LiveTime has some exciting new features and a host of new UI enhancements that we know are going to blow you away. Here are just a few…

Relationship Impact Map LiveTime has introduced a new multi-level relationship map so Technicians can readily see the impact of an outage and related infrastructure directly within the CMDB or the request itself. As the information is dynamically updated by third party monitoring tools Technicians will see a view of the entire business and it’s related services. ITSM Relationship Map Multisource LDAP Multiple LDAP connections allows organizations with different authentication servers in various locations and timezones to synchronize with LiveTime, providing a federated source of Service Desk Customers and Technicians. Line Manager Approvals The introduction of line manager approvals for Service and Change Requests. By associating line managers with Customers, when a Request is logged that requires management approval prior to processing, the Request can be automatically routed to the appropriate manager for approval. For service organizations that propose changes and updates to their customers’ environments, customers will have the ability to approve or reject work proposed by the service provider.

Workflow Map Another big change relates to the workflow editor which is more interactive and fully animated allowing technicians and customers to see exactly where they are in the entire process and the next steps available. Workflow Map Scheduled Reporting The ability to configure scheduled reports across User Groups. Within the Administrator Portal, out-of-the-box and custom-built reports can be selected and scheduled for automatic emailing to Supervisor, Manager, Technician, Finance and Administrator Users, ensuring User relevant data is sent on a regular basis. The Custom Report Builder also includes functional enhancements. Process Switching For Service Desks with Request Fulfillment and Incident Management, requests that are generated as an Incident can be readily toggled to a Service Request, and vice versa, while maintaining one identification number. This means customer correspondence will be more easily managed and the request’s history available within a single audit trail. Knowledge Import The capability to import Knowledge Base Articles using a .CSV file, providing service organizations with the convenience of importing large amounts of information stored in external sources with a single file. Planned Outages Map Users will also notice the capability to create Planned Outages for Multiple Items. Users will be able to easily traverse the relationship map to see all infrastructure that is to be related to the Planned Outage and apply the improved notifications to update Customers accordingly.

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all current customers. These releases guarantee that LiveTime customers have access to the most reliable and secure production version of its service management tool. The updates are optional for customers using the virtual appliance and automatically applied to all SaaS customers. LiveTime’s service and support team will notify any organizations that are possibly affected by software bugs addressed in the latest release, and provide assistance with the upgrade process.

January 13, 2012

Miscellaneous

• Various issues with Item CSV imports have been corrected
• The rich text editor is now compatible with the Norwegian Bokmål locale
• Login page localization issue when using Internet Explorer has been resolved
• SLA Timezones will now correctly updated when editing multiple SLAs consecutively
• Internal SLA Action dates (escalations and notifications) have been further refined
• Various performance enhancements have been made to the customer portal
• AD/LDAP post synchronization report will once again be formatted correctly
• AD/LDAP import of email aliases will now work correctly for new users
• Customer web service has been modified to better cope with org unit assignment
• Resolved event calendar issue when using Oracle and Sybase Enterprise databases

Detailed Release Notes 6.5.5 - 267.83 kB pdf

CBN ran a number of disparate commercial and home grown ticketing systems which lacked the business intelligence and processes needed across the entire organization. With so many systems to manage already CBN was looking to consolidate on a system that not only provided the requisite systems integration, but was also low maintenance.

LiveTime’s hardware appliance was the perfect solution, that was not only plug and play, but also provided the performance and security expected by CBN. A major advantage for LiveTime was the extensible Web Services API and pre-integration to existing infrastructure and services without the need for programmers.

For such a large organization it was challenging for CBN to find a solution to consolidate across all divisions with multiple layers of security and authentication providers. LiveTime was able to provide a unique solution using SSO to consolidate the business units and provide seamless access from within the organization and from any mobile device, including native iPhone and iPad clients.

Finally, LiveTime’s intuitive and context sensitive user interface made it easy for users to consume and develop services across multiple divisions while still working in a collegiate atmosphere within the product. An additional bonus was that the software seamlessly supported multiple languages. In this case it was important that users could use French or English interfaces just by changing the locale of the browser.

The ICT team was struggling with email integration and communications with users. Previously, support staff were required to copy and paste information from emails into call logs, posing a significant drain on productivity.

For the cost of support and maintenance of HP OpenView NHS was able to replace the entire system with Novell Service Desk.

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all current customers. These releases guarantee that LiveTime customers have access to the most reliable and secure production version of its service management tool. The updates are optional for customers using the virtual appliance and automatically applied to all SaaS customers. LiveTime’s service and support team will notify any organizations that are possibly affected by software bugs addressed in the latest release, and provide assistance with the upgrade process.

November 14, 2011

Requests

• Notification for queued requests generated from the customer portal will also send to the team leader
• Quickcall templates set to use a deleted technician will now cause the assignment logic to execute
• Changing the Item from Unknown will recalculate the request due date
• Duplicating an escalated request will now assign to the correct layer
• Viewing the full note content will now show the Author, along with the time & date the note was entered
• Replying to notes will now apply the email options correctly

Email

• Notes with no notification options set will save correctly irrespective of notification settings
• The ‘No Account’ message will now appear to come from the team to which it was sent
• The ‘No Contract’ message will now include the the request summary table

Miscellaneous

• The 3 vacation limit per 6 days will now be applied correctly
• Invoice Unit Count will no longer contain incorrect 0 unit counts
• Service Achievement by Technician report will no longer give an error when executed
• Creating items will work correctly when old SLA’s are assigned
• Creating customers via .NET web services will now work as expected
• Public Knowledge Template content will now apply the message contained in the Content section

Detailed Release Notes 6.5.4 - 266.46 kB pdf

Newport Beach, CA – Nov 2, 2011 – LiveTime Software, a leading provider of On-Premise and SaaS based Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today announced the immediate availability of the LiveTime virtual appliance for public and private clouds. This solution enables any organization to deploy a complete ITSM cloud in minutes. This touch-less solution provides access to all updates for seamless upgrades.

Available immediately for VMware and soon other virtualization architectures, any organization can provide best practice service management according to 11 ITIL v3 processes. The appliance includes support for symmetric multiprocessing for optimal performance across virtualized CPU’s and supports 64bit native architectures that can scale to meet any workload.

LiveTime’s virtual appliance includes built-in debugging, configuration and management utilities. Simple guided menus provide easy access to networking, monitoring and general system utilities. The menu driven environment also supports migration from other systems and SSL out of the box.

Organizations can now leverage LiveTime’s highly scalable ITIL Service Management software with the ease of the cloud. The appliance provides the necessary scalability and security that is difficult to achieve when deployed on existing hardware and operating systems. Since the system has been hardened at the operating system layer, LiveTime provides Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) for its needs. This makes the system easy to update and maintain with a very small footprint.

Based on HTML5 open standards, LiveTime is a cloud based ITSM solution used by many global 2000 companies such as Lockheed Martin, Verizon, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, and Disney. LiveTime ITSM solutions support any enterprise and comes pre-integrated to all major asset management, LDAP, AD and SSO providers. LiveTime is available on demand as Software as a Service (SaaS), traditional on premise software, virtual or hardware appliance.

Challenge

Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust needed to increase the scale and scope of its helpdesk, to support a large increase in staff from the acquisition of several new services. The Trust needed to ensure that existing and new users spread across its many departments received well-integrated support.

The ICT team was struggling with email integration and communications with users. Previously, support staff were required to copy and paste information from emails into call logs, posing a significant drain on productivity.

“We wanted a solution that would automatically email users to keep them informed about the status of their support requests, and that could also automatically log calls and generate the relevant actions based on incoming emails,” said Tristan David, Head of ICT for Oxleas.

The Trust had previously been using HP OpenView, but found the solution too complex for its requirements and the software hard to configure and use. Having reached the end of vendor support, Oxleas took the opportunity to review other options that could better fit its requirements.

Solution

Oxleas wanted a solution that was easy to use and configure, and one that would integrate efficiently with its existing infrastructure. The Trust chose Novell Service Desk from LiveTime Software as a fully integrated service management tool to streamline and automate its IT support function.

“Novell Service Desk is very easy to use and to develop, so we felt that it was the best choice for the future,” said Tristan David. “The solution makes it easy to create automated workflows, and this is helping us to make much more effective use of email in our communications with users.”

Another selling point was Novell Service Desk’s modern Web 2.0 interface, which allows users to access the system via any web browser or mobile device without plugins. This makes it easy to create powerful self-service portals for users and allows both technicians and users to check the status on support calls and update them immediately from wherever they are.

Oxleas’ service desk manager was closely involved in the selection of the solution, and was highly impressed with its functionality. “She is very enthusiastic about the capabilities of Novell Service Desk, in particular around the potential it offers for future development and integration with Novell ZENworks,” said Tristan David. “When full integration is enabled in the near future, it will be even easier for the team to build a more responsive and automated support infrastructure.”

Finally, there was an important commercial aspect to the decision. For the same cost as bringing the previous solution back into support and adding the licences it needed, Oxleas was able to deploy a completely new Novell Service Desk environment that offers greater ease of use and more benefits.

“There would have been a significant cost involved in bringing the existing system up to the standard we needed and adding additional licences. In terms of pricing, Novell offered a very attractive solution,” said Tristan David.

Results

For Oxleas, two of the most important new capabilities offered by Novell Service Desk are its easy-to-use workflow engine and web-based self-service portals, which have vastly improved the team’s ability to communicate with users.

“One of our users’ most frequent complaints was that they didn’t know what was going on,” said Tristan David. “With Novell Service Desk, they can see which technician has been assigned to their call and can follow the progress through to resolution. Our experience in other areas tells us that users really like this kind of self-service approach.”

The team at Oxleas was able to seamlessly integrate Novell Service Desk into its existing infrastructure, and will soon be able to fully integrate it with its Novell ZENworks environment. This will deliver major benefits in terms of service automation and improved transparency.

The Novell solution includes built-in call timers, giving supervisors a clearer view of performance and enabling a more structured analysis of the effectiveness of existing processes. There are also plans to develop network monitoring tools that will log support calls automatically via email, so that the network team can respond even before the user is necessarily aware that there’s a fault.

Additionally, Novell Service Desk provides highly effective, user-friendly service management that enables technicians at Oxleas to work faster and more efficiently, and allows them to ultimately focus on core business tasks. As technicians can now check for new support calls while they are off-site, they can potentially resolve emerging issues on the spot, leading to less downtime for users.

“Novell Service Desk makes it faster and easier to provide technical support,” said Tristan David. “In practice, this translates into rapid resolution for our users, improved service and reduced day-to-day support costs, which helps us to improve patient care.”

LiveTime 6.5 includes more than 100 new features and 200 customer requests and represents the industry’s first HTML 5 based ITSM solution. The main themes of this release were Reporting, Localization and Tenancy. LiveTime now includes a custom report builder for designing any report, supplementing LiveTime’s extensive array of existing reports. These reports can be shared with other roles within the system and inserted into the menu for quick access. Please refer to the starter guide for examples of building your own reports.

In addition, this release is fully localized in 11 languages, including a spellchecker and new Rich Text Editor. It also includes an editor to modify key terms throughout the application and across each locale. Lastly, LiveTime has now added Multi-Tenancy across all partner roles so that MSP’s can use a single instance of LiveTime to provide support across multiple organizations as if each had their own service management solution. This includes full rollup to the master organization when using leveraged technicians.

For a description of other new features please refer to the what’s new page.

Service Updates

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all current customers. These releases guarantee that LiveTime customers have access to the most reliable and secure production version of its service management tool. The updates are optional for customers using the virtual appliance and automatically applied to all SaaS customers.

LiveTime’s service and support team will notify any organizations that are possibly affected by software bugs addressed in the latest release, and provide assistance with the upgrade process.

October 11, 2011

Contracts & SLA’s

• Request due dates will no longer be set ‘after hours’ when exiting an ‘on-hold’ state
• SLA’s will now validate that that the support hours are not ‘closed’ for every day
• SLA Targets editor enhanced to prevent the rare case of presenting the user with duplicates

Email

• Notes with no notification options set will save correctly irrespective of notification settings
• The ‘No Account’ message will now appear to come from the team to which it was sent
• The ‘No Contract’ message will now include the the request summary table

Requests

• Partner visibility of requests has been further refined to apply to grouped requests
• It is now possible to search for requests by the first name of the customer
• My Tasks search screen will now only show ‘Workflows’ if a process is selected
• It is now possible to search for queued requests within a team with the queue enabled
• ‘Open’ Date & Open Time will now base themselves around opening hours of the SLA

Miscellaneous

• The iPhone Dashboard will now correctly render when LiveTime is run against a SQL Server database
• Customer portal self-help contents are once again sorted by search relevance, rather than age
• CTI ‘LookupCustomer’ will now also find technicians that have the customer role
• Attachment tab in the Item Details screen now shows the number of attachments
• Refinements made to enhance indexing performance and file management
• Out of office email subject line parsing is no longer case sensitive

Detailed Release Notes 6.5.3 - 274.09 kB pdf

Newport Beach, CA – September 29, 2011 – LiveTime Software, a leading provider of On-Premise and SaaS based Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today announced the release of LiveTime Run Book Automation to its HTML5 based ITSM solution. Customers can now provide complete orchestration of their business processes directly from the service desk according to ITIL best practices.

Runbook automation provides a valuable opportunity for all organizations to reduce costs. LiveTime’s addition of Run Book Automation will improve processes, and ensure consistent control and coordination across tools and systems.

While point tools have specific uses, they do not necessarily follow any business process or workflow. Many times this can lead to conflict and therefore execution failures. LiveTime’s flexible Web Services API makes it possible to build processes and procedures directly from within the UI and design custom scripts to interface with other tools to ensure execution along a defined process and workflow.

Runbook Automation ensures:
- Tool execution follows a defined business process
- Task execution does not conflict with other systems or procedures
- Rapid response and execution of common tasks
- Fulfillment is possible by non IT personnel, such as a new user request by HR.

Based on HTML5 open standards, LiveTime is a cloud based ITSM solution used by many global 2000 companies such as Lockheed Martin, Verizon, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, and Disney. Solutions are available as on demand Software as a Service (SaaS) or traditional on premise software, virtual and hardware appliances.

LiveTime 6.5 includes more than 100 new features and 200 customer requests and represents the industry’s first HTML 5 based ITSM solution. The main themes of this release were Reporting, Localization and Tenancy. LiveTime now includes a custom report builder for designing any report, supplementing LiveTime’s extensive array of existing reports. These reports can be shared with other roles within the system and inserted into the menu for quick access. Please refer to the starter guide for examples of building your own reports.

In addition, this release is fully localized in 11 languages, including a spellchecker and new Rich Text Editor. It also includes an editor to modify key terms throughout the application and across each locale. Lastly, LiveTime has now added Multi-Tenancy across all partner roles so that MSP’s can use a single instance of LiveTime to provide support across multiple organizations as if each had their own service management solution. This includes full rollup to the master organization when using leveraged technicians.

For a description of other new features please refer to the what’s new page.

Service Updates

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all current customers. These releases guarantee that LiveTime customers have access to the most reliable and secure production version of its service management tool. The updates are optional for customers using the virtual appliance and automatically applied to all SaaS customers.

LiveTime’s service and support team will notify any organizations that are possibly affected by software bugs addressed in the latest release, and provide assistance with the upgrade process.

September 13, 2011

This is a security release of LiveTime 6.5 and is recommended for all users.

Security

• The login page prompting for a logout of an existing session returned the password in the html

HTML 5 Compatibility

• Various issues relating to HTML 5 element name clashes have been resolved
• Fixed compatibility with IE7 and IE8 and Rich Text Editor

Contracts

• ‘Support hours by month’ contract type correctly handles the rollover day chosen by the user

Email & Notes

• Replies when adding notes to closed requests no longer strip formatting from returned content
• Audit trails relating to proposed solutions have been tidied up and now accurately report recipients
• Item assignment using subject line tokens will correctly identify alphanumeric item numbers
• The bulk incident editor allows notes to be added to grouped requests
• Sending a message to only the Technician CC will be processed correctly
• System generated emails in response to note additions now function as they did in v6.2

Localization

• Object summary tables are now provided for all languages
• Database selection screen now has a localized version of the ‘cannot open connection’ message

Detailed Release Notes 6.5.2 - 262.31 kB pdf