Good morning, I thought I'd provide you all with my first impressions on MyIT and SmartIT. Basically, I set up a new development Remedy environment and took a copy of the production database so we'd have a good working proof of concept system. Last week, we installed MyIT and SmartIT and pointed it at this system, then configured a bunch of sample stuff in it. I've only spent less than a week working with it so I'm by no means an expert yet but I know many of you haven't gotten started and it is completely new, non-Remedy technology so you probably have a lot of questions. If you've worked with it before, I'd be interested in seeing your thoughts on it as well.
For a quick executive summary, I like both of the applications a lot, but see a lot of areas ripe for enhancements especially around the integrations with the rest of Remedy. What I wrote is more to help me have a roadmap of where we can take these tools and what outstanding things need to be addressed. Here are my initial thoughts on it having worked with it for a week. Installation: * This ended up going very easily, and it was done in a couple hours. * MyIT and SmartIT are installed together and I didn't really see a good way to install them separately, if we were considering rolling MyIT out first. * I need to further investigate the impact of the User Experience patch that was installed on ITSM but in my initial testing it appears to not break anything. It does install new forms and workflow that help MyIT interact with the rest of ITSM though so there still could be some impact that I haven't found yet. * There are some errors pertaining to a Java library that occur with the install, but apparently they are safe to ignore. * When we do the install, it creates a new database and requires DBA assistance so it's not just using AR System and the Mongo DB. Architecture and Configuration: * The entire thing sits well on a single server, although it idles using up about 4GB of RAM so for further installs I'd like to bump up the RAM before turning it over to many users. * We either need to use SSL or require people to access it via VPN to properly secure it. * It is scalable and uses clustering, but we haven't found a need to test that yet. * The performance is good enough on its own server in the POC environment, however the integration with SRM is slow for some reason. It takes a long time to display the lists of SRDs. * In MyIT, users are stored separately from Remedy, even though they authenticate against Remedy. When a person logs in for the first time, their profile is created. * As a test, I loaded the spreadsheet of all potential users (around 9,000, although maybe 3,000 would use it at most), and I can no longer load the list of users within the console. * There is apparently a defect which I haven't experienced in testing but I was warned about where you can't use MyIT, SmartIT, and the Admin Console for MyIT from the same browser. Supposedly if you load MyIT once, you will only be able to log into MyIT within that browser. * I had to update the memory and garbage collection settings for Tomcat to improve performance and that seemed to help, but the settings weren't terrible out of the box. * BMC's documentation isn't very detailed, so I don't understand in detail how everything fits together. A good example is the Exchange connector, which basically just tells you that it exists, and you have to look elsewhere to find out what values to put in the configuration (e.g. do I put a service account's login or email address?) * We need to find out how to pull the pictures out of Outlook so we can load them into Remedy and MyIT/SmartIT. Otherwise the apps look a bit ugly. * If you don't have some form of Mobile Device Management, deploying the apps may be a problem. I've spoken with someone who has pioneered developing mobile apps in my company's environment, but it's still very much a bleeding edge activity so this activity is going to eat up a lot of time planning for deployment and security of the mobile apps. I don't know why BMC doesn't just let us deploy a file to our users that lets them use the MyIT and SmartIT apps located on the Apple and Google play stores. * I really have no idea of how MongoDB works or what we can do with it yet. It seems to just "exist" and is used for social stuff but there isn't any maintenance or troubleshooting information that I'm aware of as of yet. * The Openfire chat server is similar in that I don't know what needs to be done to maintain or troubleshoot it. MyIT: * There is a another layer of configuration on top of SRM, basically defining new icons and categorizing things whether they are a problem or a request. * The Knowledge Base integration is seamless and works great. * There is no direct integration between the Business Services defined in the CMDB and the Services listed in MyIT. You have to create them all over again in MyIT, and there doesn't appear to be a way using just MyIT and ITSM/Atrium to have outages or major Incidents update the status of a Service in MyIT. I also don't see a way to define support groups to give specific groups the ability to update the status in MyIT officially. * Performance is bad in bringing up the lists of SRM forms available, but seems to cache that list after the first time and runs better. It's the only thing that is slow in my testing so far. * Locations are not tied into Remedy in any way, which kind of makes some sense because of how you configure the locations with pictures, floorplans, etc. You can import from a CSV to get a list though. * There's going to be a need to split up several of our SRM forms because we have taken a very "application-centric" approach to SRM. Basically, where we have applications that have an SRM form to either report an Incident or request a service or enhancement request, we'll need to split those out and tie them to the Service as defined in MyIT. * I've not seen anything that would be similar to the Direct URLs in SRM, so we need to rethink how we direct people to specific requests. I believe this will end our ability to put forms directly linked to on SharePoint and within other applications if SRM is eventually phased out completely. * We have Appzone included, but I don't know if we want to use it. It may compete with what we're doing with SCCM, Citrix, and some of the other initiatives, but I'm not sure. * We need to work closely with our users to identify what we want to use MyIT for. It does a lot more than what we've used SRM for so we need to nail down the scope. * QR code scanning works great, although I don't see any context from it passed on through SRM. For example, every printer (as a type of Asset) has an SRM form that I set up to report paper jams, ink replacement, paper replacement, connectivity issues, etc.) However, it just submits an SRM form, but doesn't copy the Asset Name (in this case the printer's name) into the Incident. * The integration with Exchange is cool, but I don't like how it reserves conference rooms with the Service Account that we're using instead of the person who actually reserved it. That makes it impossible to use it as a fluid way to schedule meetings. * Approvals exist, and we may want to think about what is presented there and how to customize that for Change Requests so people can use it as opposed to emails. * There is a lot of data that needs to be gathered, including: o Locations we want to list in MyIT, including pictures. o Floorplans for each of those locations in an image format at the proper size. o Points of interest (e.g. "Assets") including printers, conference rooms, etc. and pictures where it makes sense. o If we use Appzone, there's additional configuration of apps to make available there. o New SRM forms, and enhancements to existing SRM forms. o Business Services and graphics. * You can import spreadsheets of an extract of some of the Assets from Remedy, but it's not kept in sync. For example, I can't set it up to have a current list of network printers based on the network printers managed in Remedy. * We're going to need to work on a fairly massive advertising campaign to our users to raise awareness, as well as prepare the Service Desk or the MDM team (depending on how we deploy it) to handle support calls and questions about MyIT when we initially deploy it. * The web interface works fine on all browsers, including mobile-based browsers. This will help in cases where the app isn't installed. SmartIT: * Seems to work pretty well and probably won't require a lot of training for I.T. staff. * I'd like to see if there's a way to default to the console instead of the "social" feed, unless there is a way to tailor the feed to be more useful to individuals. However, this may just be my bias because I don't like things like Twitter or Facebook feeds. * We need to see if there's a way to set the Smart Recorder to set the Summary of an Incident automatically based on what was typed in rather than leaving it blank and giving an error every time we use the Smart Recorder. * SmartIT actually feels more complete and polished than MyIT does, probably because it's replicating an existing UI. The only caveat is that we'd treat it as something for people who are on-call or traveling to use since we would potentially release it with only Incident/Work Order/Tasks available. Hopefully Change and Problem Investigations come soon. * There is confusion over whether the patch was released for SmartIT to work on the iPhone. Since I don't use iOS devices, I haven't tested it yet. * There are tablet and phone apps for Android, although I don't currently know the minimum Android version required to run the app. * The web interface works fine on all browsers, including mobile-based browsers. Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.energytransfer.com/mail_disclaimer.aspx . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
