Instant Emailing Provision

Send emails while viewing the requests in ‘Service Desk’ without even opening the email client. This option ensures all communications between the technician and end users happen within service desk. Such correspondence is very useful for review at a later stage. You can even customize the email template to include the request summary.

Workgroup

Automatic grouping of requests post submission for easy management. For ‘Service Desk’ operating as silos of technicians focusing on specific IT services etc, this automatic grouping helps in viewing and manging requests of only their group instead of all requests.

We had completed the roll-out of Service desk in 3 weeks timeframe after business process mapping. Soon after that, organization understood the flexibility SapphireIMS Service-desk delivers and started discussing with us about using the same for managing Insurance related compliants, other process management changes, etc. within the organization. Our professional services team showcased the capability and the customer went Live with the same. We are glad that the customer is able to realize the value in more than one manner.

We have also rolled out the agents across the branches to discover the assets and used the agentless discovery mode at the HO to bring all the assets in the single manageability window. This helps the customer to perform Total Asset management and be in control of all the assets across the organization.

As SapphireIMS CMDB is flexible, Customer decided to use the same to manage the non-IT assets as well and our team gladly configured and delivered the same.

Do get in touch with our pre-sales team, If you require more details about what we can do for your organization.

The team continue to work closely with the customer during the recessionary market environment and enhance the overall value we deliver to the customer and the market slow-down did not stop the innovation and value addition to the product.

We worked closely with leading System Integrators and Managed Service Providers in India to get ourself empanelled and prove our compelling value proposition. Some of the leading SI’s saw the value and they are supporting us in our growth by positioning SapphireIMS as part of their offering and increasing the SapphireIMS reach.

Calendar year 2010 has been eventful in many ways and thanks to the customers, partners, consultants and well wishers who have supported whole heartedly which resulted adding strong leading brands as our customers and achieve consistent growth in customer addition.

SapphireIMS has started its global expansion through partner qualification process in Middle East and Malaysia and narrowed on its selection of partners. This year is going to be exciting as we are enhancing the product capability as well as venturing into newer geographies. This blog shall have regular post hence-forth.

Supplement to agent-less management of desktops, SapphireIMS now supports management of desktops using proprietary agents in the absence of connectivity to SapphireIMS server. This is more ideal for environments like retail outlet as it is spread across large number of locations involving fewer systems and connection is established only via http to head office. Agent based management reduces the overheads associated in having remote data collection station for smaller location. and supports a secured data transfer to the server using SSL. 

Traffic Monitoring using IPSLA

To identify the network issues and increase the network reliability SapphireIMS makes use of IPSLA technology in Cisco devices to continuously monitor network traffic. It helps organizations to remotely monitor their WAN performance between sites, network latency, packet loss etc. It supports monitoring of various parameters like ‘Jitter’, ‘RTT’, ‘MOS’ and ‘ICPIF’.

Disk Monitoring using S.M.A.R.T

Monitoring of hard disk systems using S.M.A.R.T technology. It helps in monitoring the health of hard disks and receiving forewarnings about possible hard disk failures proactively prior to its failure. It supports monitoring of various parameters like ‘Temper­ature’, ‘Read Error Rate’, ‘Reallocated Sector Count’ and many more.

The recent release v 2.0.2 + P3 provides comprehensive support for handling e-mail based service requests.

- Allows the classification of trusted domains
- Automatic conversion of trusted domains e-mail requests to service-requests with pre-determined service catalogue
- Listing of e-mails from non-trusted domains/users
- Single click conversion of emails from the listing
- Dashboard to provide status of e-mail based requests

Our discussions with customers indicated that, end-users find it difficult to login to the portal and submit a request(though single click submission is available) and they want to use the traditional method of sending e-mail as support call request.

Benefits
- Increase in the direct service call logging by the end-users
- Accuracy of metrics collection improves as more calls gets captured
- Helpdesk engineers get more free-time to focus on issue-resolutions rather than service call logging against the users

Our team has detailed discussion with one of our premier, privileged customer to understand their pain-points in preparing this monthly executive summary report and their business requirement as well. We learnt that, Service providers spend 2 to 4 days of time to prepare this monthly report and it is a tedious process in the beginning of the month. However, the report produced manually by gathering data from various systems does not tally at times due to manual/humar error OR due to the data source. This creates discomfort for the customer/executive.

Other critical requirement for Executive summay report is that, service provider OR Technicians must be able to add their comments against the reports to specify the cause of service degration/superior performance. If the comment option is not available, then it becomes some static graph/report without explanation which is not of interest to executives.

In order to increase the efficiency of the service provider and assure transparency/data integrity, our team got into the Job of generating Executive summary report from SapphireIMS itself directly.

SapphireIMS allows the customers to generate comprehensive executive summary reports directly and add comments wherever requried to generate meaningful reports. These reports can be scheduled for auto-mailing as well.

For more details about generating Executive summary reports, kindly get in touch with our support team(sapphire@tecknodreams.com).

Importing a valid SSL certificate

• copy <filename>.cer to %SAPPHIRE_HOME%\WebManagement\server\default\conf
• cd %SAPPHIRE_HOME%WebManagement\JDK1.5\bin
• keytool -import -alias tomcat -keystore %SAPPHIRE_HOME%\WebManagement\server\default\conf\chap8.keystore -trustcacerts -file %SAPPHIRE_HOME%\WebManagement\server\default\conf\<filename>.cer -keypass secret -storepass secret  ( Note: Replace “secret” with the proper password for security)

Creating Self-Signed Certificate

• cd %SAPPHIRE_HOME%\WebManagement\JDK1.5\bin
• keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore %SAPPHIRE_HOME%\WebManagement\server\default\conf\chap8.keystore -dname “cn=localhost” -storepass secret -keypass secret   ( Note: Replace “secret” with proper password for security )

Modifying SapphireIMS configuration files to enable SSL

• Edit %SAPPHIRE_HOME%\WebManagement\server\default\deploy\jbossweb-tomcat55.sar\server.xml
• Uncomment the section containing SSL definition. Make the changes as highlighted in bold. 443 is the default ssl port, which will enable accessing SapphireIMS web portal using https://localhost. To configure any other port, you can make the change and the portal can be access using url https://localhost:<port>
  

<!– SSL/TLS Connector configuration using the admin devl guide keystore –>
<Connector port=”443” address=”${jboss.bind.address}”
maxThreads=”100″ strategy=”ms” maxHttpHeaderSize=”8192″
emptySessionPath=”true” scheme=”https” secure=”true” clientAuth=”false”
keystoreFile=”${jboss.server.home.dir}/conf/chap8.keystore”
keystorePass=”secret” sslProtocol = “TLS” />

• Start SapphireIMS Web Portal service

Corporates had kept IT service delivery under their own belt for control and security purposes. Development in technology, security, broadband has made it possible to deliver IT service management remotely. Also, corporates have started looking at IT department as service function rather than a support function due to the maturity cycle IT has reached. Under this changed scenario, IT operations team has started to get governed by Service level agreements(internal as well as external). The CIO’s starting to look at this as separate business function and started to evaluate the merits of out-sourcing it which opens-up the world of new opportunities to the service providers. Hence the Market buzz about the RIM market predictions are completely true.

AMC vendors, IT FMS providers started making foray into managed services business initially. However, the success rate quite dismal due to un-preparedness of these service providers to handle the new form of service delivery which requires Transparency, Accountability, Swift action to meet the SLA’s, etc. Some of the service providers have learned the need to have integrated methodologies (people, process and technology) and started to make foray into the same.

In recent times, we are seeing the entry of mid-Tier IT organizations entering into this field and they are bringing in their successful business models and approaching this market in a structured manner by adequately equipping them with the technology, methodologies, etc.

In the coming months, we can see this market opportunity getting addressed by serious players and reaping the benefits.

As MSP Enablers, we are very eagerly waiting for the entry of the serious players and work very closely with such organization to make that happen.

Executive Summary Reports

Customers can generate executive summary reports directly by including all the statistics, adding their comments against the performance/trend, etc. Earlier, our customers used to generate individual reports, copy them manually into their presentation or document, add their comments against reports and then submit. This involved manual effort each time and is also prone to errors.

By taking advantage of Executive summary reports, customers can save their efforts they spend on manual report generation and let SapphireIMS to generate the reports in a professional manner and deliver it on their mail-box.

Service desk request relationship (Request Inter-linking)

Customers often have need to generate separate calls to handle internal activities which arise while handling end-users requests. For example, for hardware failures, it may require separate request to follow-up with AMC vendor and at the same time close the end-users request by providing replacement from spares. In such scenario, it is important to generate child requests and track it to closure.

This has been addressed comprehensive through the introduction of child call creation feature.

Also, the following components have gone through feature enhancements

- LDAP
- Reports
- Asset lifecycle management

Get in touch with support team to download the Patch 3 and go through the releaseNotes for details.

We are very happy to launch SapphireIMS blog which shall help us to communicate with our customers, users and other interested IT management communities effectively through this medium.

SapphireIMS is making rapid progress in-terms of reaching out to the customers, innovative feature addition to delight the customers and users, etc. This blog shall be used to communicate such progress and gather feedbacks as well.

I am glad to go online with this.

- Shafi