However, if collaboration is unstructured, this can lead to a chain of unfavorable consequences – losing time, misunderstandings, lost information, inaccurate cost estimates, and more.

In today’s increasingly competitive business world, it’s important for businesses to make sure all their processes go as smoothly as possible, and that they deliver products or services that win in the marketplace. The catch is, that they must beat their competitors to it.

Hence, I would like to introduce you to OneDesk, a solution suite that helps companies get work done more effectively.

OneDesk is based on the idea that all stakeholders should be on the same page at all times. Real-time collaborative editing, an instant activity stream, and real-time chats and discussion forums facilitate this.

Designed for every role, the cloud-based application helps companies leverage social product development, co-creation, and customer-driven innovation, and get their product-to-market faster.  Its suite of interconnected applications includes customer feedback management, innovation and ideas management, help desk, requirements management, project management, product roadmapping, and issue tracking.

OneDesk also comes with a unique customer portal that companies can embed into their website or simply send customers a link. Customers can then submit ideas, questions, problems and compliments directly to the company’s OneDesk account. Customers can also vote on other customer’s ideas, answer polls companies create and start discussions with the company, or with other customers in order to elaborate on their feedback.

Companies can use the built-in social media monitoring tool, to search for what customers are saying about their brands on Facebook, Twitter, and blog. They can then tag social media comments and bring them into OneDesk as feedback, ideas, problems, questions, leads, and  compliments.

Companies can also forward emails or ask customers to send emails directly to their OneDesk email addresses.

The beauty of OneDesk is that it allows companies to involve customers and external business partners into the development process and to capture feedback that would otherwise have gotten lost, into one place. Once in the system, items can be turned into requirements, which can then be analysed based on metrics that are important to the company.

Requirements can then be turned into tasks and assigned to the appropriate person to be worked on.

Companies can also choose to keep customers and employees updated on any item’s status. When they update an item’s lifecycle status in OneDesk, that status is automatically reflected in the customer portal.

OneDesk’s pre-configured (and modifiable) automated workflows helps minimize manual work and errors.

With the issues and tasks applications, organizations can use Agile project management to resolve issues and defects.

Transparent product roadmaps are built from inputs across the platform, from ideas and issues to requirements, tasks, resources, and costs. A quick glance at the roadmaps you create helps with decision-making.

OneDesk is a very robust product platform that consists of comprehensive tools. Interested individuals are encouraged to try the free version of the application which gives them full access to all of OneDesk’s tools and applications. The OneDesk team is always available and ready to answer any questions and guide users through the software.

———————————–
Kimberley Chan is a Marketing Specialist at OneDesk Inc. She is also a regular blogger on OneDesk’s blog where she provides insight to organizations as to how they can use the latest social technologies to build a stronger business and drive innovation. Follow her company on Twitter @OneDesk app to learn more.

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The original post is published here: Get Work Done with OneDesk, All-In-One Social Business Software

Don’t worry as I’m here to point you to the right direction.

When I first started learning about ITIL, I found out that the materials are very textbook like and bored me to death.

But because I had to pick up ITIL as quickly as possible so that I can equip myself with enough ITIL knowledge to be part of a project implementation team, I forced myself to read and understand ITIL to the best possible. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

In case you’re wondering what ITIL is all about, it is a set of best practices to help organizations align their core business with Information Technology.

In simpler terms, if an organization chooses to adopt ITIL best practices, they may be able to provide better:

• Customer support (whether to internal or external clients)
• Service level support (SLA management)
• Management of problems
• Management of change requests
• and more…

Learning ITIL doesn’t have to be difficult even though you’re only given a short timeframe to understand how it all works.

There are many 100+ pages of ITIL materials readily available for you to purchase from many Internet sites, but here I will highlight a single and free white paper / ebook by Alex D Paul from ZohoCorp.

ITIL Heroes Handbook is a condensed version of what ITIL is all about and it is written in an way that will definitely capture your attention.

In the Free ITIL white paper, there are 7 chapters whereby chapter 2 -6 describes the following ITIL processes namely Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management and Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

Note that this ITIL Heroes Handbook focuses more on explaining ITIL Service Support and it also highlights how you can implement ITIL Service Support with Service Desk Plus software in the final chapter.

What I really like about this ebook is the way each chapter is presented where it includes a comic strip about the process, explanations to further describe each process as well as a simple workflow which provides a high level view of a process.

If you’re a beginner and new to ITIL, I would highly recommend you to read ITIL Heroes Handbook today!

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The original post is published here: Free ITIL ebook / white paper for beginners

The various web applications deployed within an organization usually helps automate business processes which are related to customer support, human resource management, accounting, business intelligence, unified communications and more.

IT support personnels in charged of developing and managing these web based systems are usually given the responsibility to ensure that the above mentioned critical business applications are:

• Error free
• Fast loading
• Safe and secure
• Up and running 24 x 7
• Working according to the defined business rule

These web applications usually resides on top of an IT infrastructure which consists of:

• Network
• File servers
• Email servers
• Database servers
• Application servers
• Internet connectivity

In order to ensure that the business applications are up at all times, the IT team usually deploy monitoring solutions to monitor the health and status of each component.

Network monitoring solutions are usually deployed to maintain network visibility and be alerted at the first sign of potential trouble.

Although these network / application service monitoring tools are effective in notifying the IT team in case of any abnormal service behavior, it doesn’t really ensure that the functionalities of application can work seamlessly from beginning to the end.

Let’s take a scenario where a sales manager logs into the CRM system to view reports on pipeline data or new customers data but encounters a problem when trying to retrieve these information due to an application bug.

Network monitoring tools won’t be able to alert an IT support team of such problems since it only monitors the uptime and health of the services.

What’s really needed to ensure that business web applications can work without any errors is an application transaction monitoring service which automates running a set of critical transactions / workflow to ensure that it works.

So now you must be wondering what are transaction monitoring services for and how does it work.

Transaction monitoring continually monitors your web application transactions and notifies you when any of the various steps in a transaction don’t work correctly.

If we go back to our scenario where the sales manager couldn’t retrieve a report, with a transaction monitoring tool, we can instruct the tool to check the following steps first thing in the morning before people come in to work:

1. Login (ensures that users can login to the CRM system)
2. Reports (ensures that the report page can be loaded)
3. Generate pipeline reports for the month (ensures that the report produces an output)

When the transaction monitoring tool runs through the steps above every morning and encounter any problems, an IT support engineer in charged of maintaining the system will be notified so that he / she can take immediate actions to fix the problem.

For a case study on how a package delivery company uses transaction monitoring to ensure continuous availability of billing and reporting modules every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day, read Multi-step Application (Transactions) Monitoring Case Study.

If you’re interested to try out transaction monitoring services to monitor your web applications, one tool that I can recommend is Monitis.

Monitis helps IT teams provide a continuous IT service delivery through their cloud based all-in-one monitoring system.

Besides providing transaction monitoring services, these are some other key services provided by Monitis:

• Server monitoring
• Network monitoring
• Cloud monitoring
• Web traffic monitoring
• Event monitoring
• and more

For a quick overview on how Monitis transaction monitoring works, view this video:

A key strength about Monitis monitoring has to be its 100% cloud based monitoring services where the IT team doesn’t need to worry about maintaining and installing the monitoring server itself.

Once you sign up for an account, you can begin to monitor your network, applications and transactions immediately without having to set up on your premise.

For more details and information on how to use Monitis to monitor your IT services, check out Monitis today!

The original post is published here: How to monitor web application transactions

Most customers would prefer to call in and ask for help while some might just send an email.

Either way, it’s vital for all service providers to have an ability to manage and track every single incident / request made by customers.

In the past, help desk agents would log down a service request on paper or an excel sheet. This method made tracking the status of the requests difficult and at times forgotten altogether.

These days there are many help desk applications out there in the market to help us better manage customer requests.

The common features provided by help desk applications include the ability to:

• Log down incidents / requests
• Tag the priority based on criticality
• Escalate an incident to another person
• Provide service managers with a dashboard and consolidated view of all incidents / requests

In today’s post I’ll be highlighting 4 SaaS web based on demand help desk applications which your organization can start using today without the need for any installation or assistance from the technical IT team.

These SaaS help desk applications are all hosted by the software creators and charges a monthly subscription usage fee.

The following are 4 top SaaS web based on demand help desk applications:

HelpSpot is a comprehensive  web based help desk software with key features such as workflow with rule based logic, customer self service portal, real time help desk reporting, better email management and many more.

HelpSpot is available as a hosted software as well as a direct download which can be hosted in house.

A key strength of HelpSpot has to be its developer API’s which allow integration to be done with other external systems such as the HRMS, CRM, LDAP, etc.

Zendesk is a customer support help desk system with a complete interface for customers, support agents and customer representatives.

With Zendesk, you can collect trouble tickets, implement workflow and business rules, brand the looks of the help desk app, allow customers access to online support community and many more.

Just like HelpSpot, Zendesk is very strong in terms of integration with external apps and even has pre-built integration done with other notable systems such as Salesforce.com, Campfire and GroundWork Open Source.

Kayako is a help desk software, live chat software and customer service software.

Kayako’s key features include ticketed support, email management, advanced reporting, workflow, SLA management, ticket scheduling,  site visitors monitoring and chat, resource publishing and many more.

Kayako is available in both hosted and download versions. For registered charity and open source software projects, Kayako is available free of charge with certain terms and conditions being applied.

Tender Support is a simple to use help desk application which helps you focus on providing your core services.

Tender is a hosted application and has many help desk features such as requests collection via email, knowledge base to help customers, public discussion area, permission based discussions, customizable interface and many more.

Tender Support to me has one the nicest and cleanest user interface I’ve seen.

——————– End of Saas Help Desk Applications ———————-

There you go, hope this list here helps you to choose and evaluate a suitable help desk application for your service oriented organization.

The original post is published here: List of SaaS web based on demand help desk applications

Today’s post, I’ll walk you through the implementation with the help of an open source Service Level Management software called OTRS.

OTRS stands for Open source Ticket Request System – an ITIL compatible Service Desk for you to manage sales, pre-sales enquiries, IT management, help desk, and many other support services.

I found out that OTRS is not just a simple Ticket Request System but rather a comprehensive solution which focuses on the entire service level management offerings.

What I mean by the service level management offerings include abilities to:

1. Create the IT service catalog.
2. Attach service level agreements (SLA) to each service.
3. Allow service offerings to be transparent and made known to all users.
4. Allow users to request or respond to a particular service.
5. Allow service desk personnel to respond or escalate a service.
6. Allow a service manager to monitor all tickets from an overall perspective.

OTRS has an online demo and it is from this demo that I will attempt to show you how OTRS can fulfill the offerings as stated above.

1. Creating a Service Catalog

The IT service catalog is a list of IT services that an organization provides to its users.

Via OTRS, an administrator would have the rights and abilities to define the service catalong.

Below is an example of adding a new service offering.

After adding all the services, below is an example of the list of services (service catalog)

2. Defining Service Level Agreement to each Services

Now that your list of services are up and running, it’s time to attach an SLA to the respective services.

Below is a screenshot of how you would add a new SLA for Email Access.

After adding the SLA, see the following for a list of all defined SLAs.

3. Chargeable IT Services to be transparent and made known to all users

Communicate the list of available services to all users via an email announcement or memo with a simple message / instruction on how users can requests for IT services.

This particular task can be done outside of the OTRS solution.

4. Allow users to request or respond to IT services

OTRS has a web based interface for users / internal customer to login, view and request for any IT services they require. Below is a screenshot of a user requesting for an email access service.

Note that OTRS allows the user to select the SLA. My initial thoughts were that SLA is supposed to be tied automatically to each service. Giving users the options to select their SLA probably provides a bit more flexibility in terms of the user’s expectation for a particular service. If a user is willing to pay for the service, then he would select a 24 by 7 service availability. Otherwise, without selecting an SLA would mean that the service is provided for free on a best effort basis. This setup could possibly be arranged and communicated to your users.

5. Allow service desk personnel to respond or escalate a service.

A typical service desk environment would have a service desk agent, a 2nd level service desk agent and a service manager. OTRS has built these roles in by default. You will just need to assign appropriate people to assume the responsibility of each roles.

To follow up from the user’s request above, a service desk agent would be notified whenever there is a new request. The screenshot below shows a list of all new ticket requests.

Clicking on the ticket allows the service desk agent to take several actions which includes:

• Lock and work on the ticket (to ensure that not more than 1 agent is working on the same ticket).
• Contact the user regarding the request whether by phone or email.
• Update the status of a ticket request (close, pending).
• Change the priority of a ticket.
• Escalate the responsibility of a ticket to someone else.

6. Allow a service manager to monitor all tickets from an overall perspective

A service manager would have the ability to look at the statuses of all tickets and to take the appropriate actions to ensure that all IT services can be served within its appropriate service level agreements.

———————————— End of walk through ————————————–

I hope you gained some value from this this quick and simple walk through on how you can utilize OTRS – an open source service level management solution to implement an IT service chargeback model.

Thanks for taking time to read and do feel free to provide any feedback or comments you may have.

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The original post is published here: Open source web based service level management software