In addition to the most obvious uses of the Samanage REST API (like creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting IT asset information), you can also use this valuable tool to create your own applications and interface between your particular business processes and your Samanage account. Here are just 5 of the countless ways you can use the Samanage API.

1. For Staying on Top of License Compliance

This dramatization portrays the software publisher’s point of view when your company flunks a software license audit.

You don’t want your company to use software with expired licenses because it can result in unnecessary expenditure. Is the license for a widely-used software package coming to an end in a few months? Your Samanage API can be customized so that the affected parties are notified, and department heads or other authorized personnel can determine whether to renew the license, upgrade the software, or switch to different software altogether. With software publishers increasingly looking to software audits as a source of revenue, you don’t want your company to be caught with expired licenses.

2. For Requesting Business Purchases

You can create an interface that allows certain business processes to be triggered based on “ticket” submission. For example, if someone needs to order a laptop for a new hire, she can submit a ticket to trigger the purchase process. A similar interface could be used by the supply office for requesting printer paper, drafting supplies, pens, or other office supplies. Or it could be used to requisition office furniture. If a chair breaks, for example, the user could put in a request for a new one.

3. For Automating Asset Maintenance and Disposal

If you lease equipment, the Samanage API could be used to send automated notifications when equipment is nearing its turn-in date. This can help you avoid late charges and prevent workers from going without needed equipment. In conjunction with a business purchase / lease request API, this could streamline the disposal of old assets and coordinate it with acquisition of new assets, so that there is minimal disruption to productivity.

4. For Scheduling Conference Rooms, Equipment, and Meetings

Need practice space for the company’s synchronized briefcase team on Thursdays during lunch? Schedule it using a custom API.

Your company’s administrator in charge of scheduling conference rooms, meeting rooms, and audiovisual equipment could have an API designed so that employees can schedule the use of facilities and equipment. Or you could make the interface part of an end-user self service portal. Suppose an employee needed a small conference room for a client visit. He could submit a ticket with information on dates, times, and necessary equipment. The API would let the administrator know at a glance (or query) which facilities and equipment were available and reserve those facilities. Or he could use a self-service version to reserve the room and equipment himself. Such a system could prevent problems like double-booking meeting spaces or equipment.

5. For Requesting Company Travel

You could work with your company’s travel department to create an API for requesting company travel. Employees with upcoming business trips or conferences could create a “ticket” that’s submitted to the travel department. Travel coordinators can then make necessary arrangements, and the employees who plan to travel can check the status of their travel plans. This is far more efficient and accurate than travel requests submitted on paper.

The Samanage API offers flexibility so that your developers can create custom APIs to make many business processes work better. Samanage‘s powerful IT service management and asset management capabilities can be put to work not only solving end-user IT problems and tracking IT assets, but also making other business functions more efficient.

Photo Credits: cooldesign / freedigitalphotos.net, renjith krishnan / freedigitalphotos.net

With the cloud, many business functions are un-tethered from the desktop.

Another great feature offered by top cloud service desk providers is mobility. With mobile apps, your IT service desk workers aren’t chained to a desk … or even to the office, for that matter.

Fully Functional With No App Required

Samanage offers mobility with no app required. Users only have to go to the mobile version of the site from a phone or tablet to access a fully-functional mobile version of the software. IT service desk workers can use the service to easily view IT asset details, manage service requests, modify asset properties, and even collaborate with end users. It’s like having the whole help desk in a phone, tablet, or Blackberry. Companies that have service desk workers on call during off hours don’t have to make special provisions as long as those workers have a mobile device with them.

Optimized for Mobile Screens

Samanage Mobile isn’t a shrunken down version of the software. It runs on any mobile device running iOS 4+, Android 2.1+, webOS2, or Blackberry 6, and it has been optimized for smaller screens. Samanage Mobile is easy to see, easy to navigate, and optimized to work efficiently on mobile devices. Is your on-call agent at the ballpark? With Samanage Mobile, she can take care of many problems right from her iPhone, before the top of the next inning. Did an agent have to go home early due to illness? His backup can handle most problems without even coming in to the office.

Advantages of Mobility

Mobility doesn’t just help the IT service desk workers. It helps end users too. When an IT worker has to go somewhere to deal with a physical device like a printer, he can scan the IT asset management QR code affixed to it and immediately have all the specs right there. Maybe it’s a printer that’s nearing the end of its service life, or is a leased device that is about to be turned in. This information can be helpful to the IT worker who is choosing the most efficient and cost-effective fix for a problem. The result is happier end users and IT workers who don’t waste time on the phone or going back and forth to his desk for answers.

The IT Office, Minus the Office

IT installation several time zones away? Your IT professional has access to powerful help desk software, right on her phone.

Cloud-based IT service desk software coupled with mobile apps frees up IT workers to do their work in the most efficient manner possible. In some companies, this may mean telecommuting and handling IT service problems from home. In others, it may mean a smaller contingent of workers on-site, with backup agents on call at home. And in companies with offices that are geographically dispersed, it means that IT service workers have all their tools with them, wherever they go.

Samanage is powerful, flexible cloud service desk software that gives your IT team everything they need to take care of problems in the office and on the go. When you empower your IT team with great software plus mobility, the entire business runs more efficiently. And if you want, you can try it out for yourself, right now.

Photo Credits: KROMKRATHOG / freedigitalphotos.net, ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Requesting products or services through an IT service catalog is similar to online shopping.

Typical information in a service catalog listing includes the following:

• Service description
• Categorization of service type
• Supporting services
• Time frames for fulfillment of the service
• Who is eligible to request the service
• Cost
• How to request the service
• When escalation is appropriate
• Hours of service availability

The service catalog is an important reference for end users, and prevents misunderstandings about provision of IT services. It should be kept current, or it will rapidly become less useful.

Advantages of a Service Catalog

Having a comprehensive, regularly-updated service catalog helps optimize IT service delivery, hold down support-related costs, and improve communications between the IT service desk and end-users. Whenever an end user makes a request through the service catalog, established fulfillment processes begin immediately — often by the automatic creation of a help desk ticket. The service catalog should be designed with the end user in mind, with a minimum of IT jargon, and it should be easy to navigate, whether it’s organized by department, service area, cost, or type of device. Updating the service catalog regularly is one key to reaping its benefits.

The Periodic Service Catalog Update

As a general rule of thumb, your service catalog should be updated quarterly. Whomever is tasked with updating the service catalog should evaluate service offerings in light of the actual services provided over the previous quarter. Updates should take into account notes or call records on which parts of the service catalog are misunderstood or poorly understood, and they should also take into account changes in the company that might affect IT services, such as a switch from one hardware or software vendor to another.

The Ad Hoc Service Catalog Update

Sometimes, the service catalog should be updated without waiting for the next regular update. For example, if multiple requests come in for a service that is not listed in the service catalog, and if the IT department anticipates more requests for that service, it should be added immediately to help streamline this service in the future. As another example, if your company implements a major policy change, such as a new BYOD policy, the service catalog should be updated to reflect this, stating which services end users can expect in relation to personal devices they use at work.

If your company implements a policy affecting the relationship between end users and the IT service desk (like a new BYOD policy), the service catalog should be updated accordingly.

How a Well-Maintained Service Catalog Helps IT and End Users

A well-designed, well-maintained service catalog helps break the IT department out of the “IT silo” and brings it into better communication with the rest of the company. A great service catalog is a strong backbone for your service management program, helping end users know what to expect, and helping the IT service desk organize and prioritize their time more efficiently. Consider including at least one non-IT end user in the service catalog design and development process, to ensure that it will be useful to and understandable for end users. Non-IT end users involved in design and development can also help promote use of the service catalog throughout the workforce.

Samanage offers service catalog capability that lets you define service processes and have service requests appear as new service desk items so that your help desk can easily manage them from one place. End users find the service catalog interface to be intuitive and time-saving, and your IT service desk will find that it helps bridge the gap between IT and the rest of the workforce, improving communication and helping IT interactions with end users go more smoothly.

Photo Credits: imagerymajestic / freedigitalphotos.net, pakorn / freedigitalphotos.net

When IT service desk workers find themselves in that “must laugh so I don’t cry uncontrollably” emotional void, the meme world is there. Here are 10 favorite IT memes inspired by some of the humorous situations help desk workers find themselves in.

1. When you meet someone and they ask what you do, you can’t just say, “I fix computers” because that’s a sure route to “You know, my computer’s acting funny and I bet you can help me”-ville. Perhaps if you show them this meme (varonis.com), they’ll be distracted long enough for you to escape.

2. Does your company offer VIP service so that the corner office club doesn’t have to wait to have their computer problems fixed? If so, and you’re lucky enough to answer a call that takes you on that elevator ride to the executive floor, there’s a decent chance you’ll encounter this guy (breakbrunch.com).

3. You’re always telling people the importance of backing up important files, but do they listen? Of course not. Sometimes you have to simply sit back and wait for natural consequences to teach them that lesson (memegenerator.net).

4. The IT help desk may have been using a ticketing system for years, but there’s usually one or two old-school workers who insist on calling you up so you can drop everything and fix their problem, thereby rewarding bad behavior and punishing those who use the ticket system. Well, sometimes you have to cut them off with something they’ll have no answer to (memegenerator.net)

5. IT workers are … how you say? Different, sometimes. Sure, you may do things in an unorthodox manner, but who cares as long as you get the job done. Like this guy (tumblr.memecenter.com)

6. The IT department has just finished a major software rollout that required re-training of the civilian population, late nights, and enough Chinese takeout that you have given the delivery guy his own nickname. Of course you’re ready to help all those end users who didn’t pay attention during the training sessions, right? (thelolshop.com)

7. Every company has one (or several) of these: end users whose requests are so vague that the answers “close and restart the program” and “macaroni and cheese with ketchup” have an equal probability of being correct. Perhaps you imagine Mr. Vague Nonsensical End-User like this (izifunny.com).

8. Wouldn’t it be cool if just once, an end-user’s description of the problem were literally true? (freestylingfood.wordpress.com)

9. Do you ever wish that the hardware purchase process at your company were just a little more heavily regulated? If so, it’s probably because of department heads like this one (quickmeme.com)

10. Finally, there are some IT people who only exist in the realm of mythology, like this particular IT coworker (izifunny.com).

Now get back to work. Old Mrs. Flavisham in the antiquities department is once again trying to get on the internet with her IBM Selectric.

If you don’t manage risks, addressing problems can be like closing the barn door long after the horse is gone.

Your company’s IT service desk should also focus on prevention of problems by identifying risks and addressing them. Here are 5 risks that your company can’t afford to ignore.

1. Loss of Data Due to Storage Crashes

A hard drive or server crash can cause major loss of company resources, whether the crash happens on a server used by many employees or on a single employee’s computer. The best prevention is having a strong backup policy that mandates archival of data in multiple places using multiple methods. Cloud services like SkyDrive keep copies on local computers as well as in the cloud, and they automatically synchronize. Departmental file servers should be backed up daily, and when they start filling up, it’s time to requisition more storage space. Of course, files can be backed up on portable storage media. This should not be the only backup method, however, because storage media are easily destroyed or lost.

2. Virus Attack

Computer viruses might be created by teenagers pulling pranks, or they might be developed by criminal masterminds. Either way, the results can be disastrous. On average, it costs 50 hours of labor and $10,000 for a company to recover from a virus attack. Antivirus software is absolutely critical for your company’s IT assets, and it must be kept up to date due to continual introduction of new types of computer viruses. Your company needs a clear policy about employee downloads and file sharing, as well as about how to address viral attacks, including how to quarantine infected computers.

3. Infiltration by a Hacker

Keeping your company’s network secure requires vigilant effort from you, your web developers, and vendors. Staying current on the latest hacks and testing tools helps keep network security at the forefront of your IT team’s minds. Relatively simple methods can prevent automated attacks from worms or from scripts designed to attack specific script types, but you also need other controls, like a network-based firewall that can detect and block attacks on web systems. A host-based web application IPS can detect web application and some database attacks in real time and cut them off quickly.

4. Malware Entering through Employee Mobile Devices

BYOD can improve productivity, but you have to have a strong BYOD policy to mitigate security risks.

The BYOD environment giveth and taketh away. Employee devices may not have up-to-date virus protection, and may not be secured by the latest security patches. Employees can unknowingly visit sites with infected links or download personal apps that are infected with malware, and this can cause work computers to become infected quickly. Your BYOD policy should prohibit personally-owned devices and storage media (like USB drives) connecting to a USB port on a company computer or a company network cable. Some companies prohibit personally-owned devices from connecting to the company wireless network unless it’s a separate wireless network solely for internet access. BYOD can be safe, as long as clear policies are in place and everyone is aware of the risks and knows what they are and are not allowed to do with personal devices.

5. Major Catastrophes Like Fire, Flood, Criminal Destruction

Your company should have a disaster plan, and it should review that plan regularly to take into account new disaster prevention techniques and lessons learned by companies that have experienced disasters. Disaster preparedness is one reason so many companies are turning to cloud applications. Recovering from a flood or fire is faster with cloud applications than with on-site applications. It’s not fun to think about a catastrophe happening to your company and its assets, but you cannot ignore this risk and must have a disaster management plan ready at all times.

Your IT service management software can be an integral part of risk reduction. Samanage offers SaaS service desk and IT management software that continually scans your software and hardware inventory to detect risks like lack of virus protection, presence of illegal software, and missing security patches. It can even alert you to lack of free hard disk space, which can save employees from having to deal with a major crash. Samanage risk reduction features can notify the IT service desk of risks like the downloading of illegal licenses, P2P file sharing programs, or games. When you can identify such risks early, you can take action right away and prevent a major IT disaster.

Photo Credits: AcrylicArtist, Typexnick

Here are just a few types of IT contracts:

• Software licenses
• Hardware licenses
• Online subscription-based services
• Maintenance and service contracts
• Warranties

All of these contracts have different terms and conditions, and the contracts may be acquired in different ways. Trying to manually manage contracts doesn’t make sense in an age when just about anything can be automated. Manual contract management is error-prone and unwieldy, even for the most organized manager. Hence, IT contract management.

Since a person this organized has never been captured or photographed, scientists developed this rendering based on anecdotal data.

IT contract management software is one of the best investments you can make because of the broad reach of good contract management. Here are 5 surprising benefits of superior IT contract management.

1. Rebate Management

Have you ever given up in frustration while trying to figure out the intricacies of getting a five dollar rebate on cat food? Try figuring out a hardware or software rebate. If you own a small business and need to control costs across the board, such rebates can be worthwhile, if you have a good way to manage and track them. With flexible IT contract management, you can store scans of UPC codes, receipts, and invoices, and receive notifications when you can expect your rebate. That way, if it doesn’t come through when expected and you have to figure out what happened, you can access all pertinent information using any web-connected device.

2. Keeping Your “SOX” Up

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, nicknamed SOX, was passed in 2002. It spells out how companies must certify the accuracy of financial information and the penalties that apply for fraudulent accounting practices. Companies bound by SOX must have their CFOs and CEOs certify that they use effective controls and procedures to ensure accounting accuracy. Contract management software can be an effective part of a company’s SOX compliance strategy, since it reduces risks of contract noncompliance. Effective contract management software helps keep everything above board, clearly laying out expenditures in official contracts and providing necessary transparency for efficient, ethical business practices.

3. Evergreen Contract Elimination

Have you ever had an automatically-renewing subscription that you kept forgetting to cancel? Your print edition of TV Guidemay have continued arriving faithfully long after you ditched cable for Netflix because you never could remember when it was supposed to renew. In a medium-to-large company, such “evergreen” contracts of all kinds can add up to a lot of wasted money. By using IT contract management software, you’re notified before an automatically-renewing subscription renews, so you can cancel it if you don’t need it anymore.

4. Fewer Hard Feelings

An alarming trend among contractors is to go straight from the “Second Notice” to the “Collection Crocodile.”

Does your company hire services on contract? Maybe you hired an independent contractor to design your new logo, or perhaps you hired a writer to edit and polish an annual report. When these contracts are managed with contract management software, you don’t run the risk of forgetting to pay a contractor when you said you would and causing hard feelings. Plus, if a few years pass and you want to hire a contractor again, you can easily look up his or her name in your contract management database.

5. Return on Investment

Ineffective contract management costs US businesses $153 billion per year in missed savings opportunities. Contract management errors cost the typical company up to 12% of annual contract expenditures. Implement effective contract management software and you can achieve payback of 150% to 200% in just one year. Can you think of any other single investment you can make with that kind of payback? Managing contracts effectively is one of the best things you can do for your company’s bottom line.

Samanage IT service desk software has the power and flexibility to effectively manage contracts using cloud technology, so you can reach your contract management information wherever you can connect to the internet. You can configure the software to suit your company’s needs, setting up automated reminders and storing relevant contract information so you’re never at a loss as to what’s in your contracts, when they began, and when they terminate. Imagine all this capability, just from choosing the right IT service desk software. At Samanage, it is reality and it’s right now.

Photo Credits: cooldesign / freedigitalphotos.net, Witthaya Phonsawat / freedigitalphotos.net

We live in the information age. Make relevant information available to end users by creating a searchable knowledge base.

In an IT service desk environment, the IT service desk workers build and maintain the knowledge base, and it can be a real asset to a company’s IT service management program. A great knowledge base helps expedite training of new service desk workers and helps current workers find quick and consistent solutions to end-user problems.

A 2012 survey by Coleman Parkes found that up to half of all “How do I …?”-type calls can be deflected to self-service channels — like a knowledge base — if that knowledge base is current and easy to use. Furthermore, a Fleishman-Hillard study found that nearly 90% of consumers go to websites, Google, and other searchable entities to find information they need before ever contacting a human help resource. So end users are willing to use good resources where they exist.

If your IT service desk is considering implementing a knowledge base, it’s good to keep these 5 best practices in mind.

1. Get Management on Board from the Start

The success of a knowledge base depends on a corporate culture that embraces accountability. When you get managers and executives on board from the beginning, not only will you have an easier time justifying the resources needed to build the knowledge base, you’ll have an easier time impressing them when the knowledge base leads to better efficiency, time savings, and monetary savings.

2. Structure the Knowledge Base by Topic, Not Organization

Your knowledge base should be designed to connect dots across all organizational boundaries. When you structure a knowledge base on organization, that knowledge gets siloed, and while you might help people in specific organizations with specific problems, you won’t help nearly as many people as you would if you organized the knowledge base by topic. Plus, if a knowledge base is structured by organization, you’re bound to get a few people who are overly protective and possessive of “their” particular knowledge silo.

3. Encourage Extensive Linking

Cross-linking is extremely important in making the most of your knowledge base. Encourage knowledge-base creators to add links to any term that could be unclear, or that has a different meaning in the IT world than it does in to everyone else. Cross-linking helps users of your knowledge base clarify their understanding of problems and better understand how to address them.

4. Make Knowledge Base Updates a Natural Part of Workflow

When knowledge base building is built into your IT service desk solution, it naturally becomes part of the IT service management workflow.

The knowledge base shouldn’t be a project that’s set aside for people to work on when they get the time. They never will. Your IT service desk workers should have the ability to update the knowledge base in real time, making new solutions available immediately to everyone. Ideally, you should use IT service desk software that incorporates construction of a knowledge base from real problems and solutions.

5. Monitor and Track Knowledge Base Performance

Analyzing the end user experience is important in making the most of your knowledge base. You need to ensure that people know about it and aren’t afraid of using it. Encourage end users to access the knowledge base, and remind them they can still submit a help desk ticket if they can’t find a solution on their own. Keep track of how often the knowledge base is accessed, how many tickets are resolved on the first attempt by IT service desk workers (who may be using the knowledge base themselves), and if any particular types of calls aren’t benefitting from the knowledge base so you can make necessary changes.

A knowledge base can be an indispensible part of your company’s IT service management program. Samanage offers IT service desk software that includes knowledge base capability baked right in. You can retain the knowledge you gain and prevent “reinventing the wheel” every time a new incident arises. Content from resolved incidents can be captured and made available in the knowledge base instantly. Solutions are fully searchable and tagged, and you can modify or edit knowledge base entries to include input from multiple solution creators. With Samanage, you’ll build on every solution created, starting from day one.

Photo Credits: Stuart Miles / freedigitalphotos.net, adamr / freedigitalphotos.net

From the moment an asset arrives, Samanage adds it to the IT asset management system and tracks it until its life cycle is over.

While companies primarily use Samanage for their IT service desks and IT asset management systems, Samanage can also be used by departments as diverse as HR and facilities maintenance. Samanage may also be easily integrated with Salesforce, the leading cloud-based sales and CRM software provider, used by more than 100,000 businesses.

Overview of Salesforce and How Samange Integrates with It

When Samanage is integrated with Salesforce, you can manage your company’s IT assets from within your Salesforce account. Just think, from within your Salesforce account, you can track PCs, laptops, and servers.

You can also associate cases with assets, easily viewing an asset’s support history. Samanage integrated with Salesforce allows you to easily view and analyze your company’s complete asset inventory directly from Salesforce.com.

Benefits of Integrating Samanage and Salesforce

The benefits of integrating Samanage with your Salesforce account are plentiful. By having easy access to each asset’s configuration and repair history, you can more easily troubleshoot problems and resolve support tickets faster than ever. And this translates to minimal employee downtime and minimal disruption to the flow of business. Used together, Samanage and Salesforce allow automated collection of configuration data and automatic uploading to your Salesforce.com application, eliminating tedious manual entry of information.

Samanage integrated with Salesforce makes IT asset management faster and more accurate.

How Integration of Samanage with Salesforce Saves Time

Samanage is designed to have a quick learning curve, and when it’s integrated into Salesforce, your employees will find it intuitive and useful. In fact, there’s no easier way to manage your company’s IT assets.  Quicker IT problem resolution allows maximum productivity and ensure minimal downtime. No longer do you have to search or manually update spreadsheets cataloging IT asset information. You can even include QR code tracking in your asset management system to save even more time.

How Integration of Samanage with Salesforce Saves Money

Running IT asset management from within Salesforce saves money by improving efficiency and productivity. You don’t even have to switch applications to track or inquire about assets — you can do it right from inside the Salesforce account you use every day. Once assets are in the system, they’re easily tracked and updated from the day they arrive on the loading dock until they are moved out at the end of their life cycle. Use of Salesforce and Samanage on mobile devices means you don’t have to return to your desk to learn the disposition of any asset. Convenience, flexibility, and automation allow your employees to do more and do it easily.

Samanage is the leading SaaS service desk and IT management software solution for companies that demand reasonable, up-front pricing, quick deployment, and automatic upgrades. Combine Samanage with the Salesforce account your business already has, and you’re able to get the most from both programs.

Photo Credits: Hin255 / freedigitalphotos.net, patpitchaya / freedigtalphotos.net

Here are 10 obsolete computers and accessories relegated to the dusty storage rooms of obsolescence.

1. The Commodore Datasette

If you had one of these bad boys for your Vic 20, you could spend a week typing in “PEEK” and “POKE” followed by strings of numbers and eventually have something vaguely resembling a word processor (if you define “word processing” as the ability to backspace and type again to correct errors).

2. AOL Free Trial CDs

These were everywhere in the mid-1990s: your mail, your Sunday newspaper, the checkout counter at your local mass retailer — and they were free! AOL spent an estimated $300 million shipping free trial CDs out to pretty much every man, woman, and child in the US, and caught some flak for all the waste those discs represented. Fortunately, your mailbox is now safe from this particular direct marketing push.

3. The Xerox Mouse

The mechanical ball mouse came with the Xerox Alto computer, and could rotate in any direction. Made by Jack Hawley in his Berkeley, California company The Mouse House, these mice had literal balls of steel, which were covered with a rubber surface to transmit the mouse’s movement accurately.

4. The First Apple Macintosh

The late Steve Jobs introduced the first Mac in January 1984. It was the first commercial hit computer featuring a mouse and a graphical user interface. While IBM users were stuck using the DOS command line, Mac users could mouse all over the place and generally feel superior to DOS users. By the end of the 80s, the Mac started dropping in popularity, but the seeds were planted for the cult following Apple developed starting in the late 1990s.

5. Pen Plotters

Plotters were computer printers made to draw vector graphics. They used to be used extensively in computer-aided design and mapmaking, but have been replaced with wide format printers. Because they worked by moving a physical pen across a sheet of paper, pen plotters were limited to line graphics. In recent years, some artists have found old pen plotters on eBay and used them to create art.

6. Mainframe Computers

If the words “job control language” make you break out into a cold sweat, you probably used a terminal to connect to a mainframe computer to run software back in the day. Thankfully, the mainframe era is over. In early 2012, NASA powered down the last mainframe computer it was using, an IBM Z9 that was installed at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

7. SGI Visual Workstations

SGI Visual Workstations, manufactured by Silicon Graphics, Inc. ran Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Linux, and used Pentium II and III processors. In some ways, these workstations (models 320 and 540) were ahead of their time, with Firewire ports, USB keyboards, and USB mice. Though they often outperformed similarly-configured Intel PCs of the era, nonstandard components made it cheaper for people to switch to other PCs rather than upgrading.

8. The Apple Lisa

The Lisa predated the Macintosh by a year, and for the low, low price of $9,995 you got a 5MHz Motorola 68000 chip, a cool megabyte of RAM, and two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives. For some reason, only 100,000 of these rock stars were made during the two-year production run.

9. Floppy Disks

Floppy disks consisted of thin, flexible (floppy) magnetic storage sealed in a plastic, square container. The first ones were 8 inches on a side, with the second and third generation floppies measuring 5.25 and 3.5 inches on a side, respectively. From the mid-1970s to the turn of the 21st century, floppy disks were the default form of data storage and exchange.

10. Zip Drives

Introduced in 1994, the Zip drive used disks that held up to 100MB, while later versions used disks that could hold up to 750MB. The Zip disk was a popular portable storage device during the late 1990s, but it never really replaced the 3.5-inch floppy. Once CDs, DVDs, and USB thumb drives came along, it was Game Over for the Zip drive.

At Samanage, we stay on the leading edge cloud computing technology, though we’ve definitely seen our share of obsolete equipment. Which obsolete computer technology brings back memories (good or bad) for you? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments section.

Photo Credits: All photos Wikimedia Commons

Protip: there are more romantic ways to ask someone to marry you.

QR codes might have fallen short of the monumental expectations placed on them in some instances. Have you ever been in a store and scanned a QR code on, say, a casserole dish, only to be presented with a photo of the same casserole dish, with food in it? So far they haven’t exactly transformed the retail experience, but QR codes are still remarkably useful, particularly for tracking inventory of every kind, including IT asset inventory. QR codes actually can revolutionize your IT asset management system.

QR Codes Are Great for Tracking IT Assets

A QR code affixed to every laptop, desktop, tablet, and peripheral makes keeping up with your IT assets easier, quicker, and more information-rich. They can also help you when you’re trying to remotely diagnose an end-user’s problem. Have the end-user scan his computer’s QR code and send you the link that comes up. You can then find out exactly what kind of machine it is and what software is installed – valuable information when you’re diagnosing and fixing a hardware or software problem.

When it’s time to verify your database of IT assets, you can avoid manually logging numbers and simply scan QR codes and match them up with the information in the asset database. The time savings are immense for a medium to larger business.

They’re Much Better Than Logging Serial Numbers

There’s nothing wrong with logging serial numbers, but it’s not sufficient for tracking IT assets. Plus, manually logging serial numbers is highly prone to errors and takes massive amounts of time. When you assign a QR code to a new asset, you can scan the serial number barcode and add other relevant information about the asset, such as brand, model, date of purchase, location, and name of the person or department to whom the asset is assigned. You’ll have serial numbers when you need them, but you’ll also have additional information that simply makes your asset management system work better.

They’re Better Than Barcodes, Too

QR codes hold a lot more information than barcodes — a hundred times more. Not only that, a QR code can be read from any direction, so backgrounds and surrounding images don’t interfere with them. The algorithm used to create QR codes allows for a margin of error, which can actually come in handy. That means a dirty or damaged QR code can still be read. You can even design QR codes to look like certain things, such as a picture or keyword. In short, the QR code gives you more information that is easier to read, and it works even when it’s dirty or damaged to some extent.

In case you were wondering, yes, there are edible QR codes. Whether they show up on x-rays has not been determined.

QR Codes Make IT Asset Management Mobile, Fast, and Accurate

When you try to track assets using spreadsheets, or worse, a notebook full of hard copy forms, you sacrifice convenience, accuracy, and speed. When your IT asset management software includes mobile apps, inventory verification that used to take hours can now take only seconds. QR code technology is everywhere, and yes, some businesses went a little crazy with them, but when it comes to tracking your company’s IT inventory, QR codes really do live up to the hype.

At Samanage, we offer integrated IT service desk, contract management and asset management capability in one powerful, flexible software package that’s cloud hosted. No more tedious upgrades or long-term software rollouts: you can start today if you want. Samanage offers QR capability for IT asset management as well as mobile apps that give you maximum convenience and speed. Don’t leave your IT asset management system in the dark ages. Samanage gives you the tools you need to revolutionize IT asset management, saving your company time and money.

Photo Credits: Fluid Forms, Clever Cupcakes

“Reinstate my account. And hurry! I … I think I’m starting to disappear!”

As a general rule of thumb, the longer you wait between allowing a service to expire and reinstating it, the more expensive it will be, and the fewer options you will have. IT contract management is about keeping you up to date on all your SaaS services so that you have adequate warning when a service is about to expire and can take action to prevent problems. Here are some of the things you could find yourself dealing with if you let a service expire.

You May Be Given a Grace Period

With some SaaS services, if your subscription lapses, you’re given a grace period during which you can figure out what to do with your stored data. In some cases, you are able to download it and do with it what you want. For example, with Microsoft Office 365, if your subscription lapses, you have a grace period in which to download your files and you will only be able to read and print cloud-stored documents unless you renew your subscription. You will receive email notifications when your subscription is about to expire, but it’s easy for these emails to get lost in the daily email shuffle. With Microsoft Office 365, you won’t lose your files and will be able to download them indefinitely. You’ll just have to find another way to create and edit them if you don’t renew your subscription.

Data May be Stored for a While, Then Purged

Some providers will hang onto your data for a specified time period, after which it’s deleted. For example, if you allow your PlayStation Plus membership to expire, your cloud saves will stay on Sony’s servers for six months. If you subscribe within that six month period, you can access them again. If, however, your PS3 were to croak six months after you last backed up your games and dropped your subscription, you would have to kiss six months of gaming goodbye. It’s easy to see how a business app with a similar policy could be disastrous if you inadvertently neglected to re-subscribe before the cutoff date when your data is purged.

A Little Data May Be Saved, but You Could Lose the Rest

“As a courtesy, we allow you to keep all the data you can fit onto one of these.”

Another possibility when you let a cloud service lapse is that a fraction of your files are stored. For example, with Adobe Creative Cloud, if you haven’t downloaded your files to your computer, you could be out of luck. Once you let Creative Cloud lapse, Adobe will continue to store 2 GB worth of files (rather than the full 20GB you get with the service). You can still use a free subset of Creative Cloud services like syncing files, or use of a 30-day trial of the desktop software (as long as it wasn’t already installed as part of your paid Creative Cloud membership). But if you didn’t save your work to your computer, anything over the free 2GB of storage is gone.

The moral of the story is that you don’t want to accidentally let a SaaS service lapse. At best, it will be a chore getting reinstated, and at worst you could lose valuable data. You have to read your contracts and know exactly what the consequences are should your service lapse, and you have to put procedures in place for ensuring that it doesn’t happen.

When you use IT contract management software, you can avoid these problems. Samanage, provider of SaaS service desk software, includes a full suite of asset management features, including license compliance and IT contract management. Implement IT contract management and you greatly reduce the risk of impending data loss haunting you on that long-awaited day off … or worse, coming back to work to find that valuable data has disappeared.

“Samanage was the most feasible option for our organization. It’s easy to configure and does not conflict with any of our software configurations.”

Background

Advanced Technology Group (ATG) is a highly specialized management and technology consultancy focused on optimizing the lifecycle from customer experience to billing and revenue management (Q2C or CRM to BRM) for leading technology and new media providers.

Before turning to Samanage, ATG tracked assets using hard copy records — a physical log book for hardware and software allocation. This method has obvious shortcomings, so the company looked for an asset and software management solution with centralized ticketing to improve efficiency and accuracy.

Challenges

One of the main challenges ATG faced with implementing a comprehensive asset management solution was one faced by many of today’s businesses: the company had moved many operations to the cloud and did not have the on-site resources to support a dedicated, on-premises product.

“We had limited visibility of equipment. No centralized ticketing service. Samanage was the most feasible option for our organization. It’s easy to configure and does not conflict with any of our software configurations,” said ATG’s Paul York.

Solution

ATG found Samanage to be “Very easy. Implementation takes a matter of minutes.” By providing ATG with legacy information on all IT assets, Samanage significantly expedited the troubleshooting process in ATG’s IT department. The ticketing system also allowed multiple IT professionals to collaborate on end user problems when necessary.

Benefits

ATG found Samanage’s powerful reporting capabilities to be an enormous benefit. Said York, “We are able to audit any and all machines with the click of a button. Having the ability to produce a report with every type of software used organization-wide has enabled us to generate statistical information on how our users operate. These reports have provided us with data used to create standard operating system images.”

The auditing capabilities alone have provided the company with useful information on how and why users have experienced software problems, and this has made the process of providing IT service management quicker and much more effective.

IT help desk access via front desk bell has fallen below all other access methods, including “shouting” and “telepathy.”

While this type of social crowdsourcing can’t replace traditional support channels, it’s a welcome tool for those experiencing technical problems and for those running the IT service desk too. Top IT service desk software providers, including Samanage, offer social integration with their software, helping IT professionals and end-users alike.

What Is Chatter?

Chatter by Salesforce is a popular business social media tool used by businesses so that employees can collaborate instantly and maximize efficiency. Chatter is a secure work-based social network that helps end-users work better with each other and with specific internal service providers like the IT help desk. Suppose an end-user has a problem with a printer. She can go on Chatter and ask to the network at large, “Hey, is anyone else having trouble with the printer on the second floor?” and possibly get an answer. If she doesn’t, she can use Chatter to ask the IT service desk for help too. Since Chatter pushes updates automatically, our end-user will know as soon as someone answers her question.

Samanage Integration With Chatter

When a social network like Chatter is integrated with IT service desk software like Samanage, the result is more problems solved more quickly. An agent that sees the previously mentioned end-user’s printer problem on Chatter can check to see if other IT workers are dealing with a related problem and direct the inquiry to the proper person.

Integration of service desk software with social media makes it easy to see related incidents springing up and detect patterns early so that someone can get to the root of the problem and help several people at once. Social media can also be used to broadcast messages to all employees about important service outages, upgrades, or other events affecting them. Social networking can even be integrated into your IT asset management system, making it easy to log changes in IT asset status.

Benefits of Social Integration With Your Service Desk

The integration of social network software with your IT service desk harnesses the collective problem-solving capacity of the entire service desk staff. When a problem is solved, solutions can be added to the service desk knowledge base for future reference. Social media software integration with your IT service desk software can increase your service desk’s first call resolution rates, cut down on resolution times, deflect easy calls (“Pat was about to install a new toner cartridge. Printer should be back up momentarily.”), and reduce unplanned downtime.

Sometimes “solving” an IT problem is just a matter of someone in the know letting you in on what’s happening.

Integrating social media with your IT service desk software adds an element of crowdsourcing, which can solve many of the easier problems the service desk deals with regularly. It’s a great adjunct to your service desk self-service portal and knowledge base.

Samanage integrates seamlessly with social software like Chatter, allowing Chatter users to send messages to the support address and have them automatically logged as new help tickets. End-users can search Chatter’s knowledge base and often resolve issues without ever having to create a help ticket. People are comfortable using social media to get answers to personal and work questions, and integrating it into your IT service desk adds another channel through which end-users can get the answers they need. Learn more here.

Photo Credits: Salvatore Vuono / freedigitalphotos.net, renjith krishnan / freedigitalphotos.net

“I don’t remember this being in my job description.”

Here are 5 of the most outrageous IT service desk requests collected from around the web.

1. Help Desk / Universal Information Repository: Potato / Po-tah-to

Business2Community.com’s Tech Gadget section solicited ridiculous IT service desk calls, and the people delivered. One person had some trouble distinguishing between the IT help desk and an encyclopedic repository of the totality of known information. Here’s how it started out:

User: ”I was wondering if you could help me. Do you know those 55 gallon drums that they hold cooking oil in? The ones they use at takeaways and such?”

Helpdesk: ”Yes… I think so.”

User: ”Well, I was wondering if you could tell me why they chose that number.”

Helpdesk: ”What number?”

User: ”55″

The IT service desk worker explained that he was supposed to solve internet technical support problems, but that didn’t clear things up.

User: ”Well, could you look it up for me and maybe put it on your web page?”

Again, the service desk worker tried to clarify what was and was not part of his job, and pointed out that the internet can be used for finding information.

Helpdesk: ”Have you tried Googling it yourself?”

User: ”Yes. I’m not much use at that sort of thing though … Tell you what; if you happen to come across it could you let me know?”

Helpdesk: ”Erm — Okay. If I find out, I’ll let you know. Bye.”

2. Fight Vague with Vague

Every IT help desk worker has dealt with the vague problems like, “I can’t print.” Sometimes, the service desk worker resists the urge to suggest penmanship classes and fights vague requests with vague solutions, like a technician in this vintage LiveJournal post.

The Request: “Could you please check the Administrative port # 6 on the switch at the DVUC in Miami.”

The Resolution: “Checked Miami DVUC switch, admin port six is still there. Ticket closed, have a good day. -JFO@0813CST.2.19.04″

3. Our Approach to Climate Change Is All Wrong

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, temperature trends, changes in polar ice caps: it turns out we don’t need to worry about any of that stuff. All we need to do is put climate change into the capable hands of IT tech support, as anyone reading thisDatamation thread on funny help desk requests would know:

“Last winter a user submitted a ticket for me to make the snow stop. This occurred in January and I closed the ticket in May. Job done, sometimes it just takes a while.”

All we need to do now is send tech support a request to halt climate change. Voila!

4. But, It Works for My Garbage Can

Modern consumer society offers all sorts of things in spray cans: spray paint, window cleaner, computer virus disinfectant … wait, what? Some people don’t quite grasp what computer viruses are, as related by this respondent to a Smart Data Collective thread on ridiculous IT help desk requests.

User: ”Is there a spray I can get for my computer?”

Helpdesk: ”Excuse me?”

User: ”A spray? One I can squirt the inside of my computer with.”

Helpdesk: ”Do you mean compressed air?”

User: ”Does that kill the viruses?”

Helpdesk: ”… You mean like a disinfectant? For computer viruses?”

User: ”Yes! That would do the trick.”

Helpdesk: ”I’m sorry, sir. There’s nothing like that available. Viruses are just a name we give to malicious software. We use ‘virus’ because it explains how the software behaves.”

User: ”Oh… so no spray then?”

Helpdesk: ”No.”

5. The IT Guy Who Saved Christmas

“Tell me the story about the nice IT worker who made the Christmas lights blink, Grandma.”

Imagine, if you will, a snowy village reminiscent of a charming Bruegel painting, only in the Dominican Republic. It’s Christmas, but one woman’s home is devoid of Christmas cheer, so she does what anyone would do: calls the help desk, as another respondent to the Datamation thread recounts:

“A lady opened a Service Request but provided minimal information as to what the problem was. As part of our agreement, I was required to go on-site and try to help her. I didn’t really know what to expect, but upon arrival to the user’s site the problem became crystal clear. Turns out she had problem ‘installing’ her Christmas tree. The lights were not flashing. It was funny and frustrating at the same time, as I had to travel 45 minutes to get to the site. But in the end, she had the perfect Christmas tree.”

And that’s how the IT guy saved Christmas.

Samanage can’t give your IT service desk professionals superpowers, but it does give them what they need for a responsive, effective IT help desk, powerful IT asset management, and IT contract management that keeps you on top of every subscription and software license. You can even try out Samanage for free. Give your IT service desk team the tools they need to take care of all the usual requests, and the unusual ones too.

It was a time when prehistoric creatures roamed the earth, and humans inexplicably pondered the identity of the person who let the dogs out.

At that time, however, you were more likely to hear terms like Application Service Provider (ASP), Application Infrastructure Provider (AIP), and Internet Business Service (IBS) than SaaS. Eventually, the Software & Information Industry Association collected all these terms under the umbrella term SaaS. SaaS was defined as an app or software service that was deployed from a centralized data center across a network, and that was accessed and used on a subscription basis.

You Have Been Using SaaS for Years Now

Not all SaaS products are used for business, and not all charge money for subscriptions. Your Gmail account (or your old Hotmail account), Google Docs, the Wunderlist organizing tool, and mathematical tools like percentagecalculator.net are all examples of SaaS products. Obviously, some are more powerful than others, and many consumer and business SaaS tools offer both free and premium versions. But the bottom line is that most of us use SaaS all day long, at home and at work, whether we realize it or not. The main reason people use SaaS tools for work, personal life, and school is that they’re convenient, usually free or cheap, and keep us from having to install software and filling up our hard drives.

Advantages of SaaS

In addition to the advantages of SaaS listed above, businesses are turning to SaaS products more frequently because of the agility of these products. Even the United States government — not exactly an icon of nimble agility — is embracing SaaS. As Vicky White, CIO of the US Department of Energy Fermilab, stated, SaaS providers build code in an “agile, modern way,” constantly providing new features and updates that are installed automatically. The latest SaaS products are paying more attention to user interfaces, so that new users don’t have to spend much time climbing a learning curve. They’re also increasingly providing interfaces that are simple, intuitive, and yes, fun to use.

Trends in SaaS

The SaaS train continues to accelerate, because SaaS makes sense for an increasing number of functions.

The SaaS train is only gaining speed as we settle into the second decade of the 21st century. According to a 2012 Gartner survey of 556 organizations in 10 countries covering North America, South America, Europe, and the Asia / Pacific region, 71% of corporations started using SaaS products in the previous three years. More than three-quarters of those companies plan to increase SaaS spending in 2013. More than 80% of respondents in the Asia / Pacific region and Brazil plan to increase spending on SaaS through 2014. Gartner estimated that by 2015, SaaS will be a $21 billion market. In North America and Europe, the biggest drivers for SaaS adoption are replacement of aging legacy applications.

Whether you know it or not, if you go online, SaaS is all around you. Think about it: when was the last time you downloaded a major software package for use locally on your computer — let alone installed software using a CD? When today’s computer user wants to be able to do something software-related, they generally look online for a free app or for a website that does what they need, whether that’s converting British pounds to Australian dollars, or turning a Word document into a PDF document.

In a Software as a Service world, doesn’t it make sense that your business’s IT service desk software should be run from the cloud, too? Your IT professionals have better things to do than install help desk software on servers and then add patches and upgrades as they’re released. At Samanage, we offer state-of-the-art SaaS service desk software that your IT service desk can start using today, putting an end to weeks-long deployments and lengthy service outages during upgrades. Because it’s run from the cloud, new features and upgrades are provided frequently and automatically, so everyone using the software always has the same, most recent version.

Yes, SaaS is the future of business computing, but with many providers, like Samanage, SaaS is reality right now, too.

Photo Credits: Anusorn P Nachol / freedigitalphotos.net, sritangphoto / freedigitalphotos.net

Let’s just say that penalties for expired software licenses can be severe.

Here are 5 events that can result in major problems if you don’t have a good IT contract management policy in place.

1. Someone Quits

Maybe your company is lucky enough to have someone who’s taken on the task of tracking IT contracts, including on-site software licenses and cloud service subscriptions. What happens when he or she quits? Unless you have someone ready and willing to take over the moment the employee is gone, it’s all too easy to let it slide for a week or two, and suddenly you realize something has expired because you can’t access your cloud data. Worse, if the person who tracked those items left under less-than-friendly circumstances, it wouldn’t be that hard to “conveniently” delete a spreadsheet that was used for keeping track of IT contracts.

2. Your Company Moves to New Offices

Moving from one cubicle to another on the same floor can be an ordeal. When an entire department or an entire company moves to another location, the disruption can be severe, and things can get lost. Surprisingly, many companies still track IT contracts using folders full of paper. If one of those folders — or even a page in one of those folders — were to disappear during the move, the next time someone thinks about an expired license or subscription could be the day he receives a notice of the lapse.

3. Multiple People Track IT Contracts with No Coordination

Your company may have a person in each department with responsibility for tracking software specific to that group. But there’s also software used by everyone in the company, and who tracks that? Furthermore, if two departments use the same software for different purposes, each department could easily think that the other department is tracking it. With SaaS IT contract management, people in every department can check on contracts, but everything’s centralized to help make sure no license or subscription gets lost in the shuffle.

4. There are Simply Too Many IT Contracts to Deal With

In a tiny, five-person start-up, it’s easy enough for one person to keep track of IT contracts. The problem is that over the years, the company grows and that person takes on a progressively larger task, often continuing to use rudimentary tracking tools like spreadsheets or hard copies. It doesn’t take long for the number of IT contracts and software licenses to overwhelm even a dedicated worker. By the time you have a dozen or so employees, it’s time to organize and centralize IT contract management with tools that make it more efficient.

5. There’s a Disaster of Some Sort

Those accidentally-shredded software licenses can be used to make a papier-maché dunce cap for whoever decided to “clean up” the file cabinet.

Maybe your company is lucky enough to have someone with a great system for tracking software licenses and subscriptions. Everything is organized and you can always reach this person with questions about licenses and subscriptions. It’s all perfect until that person’s computer crashes and there’s no back-up of the data. Or until someone accidentally shreds the folder full of IT contract documentation. Floods and fires can wipe out local hardware and storage media, taking out the original data and back-ups at the same time. Think about how much better it is to track IT contracts and software licenses using cloud software that doesn’t care if someone’s hard disk crashes and that won’t lose data if local hardware is wiped out.

The solution to your contract management woes is a SaaS IT contract management system that alerts the right people when licenses are set to expire or subscriptions are about to end. The people who need the information have it, and it’s still there if someone quits, or if a disaster ruins on-premises hardware. At Samanage our comprehensive service desk and IT asset management software includes powerful IT contract management features that help ensure you’ll never have to deal with a lapsed subscription or expired software license.

Photo Credits: Tim Beach / freedigitalphotos.net, Tferr

“We know where all of our laptops and PCs are at any time.” – Darrel Handgraaf, CIO, Center for Creative Leadership

Background

The Center for Creative Leadership is an executive education facility in Colorado that provides training for executive leaders from all over the world. Since 1970, approximately 470,000 business leaders have graduated from a Center for Creative Leadership program. The Center helps clients worldwide develop their capacity to increase achievements by thinking and taking action beyond what they consider business as usual. CCL is headquartered in Greensboro, NC with campuses in San Diego, Colorado Springs, Brussels, and Singapore and with offices in South Africa, Ethiopia, India, China, and Russia.

Before turning to Samanage, the Center for Creative Leadership was using spreadsheets to track and manage IT assets located around the world, particularly laptops and PCs. This was an inadequate solution, according to the Center’s CIO, Darrel Handgraaf, who described the spreadsheet solution as “Difficult to update and the spreadsheet offered no insight into the software or OS that was loaded on the laptops and PCs in inventory.”

Challenges

The Center for Creative Leadership needed an accurate global inventory of their laptops and PCs, along with information about the software and operating systems installed on them. Their system needed to be easy to update from any global location, so going with cloud-based software was a natural fit. The Center chose Samanage, which is run from the cloud and has powerful IT asset management features.

Solution

The Center for Creative Leadership selected Samanage as their asset management solution for three main reasons, according to Handgraaf:

• Features and price

• Ease of implementation and ease of access from around the globe

• Overall, very quick and easy to use

A global roll-out of on-site software would have been a logistical headache, and would have committed the Center to a future of synchronizing updates to make sure all locations were using the same software. But with Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions like Samanage, everyone is operating in the cloud and everyone has the latest software at all times.

Benefits

To Handgraaf, the benefits were simple, but exactly what they needed: “We know where all of our laptops and PCs are at any time.”

Furthermore, Samanage allowed the Center for Creative Leadership to plan laptop purchases better when older machines approached the end of their life cycles. The Center needs “to have an accurate inventory around the globe with easy updates from any of our global locations,” and that is exactly what Samanage provided.

In a development that will have a major impact on the development of ITIL and its position as a standard in IT organizations around the world, Capita has secured the rights to ITIL.  The ongoing position of ITIL as the preeminent set of practices for IT Management will now surely be questioned by many.

Created in the 1980s and enhanced over the years under the guidance of the UK Office of Government Commerce with substantial input from the international IT community, ITIL has been adopted with varying levels of success by thousands of organizations around the world.  ITIL has many fierce supporters and many equally passionate detractors.  Its success has spawned an industry of training, accreditation and consulting companies — naturally, all of which are strong proponents.  Many software vendors claim “ITIL Compliance” or “ITIL Readiness” in their capabilities and marketing.

Some of the criticism includes discussion around affordability by small to mid-size organizations and the resulting practicality of full adoption.  Writing for The ITSM Portal and addressing the development of ITIL v3, Jan van Bon summarized many of the concerns as follows, “The problem was that the project – as usual – was caught by the big vendors, and their aim is maximizing the complexity instead of giving away solutions. After all, their business models are not served by a real DIY best practice solution.”

It is only natural that these concerns will be amplified now that ITIL belongs to a “big vendor” and the UK government expects a healthy return on its 23 year “investment.”  To quote The Telegraph, this is “a unique deal that could generate £500m for the Treasury over 10 years.”

Stephen Mann, a leading analyst at Forrester, has long been both supporter and critic of ITIL.  In fact, Stephen may be the most productive critic, using his platform to great effect.  Here is what Stephen said in response to the Capita announcement:

“…despite what people think of it from an adopter-success-perspective, ITIL is by far the most successful (in terms of brand awareness and adoption) ITSM framework, methodology, or standard and that I couldn’t see it losing that position as more people opt-in than opt-out of the ITIL club.

However, I was rather short-sighted not to consider the potential for fallout dependent on who won the ITIL auction.”

See here for Stephen’s full comments, concerns and the potential positives that could could be derived from this arrangement.

At Samanage we believe that ITIL has a definite role to play.  We trust that Capita will truly act in the best interest of the thousands of IT service organizations and professionals around the world who have adopted ITIL.  Samanage will continue to provide the necessary support to allow our customers to easily benefit from ITIL, regardless of their level of adoption.

This is an important development and one that we will be following closely!

While you were busy removing the keys from your boss’s keyboard and replacing them to spell “U MAD BRO?” the rest of the world was also busy getting their April Fool on. Here are 5 of the funniest pranks from around the web, in no particular order.

1. Turning their Online World Upside Down

“On the bright side, my ankles are less swollen when I work in this position.”

Code sharing site GitHub.com conveniently provided code that could be placed into a co-worker’s Custom.css file. These CSS definitions would automatically be applied to every website visited as well as their developer tools, turning the screen images upside down and blurring them briefly every 30 seconds.

2. Making Texting a Full Body Experience

Does your company have a BYOD policy? If so, your workforce may have favorite apps that help them get things done faster. SwiftKey is a popular app for texting that uses predictive text to cut down on typing time and effort. For April Fools Day, SwiftKey introduced SwiftKey Tilt, “a revolutionary new input method which transforms the everyday activity of typing into a whole-body, immersive experience.” Rather than typing the old fashioned way, with fingers, you could “rock, wiggle or shimmy your smartphone to insert words in a truly innovative way.” They even provided a helpful (and hilarious) video demo.

3. Neustar: Improving Websites One Meow at a Time

Everyone knows all the old SEO tropes like “keywords,” “alt tags,” and “quality content.” But what really gets people to visit your website is cats. And since cat pictures are so rare and hard to find online, communications and business consultants at Neustaroffered to add cats to your website so that you could take advantage of amazing “statistics” like these:

• In product videos, including a kitten playing with a ping pong ball will increase viewership 93%. And two kittens? 560%.
• Cats in banner ads lift response 3,000%.
• Customers will spend an average of $275 more on an online clothing purchase if a cat is wearing it.
• Simply mentioning the word “cats” somewhere on your site guarantees you the top position in Google search results.

Don’t you feel silly wasting all that time on content development?

4. “Wheel of Fortune” Made This One Inevitable

“Without vowels, every word looks like profanity.”

Buying a vowel has long been a time-tested method for “Wheel” players to make sense of the puzzles they were trying to solve. In that vein, Twitter announced on April 1 that including vowels in Tweets qualified as a premium service, and that they were going to start charging for them:

“Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium “Twitter” service which also includes vowels.”

It only makes sense in a world where you have to pay a “convenience fee” for the “convenience” of printing out tickets you bought online using paper and ink from your own printer.

5. When the Aliens Arrive, You’ll Be Ready

Sure, you can video chat with your niece in Portland, or talk to your Canadian grandparent for free, but is that really enough? Skype doesn’t think so. That’s why on April 1 they announced Skype into Space, a service that allows earth-to-outer-space calls plus amazing features like “extreme gravitational resilience” for when pesky black holes threaten to interfere with your important conversation about “Harlem Shake” videos. They even have “experimental linguists” on standby to decipher communications from alien life forms, making “universal” communication live up to its name.

From announcing that the company network will be “closed for cleaning” to replacing beloved co-workers’ screen savers with the Blue Screen of Death, technologically-savvy workers are the fuel that keeps the world’s April Fools prank engine running smoothly, year after year. Got any great April Fools stories of your own? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Photo Credits: sixninepixels / freedigitalphotos.net, sixninepixels / freedigitalphotos.net

“Who knew that a poorly-executed appletini could be the downfall of an entire relationship…”

When software as a service (SaaS) first started to reach large numbers of users, there were definitely some customer satisfaction hiccups along the way. However, as SaaS has matured, customer satisfaction has risen. In many cases, customer satisfaction with SaaS has surpassed satisfaction with on-site legacy applications. This makes sense, because SaaS offers great pricing, easy implementation, and automatic upgrades without making on-site servers do any heavy lifting. SaaS IT service management (ITSM) is no exception to this trend. Here are some salient points about customer satisfaction with SaaS today.

The “Satisfied to Dissatisfied” Ratio

The Forrester SaaS ITSM Tool Market Overview found that SaaS has a better “satisfied to dissatisfied” ratio than other software delivery models: “While all other models maintain an about 70:30 satisfied / dissatisfied ratio or worse, SaaS is an impressive 88:12. We believe it’s a combination of the benefits above.” Those benefits are ease of use, instant availability, and pay-per-use delivery, and they contrast clearly with older, on-site software delivery models which are perceived as “clunky” and can take months to roll out after major up-front capital investment.

Customer Service: When It’s Good, It’s Very Very Good

Google Apps is one example of SaaS delivery that has prioritized a good customer experience. Whenever a support case is closed, Google Apps asks for feedback and has found that 80% of customers overall and 90% of large business customers report satisfaction with their support experiences. The company has made a satisfaction rating of 95% their goal. Early SaaS offerings sometimes fell short in customer service, but it now appears that SaaS providers have learned their lessons and are increasingly providing the superior customer support their clients demand.

Cost Reduction a Key to Customer Satisfaction with SaaS

NetSuite did their own survey of customer satisfaction and found that 90% of customers rated satisfaction as four or five out of a possible five (satisfied or very satisfied). When asked what the basis of their satisfaction was, one key factor was SaaS’s ability to drive cost reduction. Low up-front cost is one of the SaaS model’s strongest points. According to the NetSuite’s study, “Because the application has been validated by users as an effective tool in cost reduction, deployment footprints at existing customers are more likely to increase rather than decrease.”

“A ping pong ball for 70% off? Sign me up immediately!”

Customer Satisfaction Based on Getting the Job Done

As with on-site software, SaaS has to do the job for which it was purchased. Otherwise what’s the point? Salesforce has experienced tremendous success because business executives have found that the software is helping their businesses grow. Businesses using Salesforce have reported ”34 percent increase in revenue growth, 17 percent increase in profit margin improvement, and a 25 percent increase in overall customer satisfaction.” This is accompanied by a decrease of nearly one-quarter in customer service and support costs.

Customer Satisfaction and Innovation

Human Resources management software provider WorkDay reports customer satisfaction levels of 99%. That level of satisfaction is not as easy for on-premises vendors to reach due to long rollout times, infrequent updates, and the hassles of running software on-site. WorkDay attributes customer satisfaction to high innovation levels, which are becoming a hallmark of great SaaS delivery. With SaaS, upgrades are automatically implemented, and they’re generally done multiple times per year, contrasted with on-site upgrades that typically only occur every couple of years. SaaS simply allows greater and faster innovation.

With your IT service management program, customer satisfaction is as critical as your IT infrastructure itself. If ITSM doesn’t do its job, productivity and morale plummet. Today, we’re seeing a fundamental shift within the ITSM market to the cloud for the reasons listed above and more.

Samanage provides cloud service desk software with a full suite of IT asset management tools included. Innovations include mobile apps and end-user perks like self-service portals that allow problems to be solved as quickly as possible. If it’s time for your on-site ITSM program to step up to the next level, maybe it’s time to move it to the cloud and experience the many benefits the SaaS model has to offer.

Read also:
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 1: Saving Money
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 2: Saving Time
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 3: Easy to Support
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 4: ITIL Expandability

Photo Credits: photostock / freedigitalphotos.net, Danilo Rizzuti / freedigitalphotos.net

“We are more than pleased with the service Samanage provides. The product is solid, and the support team at Samanage has always been a pleasure to work with.”

Background

Santa Clara University School of Law was founded in 1911, and is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, one of the world’s most dynamic business centers. The school needed a better way to track their IT assets. Before using Samanage, Santa Clara Law had been using Excel spreadsheets for asset tracking, which was cumbersome and prone to inaccuracies.

What their Excel-based method lacked that they needed most was real-time information on IT assets. Previously, if an asset was moved and IT wasn’t notified, the spreadsheets wouldn’t get updated properly, and this led to assets being difficult to find. A more robust, real-time IT asset management solution was needed to prevent such problems.

Challenges

The challenge sounded simple: find an IT asset management system that would give Santa Clara Law an accurate and up-to-the-minute depiction of where assets were located throughout the school.

“While some of the on-site products had a lot to offer, cost and lack of resources was a large issue. While we are a subset of Central IT in our organization, we needed a straight-forward solution that we could deploy to service our user base,” said Andrew Corrales, field support specialist.

Solution

“We chose Samanage because we had limited resources, and wanted a SaaS solution that would be simple to implement and provide us with the real-time asset data we needed,” said Corrales, who lauded Samanage’s implementation process as “quick and painless.”

“We had more trouble trying to track down users with laptops than deploying the Samanage agent,” he said. Real time asset information is critical to day-to-day support of Santa Clara Law’s IT assets. Samanage allows the school to build an asset history by using incident reporting, and it also allows them to manage asset lifecycles efficiently by easily creating service / maintenance contracts.

Benefits

Time that had been spent managing an Excel inventory spreadsheet could now be put to more constructive purposes that would actually improve the user experience in the school. The school soon had the opportunity to put Samanage to the test during its PC replacement (PCR) program: “During the Fall, the university undergoes PCR, where after designated desktops/laptops reach their warranty expiration after 4 years, those assets are cycled out. Using Samanage, we are able to pull a list of these assets well in advance, streamlining the process of identifying users and backing up their data before their machine is replaced.”

Real time asset management capability was the primary benefit Samanage brought to Santa Clara Law. “In the past, we were able to maintain a rough list of assets throughout the Law School, however, a good amount of time would be spent having to verify these assets. Samanage enables our group to quickly view and update asset information in an intuitive and efficient manner,” said Corrales.

Wait! Was my fantasy football spreadsheet on that machine?

Furthermore, with good IT asset management, accountability is easier to establish if an asset is misused, lost, or forgotten. Every aspect of the life cycle of an IT asset presents opportunities for savings, and a great IT asset management program lets you take full advantage of these. Additionally, IT asset management can protect your company in the event of problems. Here are five ways it can do that.

1. IT Asset Management Protects Against Purchasing Unnecessary Software Licenses

Unused software is a serious drain on IT budgets, costing organizations an average of over $400 per PC. On average, there are 2.5 unused software applications per employee workstation, which represents a huge inefficiency. Those software licenses cost money whether the application is used or not, so why would you want to pay for software licenses on software that isn’t used? Some organizations may reason that paying for the occasional unused software license is better than paying a big fat fine if a software audit reveals a violation, but good IT asset management itself can help you with those harrowing software audits.

2. IT Asset Management Protects Your Company if There is a Software Audit

Software audits are more common now than they used to be since on-premises providers have discovered them as a revenue source. Software licenses are backed by both vendor contracts and copyright law, so if you fail a software audit, you risk both civil and criminal penalties. If your business inadvertently pirates software by not properly licensing it, fines of up to $150,000 per illegal copy can apply. Plus, your company will be on the hook for legal fees in dealing with such a fiasco. IT asset management lets you know at any time what software is installed on which devices, and it can warn you when software licenses are about to expire so you can deal with them and have the best kind of software audit: the kind that’s boring.

3. IT Asset Management Ensures Sensitive Data Is Removed Before Asset Disposal

Whether your organization recycles IT hardware, resells it, or donates it to charity, it needs to be scrubbed of any sensitive data before disposal. Your IT asset management program shows you, at the end of an asset’s life cycle, exactly what software and data are present so that you can remove anything sensitive before the asset goes out the door. Ever see the meme of the “medical alert” bracelet engraved with “Delete My Browser History”? Great IT asset management reminds you that every asset leaving your organization is metaphorically accessorized with something similar.

4. IT Asset Management Helps Protect Against Security Violations

Just tell to the judge the laptop was never out of your sight until the end of the trade convention, at the casino. He’ll probably be very understanding.

If your organization has contracts with various government entities, or if it is bound by security regulations like HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley, a security violation can cause major problems. Your IT asset management program shows which assets can be used with which data, where the hardware is located, and who it is assigned to. This helps protect your company against potentially disastrous security violations.

5. IT Asset Management Protects You in the Event of a Disaster

You need to know which IT assets are (or need to be) connected to redundant power systems in the event of a disaster. If your organization is the victim of a fire, flood, or other disaster, restoring the IT infrastructure depends on knowing which assets were damaged and what was on them. One of the great advantages of SaaS IT asset management software is that even if you lose hardware in a disaster, asset information is still available 24/7, so you can start putting things back together again.

Never has IT asset management been as important as it is now. With massive interconnectivity, portability of more devices than ever, and the potentially dire consequences of a security or physical disaster, having readily-available information on every IT asset and the software it contains is essential. At Samanage, we provide SaaS IT asset management and service desk software that’s powerful, flexible, and packed with features that make IT asset management more convenient. Your organization can’t afford not to have a strong IT asset management program in today’s business environment.

Photo Credits: Andrew Fresh, Monroedb1

“This is the worst game of ‘Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes’ ever.”

Some service desk customers are appreciative and not afraid to celebrate a successful problem resolution, like this onedescribed by redditor lotrfan18:

Me calling a customer at 10 am to see if their problem is fixed
Me: Hi! This is the Help Desk. We’re just calling to see if your issue has been resolved.
Customer: Yeah yeah….it’s fine….time for some shots…. hang up

And there is the occasional end-user with a sense of humor that can make a call less of a drag, as this tale illustrates:

We have one customer that have named all of their computers after Star Wars charcters. I was doing a Health Check on their systems as they were having issues with all of their machines and got reports from each machine — the server was Yoda and the workstations were Luke, Leia, Han etc.

One of our other customers open all their emails to us with ‘Help me Imperial Alliance you are my only hope’ and the emails continue along those lines. Always enjoy getting emails from them!

Then again, if you’re unable to see the humor in many service desk situations, you’re probably in for soul-crushing death march of a career. On that note, here are 5 videos illustrating the plight of the service desk worker in various situations. Sure, they’re reenactments and prank calls, but chances are you’ll relate to all of them in some way.

1. Early Prank Call to a Service Desk from the 1990s (Warning: Foul Language)

Ever had a help desk call that started out in the plane of reality but very quickly turned into something even the darkest recesses of your imagination never produced?

2. Judge Judy Calls Tech Support

We’ve all been there. Somebody calls in, asks you some questions, you answer them, and you quickly discover that all of your answers are wrong. Sure, they may be “right” in the sense that they’re truthful and accurate, but to your caller, you’re wrong. So wrong. About everything.

3. Apple iPhone 4 Support Call (Supposedly)

Is this call real or fake? Whatever. It’s very entertaining either way. Happy Halloween. I love you.

4. The IT Job Interview: A Skit

Obviously this is a comedy sketch, but this situation has probably crossed your mind — whether you’re the one being interviewed or the one hiring.

5. The One Thing You’re Not Allowed to Say

Finally, here’s the one piece of advice that, if everyone followed it, would make your job so much easier. Unfortunately, you’re probably not allowed to say it to help desk callers. But you’ve probably thought it at least a dozen times in the past 24 hours.

Got any “Top 5″ tales of woe (or humor) you’ve experienced? Feel free to share them in the comments section.

Photo Credits: David Dominici Castillo / freedigitalphotos.net

How quickly can your IT service management respond to challenges?

ITIL expandability is one of the key reasons that a major shift toward software as a service (SaaS) is happening in the IT service management (ITSM) market. Unlike on-premise solutions, which require lengthy and complex roll-outs, SaaS-based ITSM can be implemented quickly, without buying servers, and is priced on a per-user subscription basis. This keeps up-front costs to a minimum, something that just isn’t the case with on-site solutions.

If it’s time to implement or upgrade your company’s ITSM system, here are some points to consider as you evaluate potential software providers.

“Enterprise Level” Isn’t Only About Size

Your business could be considered “enterprise level” based on number of employees or on revenues, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you require an enterprise-level ITSM solution. The level of ITSM maturity you require is based on your company’s technology needs and the technology needs of the employees going about their daily work.

Before choosing your software vendor, define the ITSM process you need your new ITSM software to support (regardless of whether you choose on-premise or SaaS). If you only require basic incident management and possibly change management, choosing the SaaS solution may have many benefits for your company, including cost savings, better support, and a wider range of tools. SaaS apps are always “the latest” while legacy offerings quickly become out of date.

A Per-Seat Subscription Can Get You Multiple ITIL Processes

With SaaS IT service management, the simplicity of pricing is considered a big advantage by many businesses. With some ITSM solutions, a per-seat subscription will cover access to a broad range of capabilities across many ITIL processes. Non-SaaS processes require multiple licenses across numerous ITSM modules or processes. The advantage to the SaaS model is that a company can incrementally expand its ITIL framework without incurring additional costs (except for the cost for additional user seats if they become necessary).

SaaS Allows You to Scale Up or Down Quickly and Easily

With SaaS software, deployment is measured on a clock, not a calendar.

Suppose your IT department starts using SaaS service desk software, and everyone likes it so much the company decides to use it in other contexts, such as building management or HR management. There is no waiting for software to be installed on other servers, because the software is run from the cloud. Implementation is a matter of purchasing the required number of user subscriptions, and the software can be rolled out right away. By contrast, if your needs decrease, you’re not stuck with software licenses you paid for but are no longer using, because you simply cancel the user accounts you no longer need.

Rollout and Upgrades Are Not Huge Events with SaaS

On-premises deployment can be time-consuming, and upgrade cycles for these software products usually take 18 months to two years. By contrast, with SaaS, deployment is very rapid because there is no client to install and no local hardware to support. Also, with SaaS IT service management, automatic upgrades generally take place two to four times per year, giving users access to the latest features much more quickly than they would be available for on-premises upgrades.

“Major Shift” in the ITSM Market

Writing in his Forrester blog, Stephen Mann lays out some very important data concerning user satisfaction: “Although Forrester hears frequent complaints about ITSM tools, the data suggests that satisfaction is higher than dissatisfaction. However, SaaS customers are far more satisfied. While all other models maintain an about 70:30 satisfied/dissatisfied ratio or worse, SaaS is an impressive 88:12.” Ease of use, quick deployment, and the user subscription model are benefits that are driving the shift in the ITSM market to SaaS service management.

Samanage is one of the drivers of this shift, offering SaaS IT service management software that’s customizable, flexible, and powerful, with terrific features that make your IT service desk work more efficiently and effectively. If your legacy ITSM system is clunky and out of date, maybe your company should be part of the shift to the cloud too.

Read also:
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 1: Saving Money
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 2: Saving Time
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 3: Easy to Support

Photo Credits: David Merrett, cooldesign / freedigitalphotos.net

First, however, here is some advice on choosing to auto-renew versus reviewing / renewing services manually each year.

“Renew manually or auto-renew? Also, if it’s warm enough to push up my sleeves, why am I wearing this huge, wooly scarf?”

What’s The Difference Between Manual and Auto-Renewal?

Many services today, including those you use in your personal life (such as insurance) offer auto-renewal so that you avoid lapses in coverage. With auto-renewal, your service is automatically renewed on a certain date without your having to do anything. It’s a big convenience for those who don’t plan to shop around for services each year.

For those who do compare prices every year, however, auto-renewal can be a hassle. These people would rather look over their options before committing to another year’s service, and so may choose to opt out of auto-renewal.

Auto-Renewal Advantages and Disadvantages

With auto-renewal, you provide your payment and other pertinent information once and the product will be billed again at a fixed date in the future. Generally, you can set up auto-payment to go with auto-renewal to avoid lapses in service. Auto-renewal is convenient, particularly if you’re not good at keeping up with renewal dates.

On the other hand, if you are signed up for auto-renewal but intend to switch providers, you have to be certain to do so before the auto-renew cycle is up, or you could end up paying for services from two providers. Some customers find that after the first year of service, which was often priced at a “teaser” rate, the cost of the service goes up, so beware that you could be surprised by a higher bill the second time around.

Manual Renewal Advantages and Disadvantages

Those who want absolute control over their service contracts may prefer manual renewal. They may want to evaluate the service and make an informed decision as to whether or not to renew. Some people may want to shop around for service providers each year in order to find services at lower prices and avoid being locked into an automatically-renewing subscription (particularly if second year costs are higher).

Manual renewal, however, brings an increased chance for mistakes, and if you don’t either renew a contract or find another provider in time, you could find yourself with a lapse of service that must be taken care of before you can continue business as usual. Manual renewal requires more care and attention than auto-renewal.

“I prefer building my own service contract from scratch. Only way to make sure it’s done right.”

Your IT Asset Management Software Can Help with Auto or Manual Renewal

Some IT asset management software brands have IT contract management capabilities that can alert you to upcoming contract expirations. This capability can be very useful whether you have signed up for auto-renewal or not. If your auto-renew contract is coming up, you can be ready for the charge, or if your manually-renewed contract is coming up, you can exercise your options as far as comparing prices and choosing next year’s provider before service lapses.

At Samanage, we offer IT asset management software that can be easily used to manage IT contracts so that you don’t auto-renew without warning, and so that manually-renewed contracts are known in advance and you don’t risk going without a service. Samanage helps you organize software licenses and IT contracts, align IT contracts and software licenses with relevant IT assets, know when contracts are coming up for renewal, and easily keep track of all the vendors with which you do business. You need never experience a service lapse or auto-renew without warning again.

Photo Credits: imagerymajestic / freedigitalphotos.net, marin / freedigitalphotos.net

To be fair, there are some software solutions where on-premise installation is the right choice. However, increasing numbers of businesses are enjoying the benefits of software as a service (SaaS) applications, including SaaS service desks. Yet some myths remain about cloud help desk services, so allow us to get out our debunkifier and bust them.

We love it when we get to use the debunkifier.

1. SaaS Service Desk Software Isn’t Secure

Bzzt! Wrong! In fact, SaaS service desks can be run and maintained with security levels stronger than what would be cost effective for many running on-site solutions. Cloud providers offer physical security, application security, network protection, and disaster recovery that are often far more stringent than what’s used in on-site installations. Furthermore, customers always receive the latest security updates automatically, since they’re built into SaaS subscription costs. Any cloud service desk provider that didn’t make this a top priority wouldn’t last long.

2. On-Premise Software Has More and Better Features

If you’re running on-premise software, to ensure your applications always have the latest features, you have to commit to getting every last patch, security upgrade, and software upgrade installed as soon as it’s available. SaaS upgrades are often based on feedback from multiple companies which use the software and they take place automatically. In reality, SaaS shortens the development cycle, delivering upgrades without hassle.

3. You Lose Control of Your Data with SaaS

Oh, please. If you have any question as to whether your SaaS contract explicitly states that you, the customer, own all the data, ask the provider. SaaS providers have specific processes to export data and let clients take that data with them if they terminate the SaaS contract. Furthermore, that data is available to you 24/7, wherever you happen to have an internet connection.

4. SaaS Service Desk Applications Aren’t Reliable

Trusted SaaS providers offer 99.5% uptime guarantees for their services, making cloud service desk solutions more reliable than on-site software. Enterprise outages typically last far longer than the rare SaaS outage, cost more, and drain precious IT resources while being addressed.

5. SaaS Service Desks Aren’t Cost-Effective in the Long Run

Gains from SaaS solutions include increased productivity and decreased IT burden. With on-site software, you’re paying fees for initial licensing, upgrades, training, and tech support. And when on-site servers crash, your IT team is pulled off other tasks to deal with the problem.

6. SaaS Service Desks Are Only for Small Businesses and Don’t Scale Well

Nope. Cloud-based solutions have been around long enough that they’re sometimes even more scalable than on-site solutions. Sure, small businesses benefit from the economies of scale they enjoy from SaaS solutions, but there has been steady growth in enterprise-level adoption of cloud solutions. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2016, enterprise adoption of SaaS services will account for the majority of SaaS revenue.

7. SaaS Is a Fad

And don’t tell us you have no understanding of the concept of “fads.”

ThinkStrategies has been studying SaaS customer satisfaction for several years now, and they have found that more than 90% of SaaS users are satisfied with this software model and plan to not only renew subscriptions, but expand their use of SaaS products. SaaS is becoming entrenched in business today, no question.

8. SaaS Help Desk Software is a “Skinnier” Version of Real Help Desk Software

SaaS service desk applications have, in some cases, succeeded because of their ease of deployment, but customers don’t believe they are sacrificing functionality by shifting to SaaS services. Big companies, including Salesforce, GE, and Flextronics International have had company-wide SaaS deployments, so clearly they have no problem believing the cloud can meet their needs.

9. SaaS Service Desk Software Can’t Be Customized

SaaS solutions do not have to be used “off the rack.” Top cloud service desk solutions offer extensive customization options. And because SaaS applications evolve more quickly than on-premise software, functionality becomes more sophisticated over time, with APIs clients can build on to customize to their unique needs. By contrast, customization of on-premise solutions can be very expensive.

10. SaaS Service Desk Software Doesn’t Play Nice With Others

In fact, most SaaS service desk solutions can integrate into just about any infrastructure. Many SaaS providers make it a priority to create solutions that plug into customers’ existing IT environments seamlessly. A surprising number of SaaS solutions can be integrated easily with both on-premise systems and other SaaS applications.

If you’re ready to take advantage of all that SaaS service desk solutions offer, check out Samanage. Samanage has a robust API that can be easily integrated with on-premise systems and other SaaS applications, like Salesforce, allowing Salesforce users to track IT assets from an interface they’re already comfortable with. And if you’re implementing a service desk for the first time, you’ll be amazed at how easy Samanage is to deploy and how well you can customize it to your particular IT needs.

Photo Credits: Zigazou76, Nory Xanthus

According to a report by Computer Economics, in the U.S. and Canada, the median corporate IT ecosystem has over 1,500 users, and the IT service desk handles a median of 60 help tickets per day. Large organizations can easily face 130 help tickets per day.

So how long does it take to resolve these tickets? Well, that varies based on urgency of the problem, staffing levels, and service desk competency. But here are some averages…

“The entire graphics department needs the latest Adobe Creative Suite delivered and installed by Tuesday? Let me stop laughing so I can laugh even harder.”

Urgent and High-Priority Problems

Urgent and high priority problems are defined as:

• the ones that impact a high percentage of users
• the ones that may indicate security breaches
• the ones that could compromise health and safety (depending on the industry)

Target times for resolving these problems generally range from two hours to 2.5 days. The occasional urgent problem (such as everyone’s password somehow getting reset) could be tackled quickly with SaaS service desk software that allows you to give end users a way to fix the problem themselves via self-service portal rather than submitting help desk tickets for it.

Medium and Low-Priority Problems

Medium and low-priority problems generally carry target resolution times of one day to six days, although some low-priority problems (which are often actually “nice to have features”) may be targeted for resolution “when we get around to it.” Some lower-priority fixes, such as ordering new software, can be taken care of by end users themselves if they have access to a service catalog and self-service portal. Without these features, time to resolution is greater, because service desk workers will want to take care of higher-priority or emergency problems before dealing with software ordering and the like.

IT Service Desk Staffing Levels

The percentage of IT workers assigned to the IT service desk dropped during the 2008 to 2010 recession, and even today, asking for and getting more IT service desk workers is a challenge for many IT managers. While advances in IT service desk software, including a shift to SaaS service desk software, have improved service desk efficiency, more businesses are demanding support for more devices than ever, so resources are still strained in many companies. This is yet another reason more IT departments are pushing for a shift to SaaS service desk software.

Keeping Statistics from Giving Inaccurate Impressions

“Next up, we’ll explore the magic of help desk resolution statistics. At no time will my hands leave my arms.”

Help desk metrics aren’t going away, but there are ways that IT departments can tailor their reporting and metric records to paint a truer picture of resolution times. For example, if resolution times are based on a 24/7/365 clock, metrics can easily become skewed in organizations where the service desk is only open during normal business hours. For example, solutions to problems with a one-day resolution target can be skewed if the help tickets come in late Friday afternoon and the help desk is closed over the weekend. Creating separate reports for problems that come in outside of regular business hours can keep these incidents from skewing overall resolution times unfavorably.

Your SaaS Service Desk Software and Resolution Times

Fact: if your company doesn’t have good IT service desk software, problem resolution times suffer. Samanage offers SaaS service desk software that obviates the need for an on-site server (along with its care and maintenance) and that provides the tools that IT service desk professionals need to work as efficiently as possible. Knowledge base tools allow solutions to be saved for quick reference on future similar problems, and self-service portal and service catalog capability let end users solve many basic IT problems without the involvement of service desk workers. If you’re under pressure from the executive suite to hold down resolution times and costs, then top-notch SaaS service desk software like Samanage is your key to succeeding.

Photo Credits: DTL, Justin Russell

Everything sounded better in psychedelic colors.

Call centers benefited from two other inventions of the era: touch-tone dialing and toll-free phone numbers. Touch-tone dialing allowed computers to “understand” tones that users created by pressing keys on their touch-tone phones, allowing for greater automation of the service desk and eventually the (sometimes frustrating) phone menus we still encounter when phoning a service desk. In the 1960s, long distance phone rates were expensive, particularly in the daytime, when business was transacted, so toll-free phone numbers opened up the world of service desks to many more people.

Interactive Voice Response

Interactive voice response, or IVR, was invented in the 1970s. However, early systems depended on narrow vocabularies and couldn’t deal with things like regional accents. It wasn’t until the 1990s that IVR got good enough to be regularly used by service desks. However, even in 2013, IVR systems still encounter problems.

The Outsourcing Boom

Another big change in the service desk concept arrived in the 1990s, when outsourcing became cost effective. Though call centers in India became popular enough to become almost a pop culture staple, many U.S. companies are now bringing call centers back to the U.S. due to other cost-savings measures and complaints about overseas call centers.

The Help Desk in the Workplace

It was in the 1990s that the IT service desk started becoming a reality in lots of companies. In the early days of computer technology in the workplace, the “help desk” was often “Bob, who knows about computers,” which couldn’t remain a workable service desk model for long.

As real IT service desks were established, the primary mode of communication was the phone. Information technology specialists were hired by companies in every sector as pretty much every job function came to involve computer use to some degree. This model worked well at first, though it had its inefficiencies. Once the internet made its way into the workplace (and pretty much every other aspect of modern life), a handful of IT workers with phones was no longer adequate for the needs of even small companies.

Email, Live Chat, and the Service Desk

If primary-colored tendrils come out of your screen, call the help desk, or perhaps an exorcist.

In the mid-1990s, email and live chat support took some of the burden off the phones, and the web became an important tool for IT service. Once Google was launched in 1998, it didn’t take long for IT workers to start using it in their quests to find answers to IT problems. But email access to the help desk had its own limitations. There was still manual problem entry upon receipt of a help-related email, and gathering separate emails related to a singular problem was a pain.

The Web Revolutionizes IT Service Desks

Network-based help desks were another step forward, even if they only existed on a company’s local network and used on-site help desk software. Software of this era, however, was prone to “bloat,” due to cheap computing resources, and the result was often inelegant code, and interoperability problems.

It was around the year 2000 that web-based help desk software started to emerge, solving many of the problems associated with phone and email-based systems. With new features like self-service portals, automatic ticket creation and logging, and a lack of on-site server requirements, web — or cloud-based — help desk software brought the IT service desk into the 21st century. Sure, some employees still preferred using phones or email, but email could be integrated into some cloud service desk software systems, and an increasing number of end users grew comfortable with self-service and other access methods.

Today’s Service Desk

As we settle into the second decade of the 2000s, the game changers for IT service desks are social networking and mobile apps. Remote desktop control has been another important development, reducing the requirement for IT workers to go to where a machine is physically located in order to fix it. Mobile apps are revolutionizing IT service management, allowing IT workers to be un-tethered from their desks — or from the office altogether, in some cases. Mobile apps allow IT workers to use their smartphones to take care of problems that would have required a trip back to the office just a few years ago.

As long as hardware and software problems exist, so will help desks. The help desk of 2020 may not look much like the help desk of 2000, but with continued acceleration of technology, even more efficient IT solutions will emerge.

Samanage is a leading provider of cloud service desk software, incorporating fully-functional IT asset management capabilities as well as mobile apps, remote desktop control, knowledge base capabilities, and self-service portals. And because it is reasonably priced and cloud hosted, you don’t need to buy hardware to use it. Why not give Samanage a test drive and see for yourself where the help desk of tomorrow is developing right now?

Photo Credits: Kolubsek, cooldesign / freedigitalphotos.net

When your IT service desk is run from the cloud, your company’s up-front software costs are far lower than if your service desk software runs on a server at your location. SaaS service desk lets small businesses buy into enterprise-quality software without an enterprise-level capital investment.

Saving up to buy another server could take a while.

But here’s something that might surprise you: even over several years, total cost of ownership for SaaS service desk software is lower than on-premises software. The primary reason for that? Good support.

Software Support

With on-premises IT service desk software, patches, bug fixes, and upgrades have to be scheduled, and this can be inconvenient, to say the least. What’s more, the upgrade cycle with on-premises software can be a year and a half to two years, whereas SaaS solutions are generally updated two to four times per year (and sometimes more often).

When your SaaS service desk needs a bug fix or upgrade, it happens automatically, and everyone gets the same upgrade at the same time, so there’s no question about which software version an employee is running. And with the per-user subscription pricing model, you don’t have to worry about software licenses expiring and the problems that can occur when license expiration goes unnoticed.

Hardware Support

Because SaaS service desk software is run from a browser, if one IT service desk worker’s computer crashes, he or she can still use the software from another computer. In addition, because the software is cloud-run, disaster management for your IT service desk is taken care of remotely. (For any SaaS provider, you should always thoroughly check out their disaster management plan and ensure it is robust enough for your needs.) A flood or other disaster at your location only puts your service desk offline until they can connect a machine to the internet again. SaaS software in general can make recovering from a disaster quicker and less painful.

Maintain or Reduce Staff Required for the IT Service Desk

In the days when IT problems were logged manually (or not at all), and when fixing a user’s computer problem meant going to where the computer was located, the IT service desk was far less efficient. Today’s SaaS service desk can be set up to log incidents automatically, and remote desktop tools limit the amount of schlepping around necessary to fix problems. Furthermore, many of today’s top SaaS service desk solutions include great features like self-service portals, so that impatient end users can sometimes fix problems themselves by following simple on-screen processes.

“I don’t know how it gets from the cloud to my computer, but I like it better than those stupid disk thingies.”

On-Site Bug Fixes, Upgrades, and Server Problems Can Be Things of the Past

Your IT department probably has its collective hands full dealing with hardware and software that’s used at your location. Why not use a SaaS service desk, which will be one less process that requires on-site hardware, and that’s upgraded and maintained automatically? At Samanage, we offer cloud service desk software with amazing features including social network integration, mobile apps, self-service portals, self-building knowledge base, and more. Let today’s cloud technology take some of the burden of clunky hardware and legacy software off your IT department, for more streamlined and efficient IT infrastructure.

Read also:
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 1: Saving Money
The Benefits of SaaS for ITSM, Part 2: Saving Time

Photo Credits: Stuart Miles / freedigitalphotos.net, imagerymajestic / freedigitalphotos.net