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Smart IT Update

RightStar TeamJune 2, 2016

 

The last we blogged with you, we discussed Smart IT 1.1. Since that day, BMC has released 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and is finishing up the early access program for 1.5. While we aren’t allowed to reveal what’s coming in 1.5, we can certainly update you on the cool things in the last few releases! There are more and more reasons to move to Smart IT; here are some of them.

My favorite part of Smart IT these days is Change Management – it walks you through, step by step, how to create a change, instead of just showing you a form and saying “fill it out”. It’s much easier to make sure you didn’t miss any step. You can attach more than 50 configuration items at a time, and there is a mini-change calendar to help highlight collisions as you’re doing the change. Impact Analysis and approvals are available; it’s very well done. Every release has added more functionality to the Change Management part of Smart IT; if you haven’t looked lately, it’s worth checking it out.

While Knowledge articles have been there since 1.1, 1.3.01 added in functionality to support the Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) framework. It now has roles for KCS Coach, KCS Publisher, KCS Contributor, KCS Candidate. And you can use a default set of 7 questions to assess the quality of an article (or build your own)! For those companies getting serious about knowledge management, Smart IT is the way to go.
For the problem managers of the world, Smart IT now supports the Problem Manager role. This was added in 1.3, and now allows the full ITIL cycle of Incident to Problem to Change to happen in Smart IT.

The latest release of Smart IT finally addressed the Asset Manager role – before, you could link configuration items to records, and you could do some editing, but 1.4 expanded the capabilities. There is now an Asset Console; assets can be created now; you can create incidents, work orders and changes from an asset; and you can link assets together. There are also now asset actions to make it easier to perform routine tasks. And all of the releases have continued to add more ease of use to the user experience of Smart IT.

These are just some of the features that have been added to Smart IT! If you’ve been waiting to kick off your Smart IT implementation until there were more personas available – it may be time to launch it!