– Kevin J. Smith, Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Business Unit, FrontRange, says:
FrontRange, a leading provider of Hybrid IT software solutions, has released HEAT 2014.2 that support service and client management functionality from a single platform. This latest release of the HEAT platform boasts a more streamlined and intuitive user interface, improved security, and new Business Intelligence features, among a host of other new capabilities.
HEAT 2014.2 is particularly well-suited for customers managing multiple tenants. The updated platform now extracts summary/grid data to the master tenant that shared service desk agents can use as work queues. This fully secure feature supports standard grid behaviors such as sorting, filtering and paging.
Updated analytical metrics help both growing and established businesses keep better history of budgets and historical records through a new business intelligence (BI) tool. This new BI functionality uses multi-dimensional charting that summarizes data from multiple business objects and features a financial management module that tracks costs-per-service.
Administrators will appreciate HEAT 2014.2’s release package tool, which can track and manage administrative changes to individual projects. This new tool also supports the Service Management application lifecycle with a well-defined change process to move configuration changes between development and production environments. The Updated Admin UI uses an ERD visualization tool to help service desk administrators view relationships between objects and identify how to join tables for advanced reporting purposes. Service desk administrators will also be able to edit all customer interactions from a single location and have access to fine-grained indexing capabilities.
Improvements to HEAT’s workflow processes not only create a more intuitive user interface, but improve security by preventing users from approving their own service requests. In addition, new comment fields are provided when approving or denying requests in support of dynamic approval and denial criteria. HEAT 2014.2 also enables end users and administrators to quickly generate and run ad-hoc reports without the need for SSRS. Access to reporting is role-based to ensure robust security. User authentication enhancements offer greater control over user sessions with a seamless sign-on feature that establishes a specific SSO provider as a default. This enables users to be directly logged into an app without having to navigate additional links. Security is simultaneously strengthened with this feature through the ability to force users to change passwords for their next login and to terminate user sessions to better utilize concurrent licenses.
Among the other updates is an improved saved search function, which supports more complex searches and automatically groups and formats queries. Additionally, an updated form designer delivers faster and more consistent form design with drag and drop capabilities and a new WYSIWIG form layout generator. Lastly, a revamped XML import function allows hierarchical XML files to be imported and enables multiple related business objects – such as “employees”, “teams”, and “roles’ – to be imported at once.
“Enterprise and MSP service desks are becoming more strategic by the day given the growing complexity of IT and application infrastructures,” said Udo Waibel, CTO of FrontRange. “To help deal with this complexity, we’ve added a considerable number of new capabilities to our HEAT platform that will have a direct impact on improving operational efficiencies and overall business productivity for our customers. In addition to beefing up security and streamlining workflow processes, we’re integrating new business intelligence into the platform that will yield important new insights in our customers’ global operations.”
