– Kevin J. Smith, Vice President and General Manager of FrontRange’s Cloud Business Unit
There is no denying that the advent of social media applications has fundamentally changed the way people communicate and collaborate in both their personal and professional lives. As social media applications have grown, enterprises and the IT industry have leveraged its collaborative power to more efficiently help people, both inside and outside the data center, obtain fast and accurate service and knowledge. By helping users help each other in a managed framework supporting both real-time and archival knowledge, socially enabled support inevitably leads to enhanced IT productivity and efficiency as well as more satisfied end users.
To foster collaboration, improve productivity and better handle service management tasks as a team, FrontRange recently announced HEAT Cloud 2012.3, which introduces a powerful new process known as Social Service Management. By bringing social collaboration concepts together with service management best practices, Social Service Management transcends traditional Social IT by dramatically improving communications between service desks, team members, and customers. Through the use of real-time feeds and activity streams containing important updates, service desks analysts and customers are notified in real-time about key issues and updates to help improve service desk efficiency and improve customer satisfaction. This team approach provides peer-to-peer support with access to shared knowledge to dramatically improve productivity and provide the most cost-effective service delivery process.
Jarod Green, Research Analyst with Gartner, Inc, adds, “It is vital that modern social media concepts be adopted within IT service management processes in order for teams to stay informed and collaborate efficiently. By merging social collaboration and service management functions, customers and their support teams can stay up to date in terms of knowledge, alerts and notifications without using a separate system of record. This is a key capability customers should look for in any ITSM solution.”
Also included in HEAT Cloud 2012.3 is extended support for international markets by offering service desk client functions in French and self-service in Spanish. The new release also features a new robust data import wizard that greatly simplifies data import from other systems.
