Monday, May 13, 2013

IT Service management SapphireIMS-one stop solution for colleges and universities


End-to-end IT service management through seamlessly integrated package

Current decentralized IT environment presented an asset management challenge, as each department and or campus needed to collaborate to implement an endpoint management solution. SapphireIMS enables in gaining control of hundreds of assets and cutting yearly maintenance workloads.

 

About Large Scale Colleges

Today the large scale colleges and universities having larger number of departments spread in many acres of land and having hundreds of faculties and thousands of students enrolling every year. It is very important for such colleges to provide larger and modest infrastructure such as providing larger number of IT assets such as desktops, laptops etc. More the IT resources then more the headache of managing the same and then it becomes challenge to provide a centralized environment to manage those IT resources.

Managing means it could be finding out how many total assets, total value, how many in stock, in repair, functioning, how many needs hardware upgrade, how many needs new software installation or license upgrade etc. There are many more additional features can be made available using the right IT service management software which provides end to end IT service management platform such as service desk, asset life cycle management, IT automation, business service monitoring etc.

Challenge

The many departments spread in hundreds of acres of campus at large scale colleges are facing an IT maintenance challenge. Because the large size college’s infrastructure is largely decentralized, each department is responsible for managing its own IT environment assets and as well as non IT assets. This presented an asset management and configuration management pain point, as there was no way to tally up the exact number of devices available at the service and connected to the network, or to ensure that they were installed with the most up-to-date patches and updates.

SapphireIMS is one of the leading brands in India for IT service management solutions and has been used by many IT and non IT organizations. We figured out that there was no college-wide solution for managing their IT and non IT resources. Our software SapphireIMS with its strong engine of asset life cycle management can be proposed to centralize the college’s IT structure for better manageability and visibility across the top executives of the college.


SapphireIMS Solution

SapphireIMS a web based strong asset life cycle management and service desk platform enables administration and executives’ giving capability to centralize the existing organizational structure. SapphireIMS provides role based access such as administrator, principal, HOD or user to retrieve the IT and non asset information providing the secure access and only to those who are configured or allowed to view the details. SapphireIMS with its heterogeneous support feature manages IT assets which are running with different operating system in a single network. And provides platform to manage entire life cycle of an asset right from procurement, In-stock, allocate, In-Repair, Scrap to Asset Received. Not only that SapphireIMS does auto discovery and provides all inventory details of all the IT assets. SapphireIMS provides visibility in terms of software installed in each IT assets so that IT administrator can be well aware that what software to be installed, uninstalled or to upgrade and also SapphireIMS enables to find out OS compliance, IT compliance and other custom user defined IT policies. SapphireIMS has reduced the IT administrator workload considerably and also giving the complete information about entire college’s IT and non IT assets status to the top executives. Different student labs require many different applications/software and IT Manager at college. Thanks to SapphireIMS, IT manager can provision the necessary applications to the correct users or devices with a couple of mouse clicks. SapphireIMS has also greatly simplified the process of updating applications.


Expected Results

With the implementation of SapphireIMS, large sized college’s executives can gain complete information and control over their assets such as desktops, laptops, printers, projectors, camera and other IT and non IT assets, etc. Today, I guess many large scale colleges are having approximately more than 800 assets installed at different departments which can be easily managed by SapphireIMS and SapphireIMS with most scalable product can support hundreds and thousands of such assets. Many processes can be automated, which will be helpful to significantly increase the quality of college’s IT service, as well as reduce yearly maintenance workloads. Most importantly with its service desk SapphireIMS can enable faculties, administrators, principal and other technical and non technical staff to co-operate a controlled and efficient manner by which college executives shall have better visibility on the way they are operating. This may help them to improve the IT and non IT service.

With SapphireIMS each department can manage the patching, upgrading and maintenance of its IT assets from a common tool in an integrated infrastructure and greatly reducing the total system administration workload.  We’re confident that SapphireIMS will be able to offer administrative staff, researchers, and teachers the robust, secure and reliable IT platform they need to provide the highest level of service, research, and teaching to their students and also managing their IT and non assets.

For product user guide you can access the below website


For more details please contact us at:

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Value proposition of SapphireIMS service desk

End-to-end IT service management through seamlessly integrated package
                                                               www.sapphireims.com

Almost all organizations are very much aware that regardless of how good the technical resources and capabilites are, the overall service quality will be highly influenced by the SapphireIMS service desk.

SapphireIMS Service desk enables the organization in improving the service quality, visibility and monitoring. After delivering the service it is very much important to provide a platform internally and to the customer to have better customer interaction and a process of addressing the customer needs on time, thus by increasing the customer satisfaction. Making so, the existing customer shall be your long term customer rather than  short term customer. Ofcourse any organization in that matter needs to retain thier customer as long as possible. It is not easy job unless you have a right service delivery model and one of the component of the serice delivery model is SapphireIMS service desk.

There are few basic questions an organization may ask itself are:

1. Are we managing our customer's expectations and the view of our service ?
2. Have we optimized the quality and efficiency of our overall IT services ?
3. Do we have better control on how to manage a customer service ?


If the answer is NO for any one of the questions then we must say that the organization is surely in trouble. Sometimes organizations may not realize this but as business grows and number of customers grows, the obvious pressure of demonstrating the capabilities and scalability of keeping the customer satisfaction high increases.

If the organizations do not care about the answers for any of the above questions, then there is chance that they may loose the valuable customers in no time. And that is going to be bad news and before we realize on taking measures to improve the customer service model, we might have lost enough time and customers.

So it is of very important activity for any organizations independent of the nature of business to implement and setting up the right porcess in place to enable themselves and customers to have healthy channel of communication for service, incident, problem and change management.

It is very very important and utmost priority for any organizations for having better system in place for people management, communications and marketing, customer relationship management, project management, statistics and reporting, tools and processes etc.

What a SapphireIMS service desk platform gives is entire visibility on how an organization is operating to deliver the service. The executives having visibility of customer service model can make better decisions on on how best they can further improve and grow and make a mark in the market in which they are operating. And also it helps the executives in understanding what the customers can reasonably expect from using their services.

SapphireIMS Service desk will surely enables the organization to have seamless teamwork across IT teams and its customers. And eventually building a positive image among customers, the right culture etc.

SapphireIMS is having a service desk which is ITIL standard and pinkverify certified. And bundles with Asset Life Cycle Management, IT automation and Business Service Monitoring and Reports and makes itself as
End-to-end IT service management through seamlessly integrated package.

We will discuss more about other features of SapphireIMS in next blog.

Thanks for reading this blog.

Monday, May 6, 2013

SapphireIMS service desk offerings


End-to-end IT service management through seamlessly integrated package
                                                               www.sapphireims.com


SapphireIMS, one of the providers of end-to-end IT Service Management solutions, has announced that SapphireIMS has strengthened its service desk offering, to enable the enterprises to provide an improved and a better service for their customers. SapphireIMS service desk is an ITIL certified IT service management platform enabling organisations to model service delivery management functions (which includes IT and Non-IT) and track the adherence. This allows the CXO's and decision makers to get bird's eye view of the entire service delivery operations.
 SapphireIMS service desk has enhanced its Service Level Management (SLM) for simplifying the complex rule involved in the definitions and management. This helps the organisation to monitor service delivery operations against the pre-agreed SLA's which includes Standard business SLA's, Non-business hour SLA's, Operational level agreement between internal business units, Vendor SLA's, Power-user SLA and Power-asset SLA's, etc. Also, helps the organisation to operate across 28 States taking into considerations the different business hours and holidays. It allows the single SLA rule definition which can encompass different business hours and holidays rather 28 separate rules. 



Key Offerings of the SapphireIMS service desk:


Off-the-shelf process templates for Incident management, Request fulfillment, Problem management, Change management. Process templates can be tailored as per the business operations


Integration with Active Directory, OpenLDAP for user management, Role based access control


Implementation of single and multi-level approvals as part of the workflow


Creation of automated tasks to be performed during state transitions of the workflow through pre and post action controls


Integrated Knowledge Base


Configurable auto-assignment algorithm to automatically assign tickets to technicians


Powerful Notification layer supports E-mail, SMS and custom actions


Integration with SapphireIMS Business Service Monitoring (BSM) for automatic ticket generation from Alarms and Alerts and SapphireIMS Asset Management (AM) for linking assets to service requests and asset processes


Scheduler for ticket creation for routine jobs (like back-up or preventive maintenance activities)


CSAT interface for each ticket and interface to conduct on-line surveys to collect user feedback


Reporting framework to configure various types of dashboard and reports. Pre-configured reports for SLA compliance, call analysis, call status, performance etc.


"The key performance indicator (KPI's) depends on nature of organisation and their business model. SapphireIMS Service desk allows the modeling to capture KPI's of interest and provides real-time performance dashboards as well as historical reports for analysis."

Thursday, May 2, 2013

SapphireIMS offerings Explained

End-to-end IT service management through seamlessly integrated package
                                                               www.sapphireims.com

SapphireIMS Asset lifecycle manager offers a comprehensive set of features which helps the organization to discover, model CMDB, manage the relationships, define IT and license policies and monitor the same. The nature of data gathered can be tweaked to suite the organization's interest.

SapphireIMS offers non-intrusive agentless mode of discovery and data collection capabilities  which can be used to gather complete statistics about the IT environment of the enterprises  to perform auditing and analysis.

It provides an ability to define license master(allows the grouping of products to reflect offerings from OEM) and policies and generates off-the-shelf compliance dashboards against it.

SapphireIMS also provides agent-based data collection to gather data from systems which are not domain environment. This ensures the complete inventory collection of all systems which belong to the organization.

The data is made available in custom format to simplify the process of performing  Inventory audit, License compliance audit and IT policy related audit activities.

Comprehensive data collection, support for agent-less and agent mode of collection to achieve maximum coverage, ease-of-deployment and use makes it an ideal choice for one-time audit, regular-audit to keep-track of compliance, etc.