| Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - HelpMaster Pro - PRD Insider newletter - October 2009 | HelpMaster Pro - PRD Insider Newsletter - April 2009 | PRD Insider
October 2009 |
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Dear $(FirstName), here is the October edition of the PRD Insider - the monthly newsletter for HelpMaster Pro helpdesk / service desk software. If you are having problems reading this email, you can also view it online. Subscription options are at the end of the email.
- Major release notice! v9.1 now available
- Developers Den - Send through your ideas
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| Major release notice! v9.1 now available |
The next major version of HelpMaster v9.1 has officially shipped! PRD Software is delighted to release our best release of HelpMaster ever. v9.1 contains many new features, a lot of refinements "under the hood", as well as a slick new look for the web interface. If you haven't already seen the list of changes, check out the new features list over on the HelpMaster website. Here's a brief list of the major features - Multiple skillgroup membership for staff (helpdesk technicians)
- New and improved security model
- Dockable / undockable screens + resizing for all
- Improved XML import
- Redesigned web interface
- Wizard-style interfaces for Email Manager and Priority Manager
The biggest change for this release is the ability for staff members (helpdesk technicians) to belong to more than just one skillgroup. This feature really opens up the system for better queue management, workflow, automated escalations, and all-round better partitioning for jobs. 
Upgrade today!If your AMS (annual maintenance subscription) is current, you can upgrade to v9.1 today - your existing registration code will still work. Full upgrade information is available through the helpfile, or here on our on-line system. In a nutshell, upgrading is as simple as uninstalling your old software, installing the new, running the database and reports wizard to upgrade your database, and that's about it. If you get stuck along the way, or have any questions, please contact PRD Software support and we'll be glad to help. Contact PRD Software to discuss your upgrade / additonal licence requirements. and we can get you up and running with v9.1 in no time at all. |
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Developers Den - Send through your ideas
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From Rod - Senior HelpMaster Pro developer  Greetings helpdeskers, HelpMaster 9.1 has been a great release for many reasons. Not only does it provide some great new features, but it also sets up future versions of HelpMaster to take this powerful workflow concept to new levels. We've been busy improving much of the code "under the hood", so not only are we creating new features, but we're ensuring that the foundation upon which our software is written continually improves and paves the way forward for even better product development. We've got some very powerful concepts currently being developed - wait till you see the new Email Manager - it will change the way you think about email response management. If you are not currently using the Email Manager to automate the conversion of email into helpdesk tickets, have a look at it - you'll be surprised at how much work you can off-load to this powerful system. Also, just a quick reminder to everyone who uses HelpMaster to share with us their development ideas, feature wishes and overall feedback. Version 9.1 was largely developed based on the feedback through this discussion post. If you would like to see something in a future version of HelpMaster, please let us know. We're always listenting, and you can make a difference. Best regards, Rod |
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PRD Software PO Box 4028, Hawker ACT 2614, Australia Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved. |
| | Thursday, June 18, 2009 - HelpMaster Pro - PRD Insider newletter - June 2009 | HelpMaster Pro - PRD Insider Newsletter - April 2009 | PRD Insider
June 2009 |
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Dear $(FirstName), here is the June 2009 edition of the PRD Insider - the monthly newsletter for HelpMaster Pro helpdesk / service desk software. If you are having problems reading this email, you can also view it online. Subscription options are at the end of the email.
- Win an iTunes voucher!
- The 7 habits of highly effective HelpMaster users
- Collecting Data Will Cripple Your Help Desk tool
- Developers Den - Introducing Workflow roles
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| The 7 habits of highly effective HelpMaster users |
How effectively do you use HelpMaster? Do you simply log in to just check you job queue, or are you a power-user and do a lot more? The following 7 points are typical of the HelpMaster power user. 1. They customize the system to their personal preferences. HelpMaster allows individual users to customize the starting screen, the fonts, the sounds, the theme colour, the field chooser, the custom dictionary, the template subscriptions, the autotext, the Job Montor and much more. When was the last time you had a good look around the "User preference" screen. 2. They make good use of the template system. Effective HelpMaster users know that if they perform the same action regularly, they create an Action Template which can be re-used and combined with other templates to create powerful workflows. For an indispensible technique using the combined power of an Action Templates + Email Template + Email Template tags, check out this helpfile page. 3. They have a refined list of "Saved Searches". Power users know how to track jobs via saved searches. Build saved searches to display "Jobs logged today", "Jobs closed today", "Overdue priority 1 jobs" etc. Saved searches can also be used as report filters, and save a lot of time.
 4. They have a optimised "Field chooser" for each entity type. Did you know that when you display clients, you can also display their site, their site's custom fields, and their contact details, including phone number, email and address? Similarly, when you display jobs, the primary asset, client, and site details are also available. The key is the Field Chooser screen. 5. Search for information using the Full Text search option in the Job Finder and Advanced Job Finder screens. This feature needs to be configured by your database administrator. If your database administrator has not enabled this powerful feature of HelpMaster, how are you finding the information you need!? 6. Log jobs via the Email Manager. If you receive support jobs via email and are not using the Email Manager to automatically convert that email into a helpdesk ticket, you're doing it the hard way. 7. Visit the www.helpmasterpro.comdiscussion board, blogs and chat room for tips, discussion and general information about the latest releases.
What did we miss? Share your HelpMaster tip on-line by posting to this discussion thread. The best 5 tips submitted before 20 July 2009 will win a $50 iTunes voucher each. 
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Collecting Data Will Cripple Your Help Desk tool
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From Beth - Senior Product Consultant
 May was a terrific month for consulting at PRD Software here in Australia. It has been a different state and town each week; from chilly Devonport to the split personality town of Albury-Wadonga. There has been a very common theme coming out of the HelpMaster Pro sites visited; it’s all about system design. It can be very exciting purchasing a new help desk system, figuring out some values to pop into those pesky user defined fields (like Job Type and Issue Code) and awaaaaaay you go. Until a few years later when you realise those pesky user defined fields will make or break your help desk system. Poor system design will result in seriously frustrating consequences such as: - Inability to find jobs.
- Inability to produce useful reports for day to day management of the desk.
- Inability to identify job trends and user behaviours; and as a result not be able to target areas for improvement or implement automation.
- Inability to ‘push back’ on problem users and departments as you cannot extract ‘evidence’.
- Inability to provide high level KPI reports to senior management (which they may not want today but may very well want tomorrow).
- Inability to provide proof to cost-cutting management of the successes of the Help Desk.
Sound familiar??? The role of a Help Desk system is not to record data but to provide information. Recording the data is just a necessary evil in order to provide information. Focusing on data capture without considering the information outcomes will essentially cripple your system. In over ten years of consulting I have seen this at too many sites to count.
The inevitable results of poor system design are as follows (stop me if you have experienced these before!):
- The tool is blamed as clearly being flawed and is replaced
- The new tool has a system design based on the old tool (and guess what, that tool is flawed too, is replaced and so on).
- Years worth of data has to be ‘junked’. A clean new system with no history has to be created as the old data is simply inaccessible from an information viewpoint.
- You begin to believe that all Help Desk tools are rubbish (so not true!).
To avoid these calamities careful planning and design of the system is crucial. When performed as a consulting exercise by PRD, this typically takes two days. Yes, two whole days. Clients come away after two days completely transformed. Two days spent on design will give you a Lamborghini tool, as opposed to a 1962 Hillman Hunter tool that conks out at the lights. There are already several blogs on our site that details some of the tricks for working on your system design. If you would like some assistance with this process our consulting services are happy to help, and if you want to go it alone we highly recommend using the ITIL best practice framework as an aid. Keep reading our newsletters and blogs as system design will no doubt be a recurring theme. |
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Developers Den - Multiple skillgroup security
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From Rod - Senior HelpMaster Pro developer Last month I talked briefly about the changes we're making in the upcoming release of HelpMaster 9.1 - specifically about the ability that staff will be able to be members of more than one skillgroup. I'm happy to report that this feature has finalized and it's been working great here at the PRD Software office where we've been using a pre-release build of the software. The reason v9.1 hasn't been released yet, is because we're still working on the security system to compliment the new multi-skillgroup feature. With the additional security implications that multiple skillgroups demands, we've had to re-think the whole security model. Here's what we came up with. Introducing Job Workflow Roles
A job workflow role is a new concept for v9.1. Essentially, a workflow role defines the security level for each staff member per skillgroup they are associated with. In basic terms, it means that a staff member might have full-control for one skillgroup, but have only basic read-only permissions in another skillgroup. The following diagram describes this relationship between staff, skillgroups and workflow roles. I'll post more information about this as the feature develops and we get closer to a release.
Other things that have been keeping us busy in the HelpMaster development room are new controls and layout for the staff and client web interface, improved installation experience for newer operating systems, Vista product certification and general component upgrades for 9.1. |
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PRD Software PO Box 4028, Hawker ACT 2614, Australia Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved. |
| | Monday, April 06, 2009 - HelpMaster Pro - PRD Insider newletter - April 2009 | HelpMaster Pro - PRD Insider Newsletter - April 2009 | PRD Insider
April 2009 |
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Dear HelpMaster, here is the April edition of the PRD Insider - the monthly newsletter for HelpMaster Pro helpdesk / service desk software. If you are having problems reading this email, you can also view it online. Subscription options are at the end of the email.
- Fun with the Field Chooser
- ITIL - What is Problem Management?
- Developers Den - 9.1, APIs and remote upgrades
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| Fun with the Field Chooser |
Personalising column displays
It is often surprising to see customers using HelpMaster Pro extensively and yet not realising they can customize how information is displayed to them. Take the Workgroup Explorer window for example. It is the main working space and having the relevant Job information displayed in the right side panel right up front, without opening the Job can make your work a whole lot easier. For example, being able to see the last action date and estimated completion time. 
To control the information displayed in this area, select the Field Choose icon from the menu bar. Select the screen you want to personalise the columns for.  Voila! You now have a huge range of information which you can select from in the Available Fields panel; just move the desired values into the left hand panel! For version 9 users, be sure to check out the new date fields that automatically display a progress bar. 
These are a handy additions to your Helpdesk Explorer screen and gives great visual feedback regarding your SLAs. |
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| ITIL - What is Problem Management? |
From Beth - Senior Product Consultant
Problem Management is an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process for preventing Incidents from occurring in the first place. Thus saving IT time running around after incidents, as well as improving customer service as the customer never experiences the fault in the first place.
For an official definition of Problem Management look at this handy ITIL Pocket Guide - it is a bit long winded but hang in there.
Help Desks are generally brilliant at managing Incidents; this is often seen as their reason for existing. But there is more to it; there is a need to prevent, delay and minimise Incidents. This is where Problem Management comes into play and involves being the detective in your organisation to hunt down the root causes of Incidents (and potential Incidents) and fix them where possible. The upside of Problem Management is that is saves a lot of time and customer pain, the downside is it is hard to quantify the gain. How do you prove you saved 10 hours and $10,000 by preventing an Incident that never happened? Its a matter of looking back and comparing old Incident data with new Incident data to prove gains.
Problem Management has two aspects: reactive and proactive.
Reactive: Reactive Problem Management is where a pattern of Incidents indicates that there may be a larger underlying issue at play. It is reactive in that the Incidents have already occurred and you are looking to prevent or reduce more of the same Incidents from occurring again. HelpMaster Pro reporting is key here. The value of clear issue codes becomes critical, as well as logging Jobs with linked asset information in order to extract useful statistics.
Proactive: Proactive Problem Management is much harder, as you do not have any existing, clear Incidents in which to guide you. Here you are looking at all your system tools for signs of instability within the infrastructure, and not just relying on HelpMaster Pro. For example, at the server level monitoring disk capacity, error logs, service degradations and so on will indicate which servers may be at risk of failure or serious performance degradation. You can then take preventative action such as upgrading, servicing or replacing the risky machine.
Any Help Desk with effective Incident Management should be able to implement reactive Problem Management fairly easily. To set this process in motion here are some guiding steps:
- Set the criteria for determining when Incidents are worthy of investigation by Problem Management.
- Set up a Problem Management team (they can also have other duties) and set aside time and resources that are not to be cannibalised by Incident activities (very important!).
- Ensure the team has the authority, or access to the authority, to make change requests.
- Set the criteria for resourcing the investigation of potential Problems (a prioritisation matrix).
- Ensure there is a sound communication path for Problem Management to publish its findings to the Incident Management team, including workarounds, and details of any pending changes or reasons for refusing a change (i.e too expensive).
Well those are some basics to get you started. There is more to share, and if you ask nicely I will post details on my blog. >>> Go to Beth's blog |
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From Rod - Senior HelpMaster Pro developer Hello HelpMasters!
It has been another busy few months here in the engine room of HelpMaster Pro. Since the v9 release back in December, we've worked on a few maintenance releases, with v9.0.2 just being released late March. This version is the most stable version of HelpMaster Pro ever, so if you've been holding out on upgrading to v9, now is a very good time to jump in.
There are exciting times coming up. We are already testing the next feature release v9.1, which allows staff members to belong to more than one skill group. This exciting new feature opens up more management options, as well visibility, workflow, and reporting capabilities. There is a brand new interface for assigning jobs, and the Workgroup Explorer screen has had a slight make-over. We've also been working hard on the web interface. For further information about 9.1, keep an eye on the HelpMaster Pro website.
Another big thing that's been happening is that we've released a HelpMaster Pro v8 API to one of our clients this week. This API allows the programmatic ability to log jobs. This is a very handy thing to do if you are interested in integrating with other software such as network monitoring tools, SharePoint, or other web based, or email based systems. The plan is to port this into the v9 code base and make it available in the near future. If a HelpMaster Pro API sounds interesting to you, contact PRD Software for further details.
Also, don't forget to check out the new remote/upgrade service PRD Software is now offering. Not only does it offer a fast-track to HelpMaster Pro upgrades, but its a real time-saver when it comes to updating your system.
Finally, please keep your product suggestions coming. It's always great to read a new post in the "Wish list" discussion board. There are some great ideas in there already, so please feel free to stop by and add your own. Check out the wish list here.
Until next time, keep logging those jobs.... |
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PRD Software PO Box 4028, Hawker ACT 2614, Australia Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved. |
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