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

Change, Adapt and Expose!

Change, adapt and expose. Three words that describe what RES Dynamic Desktop Studio does for an IT department based on organisational requirements.

When there is a organisational need or requirement, it will almost always end up in some sort of technical change. Let me give you an example:

There is a new person joining the company. In order for that person be productive access to services is required. One of the services required is e-mail. The IT department will have to create an e-mail account on a mail server (often done manually).

RES Automation Manager can automate this change immediately upon the request (i.e. need) from the organisation through fully automated service orchestration. No IT interaction required.

But is this all? No, just adding a mailbox will not enable user's sending and receiving e-mail. The technical change needs to be adapted and exposed to the user based on their need and individual situation.

First they need a mail profile and then, if  they are a remote worker, they need offline access . Maybe additional mailboxes needs to be opened, and finally the signature needs to be created.

RES Workspace Manager takes care of everything that needs to be adapted and exposed.

RES Automation Manager takes care of the technical change.

These products are RES Dynamic Desktop Studio.

RES Dynamic Desktop Studio will help any IT department with making changes, adapting and exposing them based on the actual user need and situation.

Here's a demo!

/Patrik

How to do more with less in three easy steps

According to Gartner, 40% of unplanned downtime is caused by human errors. This is also the only way for IT to do more with less! Besides greatly reducing unplanned downtime, automating your daily IT tasks will;

• Standardize IT
• Increase Quality of Service
• Free up time to focus on strategic responsibilities
• Grow IT maturity
• Increase security

RES Software Automation Manager gives you an easy way of automating daily IT tasks without adding to complexity or increasing the administrative overhead. There is NO point in selecting a solution that is complex - not if you have any of the above goals.

The following videos will explain the three steps that will help you move from a Basic to a Dynamic IT as a Service environment.


Step 1 - Take an existing manual task and automate it:

Step 2 - Create Run Books and delegate them to help desk:

Step 3 - Delegate IT changes back to the organisation through self service:

By taking this practical, non-complex and easy approach to IT maturity and Microsoft I/O model, It staff will be less stressed and users more happy. Nirvana?

Take your first easy step now...

/Patrik

Relieving IT stress by implementing automation - Step 3

The final video in the series on 'How to relieve IT stress' explains how RES Automation Manager and Service Orchestration further removes the need of human interaction when implementing changes in the IT infrastructure. The Run Book we created in the previous video can now be delegated back to the organization as a service. This will;

• Allow the organisation to decide when changes are needed
• IT will still be in control on how the changes are implemented
• Free up time for both the IT administrator and the service desk

This is the third and final step in the maturity process moving from a rationalized to a dynamic IT environment.

Compare the 'Before Automation' video with the 'Step -3' video. How much time did IT spend on making the actual change in the 'Step -3'  video?

This means more time to deliver on strategic responsibilities and less resources needed for mundane repeatable tasks.

Here's the previous videos in the series;

Step 2 - Creating Run Books

Step 1 - Automating daily IT tasks

Before Automation

/Patrik

Relieving IT stress by implementing automation - Step 2

This third video in the series on 'How to relieve IT stress' explains how the previously created task in RES Automation Manager can be turned into a run book and delegated to service desk. This will;

• Minimize IT administrator workload
• Create more time for strategic initiatives.

This is the second step in the maturity model moving from a standardized to a rationalized IT infrastructure.

In the next video I will show how these Run Books can be delegated back into the organisation through self service. This will not only offload the service desk but also allow the organisation to be in control on when changes will be made while IT still are in control on how the changes are implemented. Stay tuned...

/Patrik

Relieving IT stress by implementing automation - Step 1

This video shows that automating daily IT tasks with RES Automation Manager can make changes;

• Predictable
• More secure
• Increase Quality of Service

This is also the first step in the maturity model moving from a basic IT environment to a standardized IT environment.

In the next video, I will show how you can create Run Books of the standardized tasks and delegate them to service desk. This will further relieve stress from the IT administrator.

/Patrik

Focus on the right things when delivering services to your users

Delivering It services is not an easy thing. Sometimes we make it even more difficult than necessary. We will have to live in a world of multiple service delivery mechanisms. Users will have multiple ways of accessing services. VDI, TS, desktops, laptops and other mobile devices. For IT to keep up with new demands they must invest in new technologies. The problem is that this only adds to complexity and the difficulty managing the users.


Take a look at the list below and think about delivering IT services and what is most important;

How? (delivery technology)
When? (time)
Where? (location)
Why? (ID/role)
What? (content/service)

Having a technical background I know that it is easy to fall back into your comfort zone - technology.  But is this always best for the company?

My preference would be like this;

What?
Why?
Where?
When?
How?

With this I am not saying that how is unimportant but it should not be priority one!

What potentially could happen is that the technology itself will limit on what you must deliver. You should be able to select the best technology for every purpose and not let this result in a more complex environment to manage.

You need a solution that helps you focus on what to deliver instead of how - i.e. managing a hybrid environment.

Such solution could be RES Workspace Manager. RES Workspace Manager helps you manage the desired state of the user. Decoupling all user related settings from the underlaying technology stack. You can call it virtualization, but we call it User Workspace Management. The context of the user (ID/role, location and time) will determine what will be delivered using a hybrid delivery technology.

Look at an earlier blog post explaining the concept of User Workspace Management.

/Patrik

Query uptime and perform controlled reboots

I got a question last week from a company if they, with RES Automation Manager, could easily query uptime on their Windows servers and then perform a controlled reboot.

I have created a video that demonstrates how this can be done.

Beware that this is a very powerful tool and could cause unwanted results if used in the wrong way.

This can be avoided by delegating control and setting a scope on possible systems where the task can be executed.

If you want to know more about RES Automation Manager please visit RES Software on the web.

/Patrik

How to change local administrator password in less than 60 seconds on all computers

In this video I demonstrate how easy it is to change the local administrator password on all servers and desktops in less than 60 seconds.

With RES Automation Manager making changes like this is as easy as 1 2 3!

This module can be delegated to help desk and the actual change is done without them having local administrative rights. All changes are audited.

For more information, please visit RES Software on the web.

/Patrik

How to remove local admin rights and elevate rights when needed

Removing local administrator rights from desktops and laptops have a huge impact! According to Gartner you could reduce the TCO with as much as $1237 per user per year! It could also, according to Microsoft, mitigate the effect of 92% of critical vulnerabilities.

There are a lot of reasons why local administrative rights is needed. It could be legacy applications, access to specific Control Panel applets or applications that need to change hardware settings.

What are we waiting for? Let's go ahead and see how it can be done.

RES Workspace Manager 2011 have the possibility to add Dynamic Privileges to specific processes for specific users.

In the video I demonstrate how it is configured and the way it works.

If you want to know more, please visit RES Software.

/Patrik