ITSM is, in essence, IT as a service. The platform allows for IT departments to implement and manage IT services in order to better meet the needs of the business. Specifically, it allows It departments to better manage end user support, allowing end users with little IT knowledge to better communicate their need.

Examples will be determined based on the organization implementing ITSM, but there are several general benefits ITSM provides any business.

Incident Management

Incident management allows end-users to reach IT support through a number of channels. Emails can be automatically logged as tickets, and those tickets can be automatically categorized and organized based on prior data. Tickets can then be automatically assigned to the right agents or groups so the right requests are going to the right personnel.

Incident management also allows for IT managers to view the spectrum of tickets, track progress, and visualize how the IT team is responding. This speed up resolution time and improves service all around.

Related: Working Remotely – Make Sure Your IT Team is Ready

Problem Management

Some ITSM software is able to perform root cause analysis, record impacts, symptoms, solutions, and workarounds, and monitor the progress of these throughout the process. The software will also allow managers to view timelines of events leading up to the problem in order to better analyze the problem. This will also allow for problems to be archived in a database so teams can quickly search to find if the same problem has been fixed, and quickly find a solution.

Change and Release Management

ITSM can allow for IT teams to track changes through the lifecycle, ensuring fulfillment of mandatory check and requirements before moving on to the next stage. This will minimize redundancy and automate change approvals. Teams can also set up a change calendar to easily see when updates will occur. Some software can even allow for control approvals within the platform, as well as insights from post-release reviews.

Request Management

Employees can identify and acquire services and products they need directly from an ITSM platform. IT teams can automate and simplify the request fulfilment process and eliminate errors such as double orders. Teams can also automatically assign individuals for approval, and those individuals can approve directly from the platform.

Reporting and Analytics

Perhaps the most impressive portion of ITSM is the ability to visualize date in order to provide analytics. ITSM platforms can provide a UI that shows transparency and insights into all processes and services, with built-in dashboards and analytics capabilities. Teams can monitor service desk performance, improve service delivery, and more thanks to the business intelligence gained.

These are just some of the benefits of ITSM software. It’s something every IT team should look into in order to manage some of the headaches that come with managing IT.

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The new features will allow developers to let apps integrate into Teams during video calls, before, and after meetings. They will be able to display content and notifications during Microsoft Teams calls.

Tabs will be added to meeting invites where users can interact with apps before the meeting begins. During the meeting, Teams will allow users to pull apps into live calls. It can show information in a sidebar or introduce notifications. It will also allow for apps to have buttons in the meeting controls bar.

This does away with the need for screen sharing to bring in outside content to Microsoft Teams environments. It also allows for the information from third-party apps to be linked in individual Teams meetings in archives and histories. These capabilities will be available for testing in late July.

Microsoft is also introducing a new Together Mode. According to The Verge:

This Together Mode combined with third-party apps in meetings could lead to an interesting future for Microsoft Teams in the era of remote working. “Every single feature that you see us announcing is to amplify meetings … we’re thinking about extensibility of all of them,” explains [Archana] Saseetharan [group product manager, Microsoft Teams]. “Everything that Teams is doing has an extensibility play to it, and how we amplify the possibilities for developers to plug more and more deeply into the product.”

This announcement should be a welcome one to any Technology Manager that has a company that utilizes Microsoft Teams. The truth is that videoconferencing and collaboration have become a necessary part of the workforce. Especially during COVID-19, but it will outlast that as so many become used to these systems. Allowing for more robust capabilities will benefit every user.

Especially within the archive. Now, the information that is shared during meetings from third-parties will be accessible by users that missed out. It will be interesting to see how Teams changes as a result of this new integration.

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This unprecedented uptick in unemployment has put a strain on many states in dealing with processing and paying these unemployment claims. While some states such as California outsource their IT needs to third-party vendors, others rely on staff to handle this large surge.

According to The Verge, for at least twelve states, the unemployment claims have proven difficult to handle. That is due in large part to an outdated coding language, COBOL. In Colorado, for example, there was only one full-time programmer maintaining the system prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Rhode Island currently has three COBOL programmers. In fact, Colorado was only months away from migrating to a new environment and await from COBOL before the outbreak.

In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy is calling for more COBOL programmers to help maintain the unemployment system. Unfortunately, as COBOL experienced its peak in popularity in the 1970s, many COBOL programmers have retired out of the market. By the 2000s, COBOL started to phase out of university lessons, and today it is rarely taught to computer engineering students.

Apart from the lack of knowledge in maintaining systems running on COBOL, many of the systems went undocumented, and many more were built on outdated hardware. Given the urgency of the pandemic, it’s proven difficult to maintain, let alone upgrade, these systems.

This story should prove as a reminder to all IT pros about the necessity of updating legacy systems. While band-aids and quick fixes can last when things are going well, strain on difficult systems can prove fatal to a company’s bottom line. In this case, with unemployed citizens receiving checks late or not at all, it could even prove fatal in general.

The post Unemployment Checks Held Up Due to Outdated Coding Language appeared first on My TechDecisions.

“As organizations increasingly turn to cloud-native architectures, their perimeter – as well as their attack surface – expands to the cloud,” says Tomer Weingarten, Co-founder and CEO of SentinelOne. “These workloads require the same level of monitoring, provisioning, and protection as any other device on the corporate network. SentinelOne’s server and workload protection solves this common frustration by providing visibility, protection, and context into what’s happening across each and every cloud workload, container, and virtual machine on the network, and more importantly, real-time protection from attacks.”

Critical business infrastructures are powered by and reside in the cloud as containerized workloads. While many EPP and EDR tools rely on the cloud for detection, tools are not optimized to protect the cloud attack surface. The new server and workload protection from SentinelOne is built for containerized workloads as well as deployments on traditional servers in the cloud and in private data centers. It provides full visibility and response capabilities across these infrastructures.

SentinelOne’s server and workload protection is infrastructure agnostic and can be deployed either in containers themselves, or in the machines that host them, in servers or in the cloud.

More about SentinelOne:

SentinelOne delivers autonomous endpoint protection through a single agent that successfully prevents, detects and responds to attacks across all major vectors. Designed for extreme ease of use, the S1 platform saves customers time by applying AI to automatically eliminate threats in real time for both on premise and cloud environments and is the only solution to provide full visibility across networks directly from the endpoint.

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The report highlights Red Hat’s Ansible Automation, saying it excels at orchestration and integration with other types of automation. They also call out the fact that customers said they were replacing other tools with Ansible, and praised the solution’s ability to bridge operations and development.

According to Red Hat:

Red Hat Ansible Automation is an automation platform that provides a trusted foundation for building and operating automation services at scale. As enterprises implement automation they often want to extend that automation across their organizations, which often requires a piecemeal approach — limiting its effectiveness and creating silos. Red Hat Ansible Automation provides a complete platform for automating, enabling organizations to more easily scale automation across IT operations and development, including infrastructure, networks, cloud, security and beyond.

“We are proud to have Red Hat Ansible Automation recognized as a Leader by Forrester,” says Joe Fitzgerald, the Vice President of Management for Red Hat. “Red Hat Ansible’s enterprise automation capabilities have expanded greatly over the past few years. While the large and active Ansible community have been extending automation to networks, security, storage and many other domains, Red Hat has been working hard on meeting the enterprise requirements for leveraging Ansible Automation, including certification, support, governance, composability, and scalability. In addition to strong adoption by IT organizations, we also see Ansible Automation preferred by developers as well as used in DevOps toolchains. Our integration of Ansible across much of the Red Hat portfolio helps increase levels of automation and reduce cost and complexity for our customers.”

You can download the full Forrester Wave: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2019 report by visiting the Forrester website here.

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Selling or purchasing a home is no simple process. It involves countless forms, documents and communications with multiple parties such as inspectors, appraisers, title vendors, and more. SOHO Realty wanted to make this process less complicated and easier for customers to navigate.

The Tech Decision

SOHO Realty needed a customized Marketing and Sales Automation solution to enable its agents and customers to efficiently collaborate while ensuring that all sales process steps and procedures are properly executed, and documents are stored in the appropriate company document repositories.

SOHO Realty brought on Optimum, a modern software and digital solutions consulting firm, to develop a customized solution that would ease the paperwork and documentation processes for its clients and streamline the home buying experience.

“The process of purchasing a home is already challenging enough without all the required paperwork. We wanted to ease the documentation process for our clients and improve their home buying experience,” says Sharlene Mercier, Managing Broker at SOHO Realty.

SOHO Realty was already using Dotloop, a transaction management tool for real estate brokerages, to manage its electronic signature and other documentation needs; but it wasn’t a complete sales automation solution.

SOHO Realty needed help automating the delivery of documents and tracking the status of tasks in the home buying and selling process. Additionally, SOHO Realty strived to better manage its incoming leads, from both buyers and sellers, and ensure proper and fast follow ups.

The Sales Automation Solution

Using Nintex for Office 365, Optimum created a customized CRM for SOHO Realty that was centered around the way SOHO operates. The solution utilized one advanced and fully customized Nintex Form and three Nintex Workflows, with indirect integration to SOHO’s Dotloop tenant.

Optimum’s Nintex solution starts with the agency’s online inquiries webform. Once completed and submitted, the information is added to SOHO’s CRM, triggering a Nintex Workflow which notifies a SOHO Realty sales rep to follow up with the lead. The sales rep follows up with the customer and collects more information, entering the information into the Nintex Form.

Next, the sales rep qualifies or disqualifies the lead. If qualified, the customer is assigned to an agent, which is notified via the Nintex Workflow.

As the sales journey progresses, the agent continues to use the Nintex Form to collect more information and, if applicable, kicks off a workflow to add the buying or selling and other legal documents to Dotloop. Customer information is also automatically prepopulated into the applicable documents in Dotloop based on what information has already been collected.

Read Next: Manufacturing Jobs Are Getting Hit the Hardest by Automation – Here’s Why

As documents are signed and completed in Dotloop, Nintex kicks off a workflow to deliver them to the applicable parties and the agent is notified through a workflow to continue the process. Additionally, the agent can track the status of every step in the process through the Nintex solution.

The Impact

The Nintex sales automation solution built by Optimum helps SOHO Realty improve the overall experience of buying and selling a home, both for their customers and for their staff. Thanks to workflow automation, SOHO Realty staff have better visibility into a large portion of their business process, ranging from lead generation to transaction to closing.

“By providing a more streamlined experience with Nintex, we’re able to ease the documentation process for our clients. Optimum helped us to develop a digitized solution to our customer experience and documentation requirements that is aligned with the way we do business,” says Sharlene Mercier, Managing Broker at SOHO Realty.

Additionally, the staff have greater insight into the status of documents and easier task management and assignment. These major benefits give Sharlene and her staff more time to spend on helping their customers by automating work items that had been taking up a large part of their workday.

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The new generation product is partially a result of two key acquisitions Cision made in 2019 – acquiring startups TendKite and Falcon.io. This provided the company with additional innovative capabilities, including TrendKite’s monitoring and analytics, which has been integrated with Cision’s content, media database, newswire distribution, and business results attribution capabilities.

The updated Cision Communications Cloud platformdelivers an improved user experience, more intelligent reporting, and better campaign execution – ideal for PR, marketing, and communications teams.

“This is an exciting time for Cision as we continue to evolve after our recent acquisitions,” says Kevin Akeroyd, Cision CEO. “By taking the very best elements from across our product portfolio, we’ve created an inclusive earned media management platform that sets us apart from anything else in the market. According to a 2018 Cision/PR Week Survey, 77% of comms professionals feel they could better measure the ROI of their work, and the next generation of Cision Communications Cloud is built to empower them to do so. We’re offering an end-to-end workflow, real-time insights, and the only communications platform that truly measures the value of earned media.”

Capabilities of the new Cision Communications Cloud include:

• Monitoring and Analytics – influencer discovery, business results reporting, unlimited dashboards, real-time alerts, AI-powered insights, image monitoring, social listening, and more.
• Personal and Scalabale Engagement – featuring the largest contact database available to PR pros, with more than 1.4 million professional media profiles and 910 million social influencer profiles. Users cans earch by interest, expertise, or demographic.
• Integration of Paid Media Tools – now delivering earned-media-informed custom audience creation, targeting and activation, users can create custom inerest audience based on earned media engagement.

To learn more about Cision Communications Cloud, visit the company website.

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Related:  A Company at Risk: Are Your Business Leaders Holding Back Your Company’s Digital Transformation? 

Getting a Handle on Industry Trends

This new market research initiative will aid Trusted Advisors and their business customers in understanding industry trends around emerging new technologies in cloud, colocation, connectivity, SD-WAN, security, UCaaS and more. Avant will analyze real-world insights from thousands of annual IT business purchasing decisions and conduct primary research to deliver regular reports on the state of disruption in the industry in the form of studies, papers, blogs, podcasts and briefings.

Advice and Recommendations Offered

“Avant Analytics is a new dimension to Avant’s IT decision-making platform,” says Ian Kieninger, CEO, Avant. “In keeping with our mission to facilitate digital transformation, this initiative will be an indispensable resource to Trusted Advisors who need to make critical recommendations and decisions on behalf of their customers, who must stay current to effectively navigate today’s technology transitions or risk being left behind.”

Avant powers an extensive network of channel professionals, known as Trusted Advisors, who help today’s CIOs, CISOs and CTOs navigate the rapid pace of technological change. These experts use Avant’s industry-leading tools and partnerships to introduce their customers to the most applicable enterprise technology applications that will enable them to achieve their goals.

Partners will have an opportunity to team up with in-house analysts and propel their businesses using Avant’s marketing and communications expertise. Meanwhile, enterprise customers can look to these owned resources as a single source of truth on how to fully leverage technology to the benefit of their companies.

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Finding Parts Fast; Ordering Simplified

New SyncFab users will be able to build from an extensive parts library where all previously ordered parts are available for fast and easy re-ordering.  With its solution, SyncFab utilizes blockchain smart contracts and data-driven smart manufacturing to optimize the external supply chain available to OEM buyers in the United States and beyond.

Related: IBM 5 in 5 Campaign Will Bring Blockchain and AI to Food Industry

Blockchain Improves Efficiency

“The goals of our partnership are to better understand the availability and capabilities of suppliers, integrate them with our blockchain solution, improve security and capacity utilization, and a more seamless experience with OEM purchasing departments who need to plan for contingencies in their supply chain,” says Jeremy Goodwin, founding CEO of SyncFab.

A Level Playing Field for Small Businesses

SyncFab’s system allows for the commercial procurement of manufactured parts backed by the security, speed and immutability of records blockchain offers. Orders are secure, instant, and streamlined.

Buyers reward manufacturers for quotes and manufacturers reward buyers for reorders. Small, local manufacturers are given a level playing field against large firms as no quotes get special treatment within the network. In addition, SyncFab’s platform digitally captures partner information to offer time-sensitive status updates and data related to the production process and supply chain planning.

“We are really excited about our new partnership with SyncFab.  Access to SyncFab’s advanced manufacturing blockchain platform is a great advantage for our members.  With an extensive parts library and fast, easy and secure re-ordering, blockchain technology can make a huge impact on supply chain management for NTMA members,” remarks Doug DeRose, interim president of NTMA.

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Building on over a decade of leadership in pioneering a new model for delivering on-premise IT as a Service, HPE will continue to scale HPE GreenLake to reach new market segments, new use cases, and leverage its world class partner ecosystem to accelerate growth. This includes new HPE GreenLake offerings for the mid-market, new services for the edge, and new and expanded partnerships with CyrusOne, Equinix, and Google Cloud. In addition, HPE continues to invest and innovate in the company’s suite of software delivered via a subscription model, including HPE Aruba Central, HPE BlueData, HPE Cloud Volumes, HPE InfoSight, and HPE OneView.

HPE GreenLake re-sets the digital opportunity for customers by providing a robust as a Service portfolio that provides flexibility and speed to market. HPE GreenLake gives customers a choice of subscription-based, pay-per-use, and managed IT as a Service offerings that provides customers with a consistent cloud experience for managing all their workloads. The HPE GreenLake portfolio spans a wide range of purpose built solutions, from HPE and HPE’s partners, giving customers choice in building the right digital foundation. In addition, HPE GreenLake’s powerful metering and governance capabilities allow businesses to monitor and adjust usage to ensure initiatives stay within budget and compliance.

According to an HPE commissioned Forrester report on the total economic impact of HPE GreenLake, customers benefit from a 30 percent Capex savings due to eliminated need for overprovisioning, and a 90 percent reduction in support and professional services costs, and 65 percent reduction in time to deploy IT projects.

“We are at an inflection point in the market,” says Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “Everyone recognizes that customers want technology delivered as a Service, but they also want it on their terms. HPE’s unique approach to as a Service, which empowers customers with choice, flexibility, and control, is driving HPE GreenLake’s tremendous success. We will continue to invest aggressively in this opportunity, to capitalize on our market leadership, leverage our world-class channel and partner ecosystem, and deliver our entire portfolio, from edge to cloud, under the HPE GreenLake portfolio. As a result, we will reshape HPE and transform the market, with a new and better way to deliver as a Service.”

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