’re going to go ahead and search for a particular change that we had ready for this demo, it is 10042. This change is waiting in prepare for change approval so all we need to do is go ahead and close that phase, so that it opens the change approval phase.
We click close, the change approval phase opens, and if we scroll down here, we can see that we have the approvals and we have Falcon waiting as an approver for this particular change.
We’re going to go ahead and flip over to the Mobile Client so that we can see if it has shown up on the Mobile Client.
If we are waiting for a ticket, we have a nice refresh button here and if we click the refresh button, it will refresh our tickets and as you can see, we do have our change that’s waiting for our approval now.
So we can to ahead and click into that, 10042, click again, and now we have the opportunity to either approve or deny this particular change. We’re going to go ahead and approve it. If we have any additional comments, we may enter them at this time. We can go ahead and click approve. And that change is now approved.
To confirm that, we will go back over to the Full Client so that you can verify that. We’re going to go ahead and search on this ticket.
Scroll down to the approvals, we can see that Falcon has now approved. We drill into the approval, and we can see that Falcon does show up in the completed approval actions and has disappeared from the currently pending approvals.
I want to thank you for walking through that short demonstration of the SM Mobility Client with us and if you have any further questions or need more information, please contact Laura Walker at LWalker@StrataComInc.com.
Thank you very much for your time.
StrataCom Celebrates 15-Years in Business
November 2, 2012
The StrataCom story begins in 1997 when Steve Jones, president and co-founder of StrataCom, along with principal consultant and co-founder William Rentfrow, first dreamed of building an IT Service Management company when they consulted together on enterprise-level ITSM projects for the Fortune 500 in the mid-1990’s. StrataCom was launched in the fall of 1997 and Eric Krueger, Principal Consultant, came aboard shortly after its inception.
Steve, William and Eric’s solid hands-on consulting experience in the industry proved to be a stable and trusted foundation for StrataCom. Their real-world background and understanding of ITSM business processes, coupled with their strong belief that services-based businesses thrive when quality and value is consistently delivered, is what has made StrataCom the trusted consulting choice for our IT Service Management clients for over a decade.
Steve, Eric, and William continue to be highly accessible to our clients, with Eric and William continuing to provide stellar services to clients in their original consulting roles, and Steve serving as StrataCom’s president.
StrataCom is proof positive that reliable consulting is not just a fantasy. We make that dream a reality for our clients. StrataCom relies on the expertise and experience of our strong leadership team to drive our success. Our seasoned management team averages over 30 years of IT technology, consulting and business management experience to create a client-focused culture throughout the organization.
Service Request Catalog Video
October 5, 2012
The video below is one of our consultants demonstrating the HP Service Request Catalog. The transcript of this video follows the video.
Good afternoon. My name is Kim Euker, I’m with StrataCom. Today we’re going to be talking about the SRC, the Service Request Catalog module. This module is intended to replace the ESS, the Employee Self Service module in the existing Service Manager Tool.
The SRC module is built on the existing service catalog inside Service Manager, so any of the existing catalog items that you have currently built will also be applicable and usable within the SRC module. And with all of that, let’s go over and log into the SRC module.
Upon logging into the SRC module, you can see that we have a beautiful portal here that’s very colorful and has all of the information available for our user on one screen, very nice and neatly packaged and organized.
The first area here is the service status. This allows you to get status on all of your existing requests in the tool. You can see all of those items that have been approved, any items that are currently pending, items that have been rejected, and also, any of your closed items as well.
If you want to click on one of those statuses, we’ll then be taken to the request inbox where then you can see all of your pending requests on the right-hand side here, and we can even drill in and look at one of those items.
We can see who is pending on the request, and all of the request details and the line items that make up that particular request, and we can even do “view history” to see exactly when that request was made.
Returning to the dashboard, the second area is our support status. Like the service status, this allows us to see the status of our open support tickets that we have in the tool. We either have open tickets or closed support tickets. We can click on the open, and again, we’re taken to the request inbox where we can see all of our open support tickets and we can click on any one of those as well and get more information. We can see that this is open and linked, that means it is linked to an incident ticket. And we can go ahead, actually, if we want, and update this ticket.
We can change, if desired, the contact method if we want to be contacted by phone, and then we can also give more details.
And go ahead and click update, and it’s been updated that easily.
Returning to the dashboard, the next area is approvals. If this individual had any approvals, you would see them here. We will look at that a little bit later after we open a request and we go over to the approver’s user ID.
In the next area is the packages. Packages are within the catalog, a listing of, it is a bundle and what the bundle is, it’s a number of line items that are always requested together. New application hosting has a number of line items that make up that particular bundle, as well as a new employee has a number of items that are always requested when you do a new employee.
So we’re going to go ahead and make a request for a new application. When we click on new application, you can see that we have a nice description here with the header for new application hosting. We can also see the package contents below it and if you scroll over each one of those, mouse over, excuse me, you can see a description of each of those items that make up this particular request.
We’re going to go ahead and make a request and you can see that we have a beautiful request button over here on the right-hand side that’s orange, which means that it’s something that’s not complete. So when we go ahead and click on that, we’re opening a new item here. And you’ll notice, as I said, the bar is orange, that means that it is something that is in progress. We’re going to continue to open this for Jennifer, although I could change that if desired. When I hit continue, the order information accordions shut. I do have the ability to go back and edit that if I want, but you’ll notice that it turned green.
Green means that that area has been completed successfully and is ready to move forward.
We can either save this request to view later, or we can request this now as a new item and we’re going to go ahead and request it now.
Each request requires a name and we’re going to go ahead and describe the request.
As I fill in items, you’ll notice that there’s a green checkmark off to the right side of each one of the fields. This means that each one of those areas has been completed successfully and is ready to move forward, so I can click continue. The delivery information accordions shut, and then the next area is open. It’s now asking me how I want to be contacted. I can select either email, phone, or pager, and we’re going to select email, and again, you can see that the green checkmark, hit continue.
The attachments accordions open; however, attachments aren’t required and we’re not going to put them on there today. We hit continue, and now everything is green, it’s all ready to go. We hit submit and now we’ve opened our new ticket. It was really that easy.
We can click on status to go and look at the progress for this request and then, or, we can we can return to the dashboard services or support tabs and continue.
The popular requests area is just as it is in the current tool, where you can actually, Service Manager dynamically determines which ones are the more popular of the requests that are being requested and adds them to a popular request area. It enables the user to very quickly and easily get to these requests to enact them. And we can see them here by just clicking between the little dots down at the bottom, to switch between them, we can click on the individual request itself to launch it and create a new request.
The assistance area simply is instructional information that is helpful for using the SRC module inside this tool here, and that’s pretty much all that that does.
The services tab, if we go there directly, you’ll see that it has a nice work flow definition, it has what all of the individual icons mean that you may encounter during your visit here. You can select a new employee to request a service for, or I can request it for myself, just by browsing the catalog, and you’ll notice that browsing the catalog looks very familiar to what you do today, only it’s a lot cleaner. And if I didn’t want that item, I can also very easily type in what I want to search on, here are my email items, I need a password reset, so I’m going to request that. Hit request. Press continue. Since it is my email that is affected, I definitely want to be notified by phone, because I obviously can’t get my email at this time.
So that’s how easy it is to enter tickets and the support tickets also allow you to have support items that are defined in the catalog as well. And if needed, I can also create a support item that is not in the catalog, so I can click on create, I get to give it a name, click continue.
I could actually, if I wanted, change who the request is for at this point in time. You can see that I can search on another individual. Again, I need to supply my contact method, hit continue, provide any additional information, the urgency, press continue, and submit. And I’ve submitted my request, my support ticket.
We’re going to go ahead and log off as Jennifer at this point.
The SRC application is an Adobe Flex application and it is a really beautiful tool to work with. We’re in the process of logging off here, it does sometimes take a minute or two.
Okay. Now that we’ve logged off, we’re going to log back on as an approver.
You can see that the dashboard looks entirely differently for the approver. He has no service status or not support status items in his queue; however, he has seven items waiting for his review. So we can go under the approvals and click on “review” and all of those items are listed here for his review. We can go ahead and click on this one and this is just looking for the password reset, not a problem, we’re going to go ahead and approve that.
We’re going to click on one of the other items, and in this particular case, we’re going to say that we need more information on this, maybe we are missing something. We can hit reject and it’s going to ask us why we’re rejecting it. We can hit reject and that’s how easy it was to approve and reject items inside the tool.
This pretty much covers all of the functionality in the new SRC module. I hope you’ve enjoyed this presentation and if you have any more questions or you would like more information, please free to contact Laura Walker at LWalker@StrataComInc.com.
Thank you very much for time.
StrataCom to Exhibit at the Fusion 12 Conference
September 18, 2012
StrataCom is exhibiting at the itSMF Fusion conference in Dallas Texas from October 28-31st. If you are planning on attending the October event, contact StrataCom or visit our booth at #609 for a chance to win an iPad!!
The itSMF Conference is dedicated to IT Service Management and alignment of IT services with the businesses outcomes, including Service Desk, Service and modern technologies, Service HR department and Service legal department, Virtualization and ITSM and IT Governance and Security.
The itSMF Conference brings together IT professionals from all major business sectors, including Company Directors, CIOs, IT Consultants, Management, IT Specialists and Professionals.