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.”

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all 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.

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.

February 19, 2010

• File upload memory usage has been optimized
• AMIE support for PostgreSQL sources has been improved
• Attachments to status notes can once again be downloaded
• Hyperlinks can now be used as CI identifiers with clickable links
• 64 x 64 Icons will now render the entire icon in relationship maps
• Knowledge base article content may once again contain HTML tags
• Uploading files with internationalized names now decode correctly
• Internationalized PDF exports now correctly render Turkish characters
• Emails from LiveTime will include the status in the subject line
• Show all services admin option for customer portal now works as expected
• Knowledge base proposals in the request analysis tab will now be pageable
• Emails to SMS providers will now contain only a subject with a blank body
• Corrected various issues surrounding performance optimizations made in 6.0.2
• License usage now correctly reports service request processes and base license usage
• Review Dates for Knowledge Base Articles can now be set if RFC controls are enabled
• Using the calendar on a custom field in the customer portal will no longer cause page scrolls
• SLA Reporting for defined working hours now correctly factor closed time into the calculations
• Added Norwegian translation

Detailed Release Notes 6.0.3 - 239.76 KB pdf

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 20, 2010

• Various localization corrections
• Added support for native French translation
• Various performance enhancements to reduce memory footprint with high concurrency
• Improved performance of background maintenance tasks
• LiveTime will send a single email on close of a request
• Auto-close quick calls will now send solutions
• SLA Reports now correctly factor in non-work hours
• Various changes to Survey publishing to the correct audiences
• Group attachments will now remove from requests on deletion
• Various changes to license validation of user role additions and deletions
• Performance tuning of queries used to display customer item and request lists
• Email attachments to received emails will no longer appear with a blank filename
• Email attachments with a file name of a particular charset will now decode correctly
• Knowledge Management RFC’s will no longer cause errors when accepting the change
• Solutions published for a specific request will no longer be proposed for similar requests
• Web Services calls will no longer fail due to incorrect firing of custom field value validation
• Quick Call Editor will now show items that are uncontracted and determine usability at run time
• Request object reports will now include an ‘Unassigned’ value for Requests objects that are in the queue

Detailed Release Notes 6.0.2 - 237.3 KB pdf

Newport Beach – December 14, 2005 - LiveTime Software, a leading provider of Java-based Customer Service and Support software, today announced the availability of LiveTime Help Desk version 3.7 and LiveTime Support Desk version 3.7. The introduction of project management, invoicing wizards, and knowledge management workflows, combined with significant performance enhancements make this a significant release for all users.

Projects allow complex sets of incidents to be managed via a single master entity. Each project consists of a collection of incidents that need to be individually managed and resolved before a project can be closed. A typical example is a new hire request, which can trigger a series of events such as a new email account, new workstation, training etc. This would present as a series of separate incidents to be completed by different teams before the project is completed. In addition, project templates can be defined to streamline the creation of these tasks in the future, so that each time a new staff member is hired, a project can be created instantly.

The process of raising and editing invoice items and contracts has also been streamlined through the use of wizards. Access to relevant service level agreements, items, incidents and purchase orders has been simplified with new navigational controls. Finance users also have access to an intuitive payment and delivery process, and incidents that are not covered by a valid maintenance contract are now clearly flagged in the system.

Additional Enhancements

• Significant single server and clustered server performance improvements to support hundreds of concurrent users
• Client and Item searches now permit searching on custom fields. In addition, all global items can be flagged for easy identification
• Users are now able to fast track the creation of new item category templates by cloning existing templates
• Business managers can now receive notification of escalation events by registering with an incidents circulation list
• New audit reports
• Expanded LDAP/ADS functionality includes support for ADS/LDAP over SSL for additional security
• Knowledge base articles now include an audit history and rollback facility together with integrated approvals process