Solicialising with service

Using social media tools to speed the communications between service staff, who will often be working away from their immediate base at a remote on-site location or out in the field, is becoming an increasingly important element of maintaining service levels in a number of business sectors. But it is becoming particularly important in maintaining the service reliability of cloud services.

Providing this capability is just one of a number of enhancements that FrontRange, which provides Hybrid IT Service Management tools, has included in the latest release of its HEAT Cloud IT Service Management (ITSM) solution. Taken together the upgrades are aimed at giving users improved service desk productivity and efficiency.

Known as HEAT Cloud 2013.1, the upgraded version offers a host of new capabilities. The social media components now provides the ability to post messages directly to specified service teams, social groups and/or user profiles. This provides IT and service management teams with the ability to target service and maintenance teams with service requests relevant to their areas. This can be teams with specific areas of  expertise, or perhaps a request aimed at any team close to a specific location or system.

It can also now gives service personnel a direct, and personal, `My Watch List’ which provides one-click access to recent work or accessed items to improve service management productivity.

There is a new User Interface, which provides a context-based user interface for improved service analysis and self-service efficiency, tighter integration with external applications, in the form of  HEAT Cloud Connect, which triggers workflow advancement when jobs are created or a specific object field is updated, customisableUser Interfaces that enables the look and feel to be aligned with a customer’s branding on the Self Service and Service Analyst User Interface, new Web Services APIs, which provide the ability to populate service requests and leverage advanced search capabilities, and it now supports the latest release of Microsoft’s IE 10 Internet Explorer web browser.

In addition, in line with the growth of international take up for the company’s service management tools, it has increased its language localisationto include German, Dutch and Portuguese. These are now fully supported in addition to English, French and Spanish.