ServiceDesk Plus Blogs

Have you tried reading an ITIL book, it’s perfect cure of insomnia. Yes, most ITIL books have all the information but [with all due respect] they are boring!.  I sat through a couple of boring classes and delivered even boring presentations. Then it occurred to me, why not try to make it interesting.  I tried writing an ITIL Handbook with a few cartoons.  A few readers got back to me saying it is interesting.Try it , you will like it!

Bem-vindo para India. WEG - one of the Brazil’s largest companies is coming to India.

WEG Announces New Plant In India

[Thanks Jaime for sharing the news]

WEG’s runs ServiceDesk Plus, with 1000 technicians working on it. I have to thank them for helping us perfect ServiceDesk Plus with robust performance and scalability. The biggest challenge in the getting the meeting right was the language. Everyone knew only Brazilian Portuguese and we knew only English. Luckily we had one friend who knew both. [Thanks Claudio, for saving the meeting]

WEG is in Jaragua Do Sul, Brazil - well actually Jaragua Do Sul is in WEG. The company has such a big plant that a town is built around it. I am sure we’ll win WEG over again, in our home ground.

Interesting Point: WEG had an interesting way to solve the speeding problems and accidents in its campus. Almost 90% of mini-vans and cars plying within the campus had women drivers. To be specific, it was moms who had their kids photos in the dashboard and they were never speeding… anytime!

An Incident, according to ITIL, is any event that disrupts the work of the user. Incident Management is about managing those incidents i.e. bring back normalcy to the user, using workarounds or solutions. But the idea is not let any incident affect business.

So what is a Service Request? First, it is not a disruption of any service. It is generally (but, not necessarily) a request for something new like information or access. So is password reset an incident or a service request? According to my definition of incident, the user’s work is disrupted and it should be classified as an incident. ITIL V2 does classify password reset as an incident. But in ITIL V3, it is classified as a service request. The idea is that the service, as such, is not disrupted or there is nothing wrong with the service. The user only needs to contact the service desk to get access to the service.

When classifying your requests in ServiceDesk Plus, there are three options available:

• Incident
• Service Request
• Request for Information

Let’s understand them using examples. If a user calls into the help desk and reports he can’t access his email, that is an incident. If the user wants to know how to access the Intranet when he is travelling, that is a Request for Information. If a user asks for memory upgrade on his laptop, that is a Service Request.

ITIL V3 looks at Service Requests in a whole new way and calls it a new name too - Request Fulfillment. But that is something we will tackle later.

Tech support is not responsive, what happened to you guys?

This question came to me over 5 times last week. Here’s the whole picture and what we are doing about it.

Situation - Back Stage

Our incoming requests ran over the roof, we had 3 times the regular volume and our support team was simply stretched thin. We staffed up the team but support expertise does not come in a day [or a week]. I know it is not fair for me to give excuses, walk you through our growth problems and expect your sympathy.

Now,We have formed two teams to focus on customers and prospects.

Pre-sales Team: For Prospects

If you are evaluating ServiceDesk Plus and need a demo, comparison sheet and evaluation support. Please direct your questions to “eval at manageengine dot com” . You can also contact the pre-sales team if you are planning to purchase more ManageEngine products. You can also reach the Pre-sales team by phone.

Toll Free for USA : +1 888 720 9500

International +1 925 924 9500

Support Team: For Existing Customers

With all the new requests being handled by our Pre-sales team, our support team will clearly focus on customer problems. You can continue to get back to - ” support at servicedeskplus dot com”

Direct your queries to the right team, you will get responses much faster.

Bumpy patch on the road

This is a small bumpy patch on the road, please hang in there for a while. We’ll get past this soon. I would also like to thank users who posted in the forums and mailed me personally to give us a strong doze of what you are going through :-).

We are back in action.