The best XaaS platform just got even better

RES Software IT Store 2014 Feature Release 2 includes key capabilities to improve IT efficiency, speed up delivery and help IT organizations to embrace consumerization and manage the IT consumer expectations.

What's new?

Self-service password reset now supports the use of secret questions and answers in addition to registering your private e-mail address. This removes the need for any IT involvement in resetting passwords. Not only can a user reset their Windows password, but any password can be reset including as Office 365 and Salesforce.




Optimized service bundling support to allow cancel of a service in the return workflow as well as requesting additional services in the delivery workflow. This is especially useful for a business line owners or other managers when they want to order services for their employees of project members as they now can tailor exactly what is needed in a single request.




Support for Microsoft Azure SQL database to ease management, improve scalability and enhance support for the mobile workstyle.

Improved licensing to reduce the total number of licenses needed to accommodate additional use cases and to make the already great business case even better. People can now be set to 'inactive' allowing them to be added to the identity warehouse but not claiming any license. Inactive people will not be able to subscribe to any service or log on to the IT Store.

Important improvements

Automatically insert 'Cancel Another Service' actions when configuring dependencies.

RES IT Store Notification Client renamed to RES IT Store Client.

Language support in RES IT Store Web Portal and RES IT Store Client includes Portuguese. The following languages are now supported:

• English
• Dutch
• German
• French
• Swedish
• Danish
• Norwegian
• Portuguese

Preconfigured people attribute 'Security Questions and Answers' to ease implement of self-service password reset.

Disable/Enable services from the context menu.

You can read more about RES IT Store here.

If you ask me, the RES IT Store is the easiest and most efficient way to get result out of ITSM best practices such as ITIL to become a real provider of services.







Manage the expectations of the consumer in an ever growing complex and diverse infrastructure.

Time is running out...

How can IT generate more time in order to focus on strategic initiatives that actually solve real business problems?

I'm a big fan of XKCD.com and especially two graphics caught my attention. The first one describes how much time you can spend on optimizing an activity before you spend more time than you save.

Is it worth the time?

The above graph shows that is is very obvious to start automating your daily activities and the fact that you can spend quite large amount of time on the optimization activity itself to free up your time.

The only thing you now have to do is find a solution that quickly will help you automate away your daily manual IT activities. Easy?

Automation

Here's the catch: I often see that instead of finding a solution that will free up time, in reality, a widely adopted solution is chosen and people spend more time and resources on the solution than the actual problem itself.


The first step to break away from this destructive pattern is to dare finding another solution. To win you have to dare and to dare you have to do.

Do you dare to do to win?

Long time no post

It's been a while since I posted a blog here and I'll try to be better going forward. I've been really busy launching 3 products and a solution that completely changes the way IT delivers services to their users and how users consume IT services.

What is it that I've been up to? And more importantly, why should you care? I'll try to explain...

Managing users is no longer enough, you have to start serving consumers!

This is what employees expect and deserve. This is what the business needs to achieve their targets and goals. This is what IT has to do to survive! This is how you want to be treated!

By changing focus from 'data center out' to 'user in' IT will be able to transform to the next level - the new level - the level of necessity.

Do not get me wrong; IT specialists and new innovative technology is important and maybe more important than ever, but without a good relationship with the business and really understanding their need, there's a risk they are becoming redundant. Services will be looked for elsewhere - somewhere better, quicker and cheaper simply because there's no added value.

If you're an IT pro, an IT manager or already a service provider and want to future proof yourself, take a different approach, an approach that is unique, refreshing and one that you'll absolutely love. And hey, there's no rip and replace. It's the link between business (customer), their users and IT.

Take a look at the RES Suite 2014.

/Patrik

Intelligent Automation Out-of-the-box

Ever bought a solution that you thought would help you do more with less? Did it disappoint you? If  so please pay close attention to what I hope will be one of the most gratifying experiences in your professional life!

What if you could, for once, purchase a tool that is easy to use and is actually designed to get the job done?

I've seen many tools that looks shiny on the outside but when you open the can it is not what you've expected. You think you've purchased a conveyor belt with robots - a fully automated solution with little to no human interaction?

But what you actually got was, indeed an conveyor belt, but you still have to assign a lot of people getting things done! Not very efficient!

Well, here's a solution to the problem: RES Automation Manager.

RES Automation Manager is designed to get things done! It is easy to use, has a very lightweight and easy to deploy infrastructure that works seamlessly in multi-tenant environments. It has extensive built-in knowledge and requires little training to use. A complete list of all the built-in tasks can be downloaded here.

With RES Automation Manager you can encapsulate your administrators change knowledge in secure, effective modules or runbooks. The modules or runbooks can easily be delegated to people with no IT skills and no administrative access to any system but still allowing them to perform advanced, controlled and audited changes. Some of the changes might be suitable to offer as services through an Enterprise Service Store - Service Orchestration.

Nowadays vendors offer a scripting interface such as PowerShell into most of their products. This is great but requires advanced skills to manage and maintain. The scripts will also often be custom made for a specific task. With the use of Parameters you can make changes reusable. Parameters can even be used within scripts. When a script is executed (by people with no administrative access or script knowledge) they will be asked to input custom data into a locked down script. RES Automation Manager will execute the script locally where needed and the change is controlled by the administrator.

If you the also work with change management best practices you have different environments for developing and testing your changes. How do you easily move the settings from one environment to another? RES Automation Manager offers building block technology that allows easy move of modules or runbooks from one environment to another.

How about documenting changes? Is this always done? Are scripters documenting their scripts in a consistent way? All of them? All the time? In RES Automation Manager everything is automatically documented, all the time, consistent...

And what if you manage more than one customer or multiple Active Directories? No problem! RES Automation Manager is Windows Domain independent and proven to work in very large and complex networking infrastructures.

Have a look at one of the videos I've created on how to use RES Automation Manager.

And when you're done watching, download a trial of the software here:

http://www.ressoftware.com/support/downloads

/Patrik

Bright, Brighter & Brightest

I just returned from RES Software yearly Sales Kick Off in Amsterdam and I feel more energized than ever!

It is fantastic to work at a company that provides completely unique solutions to the market that will help organisations meet both current and future demands like BYOx and coIT. No other vendor can do this! We also have great leadership in Bob Janssen, CTO and co-founder. A true thought leader.


In short here's the recap:

BRIGHT PEOPLE with a BRIGHTER FUTURE and the BRIGHTEST SOLUTIONS

It is going to be an awesome 2012!

/Patrik

How to reduce Firefox profile size with RES Workspace Manager

My colleague Musa Cakar at RES Software has created an article on how to reduce the profile size in Mozilla Firefox with the help of Workspace Manager.

You'll find Musa's article here.

/Patrik

Get started with RES Workspace Manager Express

In this video I will show how to get started with RES Workspace Manager 2011 Express to replace roaming profiles and login scripts or GPO's.

Yes, the video is longer than normal but I have captured the complete process with reboots and all. Even so it is only 18 minutes long!

Download your FREE version of RES Workspace Manager 2011 Express here.

Register and get started with  RES Baseline Desktop Analyzer here.


/Patrik