I am currently at the WWRUG10 conference in Las Vegas. The WWRUG (World Wide Remedy User Group) is a community gathering around the Remedy tools and applications provided by BMC. This is the first time I am attending the RUG and I hope to be able to attend again in the future. Two persons have attended all of the RUGS and several have attended ten times or more. My guess is that around a quarter of us are here for the first time ever.
One new "cool" thing presented was an iPad version of the SRM interface. Some think this is great and I just wonder, Why?. Who needs to order stuff from their iPad, if you have one? I would see a larger need to have an interface for incidents and tasks for technicians on the run. Then even iPad is a bit bulky and you would need access with your Android/iOS/webOS/whateverOS smart phone. Maybe I am just confused about this new iPad product? We will see in a short future what it will become.
I was hoping to post blog entries at least once a day when I am here but I don't have Internet access. Now I am able to borrow a computer with Internet access so I can post this entry. I will write something more when I get home again.
2010-10-21
2010-07-02
Work party - Midnight bath
Some of us took a bath in the pool. I didn't because I forgot my bathing suit. :P
2010-07-01
Work party - Mosquitos
The sun is down but the mosquitoes are still up with us. This stuff is helping some but not much... Some more beer and we will not notice... Raj raj!
Work summer party
Once a year in the beginning of the summer my customers boss is inviting us all to his home. There he and his wife are treating us with food and drinks. Good customer!
2010-06-17
Project party - First beer
We are done with the BMC ITSM 7.6 upgrade project. It was a huge success so now we have to celebrate. This is the first beer at the local pub close to work.
2010-05-25
2010-04-23
Windows Installer for SRM 7.6
I am just about to upgrade our BMC Service Request Management 2.2 patch 4 to SRM 7.6 patch 1. It should be a straight forward upgrade. I will install everything on the D-drive and I've deleted stuff so I have at least 2 GB free space. On the C-drive we have only the Windows operating system and we are not allowed to install anything else on the C-drive.
I start the installation but it halts before the actual installation starts with a message that I need to free up space on the C-drive for temporary 1500 MB data and it is only 1376 MB space available.
WTF! I have nothing to free up on the C-drive. Can't I use some network drive for temporary storage during the installation? Or use the 8GB memory that is mostly unused at the moment? Quite often I wish we were using Unix/Linux instead of this toy-OS called Windows.
See you later... now I have to call some Windows-tech to help me expand the C-drive or whatever they do.
I start the installation but it halts before the actual installation starts with a message that I need to free up space on the C-drive for temporary 1500 MB data and it is only 1376 MB space available.
WTF! I have nothing to free up on the C-drive. Can't I use some network drive for temporary storage during the installation? Or use the 8GB memory that is mostly unused at the moment? Quite often I wish we were using Unix/Linux instead of this toy-OS called Windows.
See you later... now I have to call some Windows-tech to help me expand the C-drive or whatever they do.
2010-03-18
2010-03-03
New BMC Home Page?
We have the standard out of the box stuff with links to the left and a huge empty blue void on the right side. I want to build something useful on that empty space but so far there have not been enough of a business need for that.
Then one of the consultants mention that he saw this new cool Home Page in arslist. So I dug down and found it. Yes it is cool and you can see it in the picture here. But as I understand it, this is nothing that you will get out of the box, this is an example of what you can build with the technology that BMC will release in mid 2010.
It looks cool but then the question for me will be... Will my company find a business need for me to let me build something like this for them? Probably not, because we are aiming really hard at buying more and more applications out of the box and not customizing anything. Everything should be configurable.
This is both good and bad...
Bad because I will not be developing as much as before.
Good because it will force me to change career. ;)
2010-01-26
E-mail support with humor
I am maintaining a BMC AR-System environment with ITSM applications supporting ITIL applications including Incident, Problem and Change. This system is sending out a lot of e-mail notifications to all the users. Quite often the end user reporting an incident answers the receipt e-mail asking questions or sending additional feedback. Very often the system just receives autoreplies about the users being on vacation or on paternity leave.
The autoreplies we don't care about but the questions and feedback can be interesting to pay attention to. I want to build some workflow to filter out the interesting stuff and attach to the relevant ticket in the system or automatically deal with them in some other way in the cases where it is not possible to find the corresponding ticket. So far I didn't get the permission to do this development.
Instead I was asked to set up an autoreply in the exchange account for every incoming e-mail that comes from within the company. In this autoreply we are just going to inform the end user that they've sent an e-mail to a system and no person will read the e-mail and that they should send the e-mail to some support address.
So I did, but I was a little bit concerned that Exchange was not smart enough to deal with the auto-replies from end users on vacation. If our system sends an e-mail to a user on vacation and and the users e-mail account sends an auto-reply to our system that send an auto-reply back to the user that sends an auto-reply again and so on... You get the picture. It will become like a ping pong match.
I sent an e-mail to our e-mail support group asking about the risk of an ping pong match. I really liked their answer.
"Usually Exchange is smart enough to not start a ping pong match that it can not win. But occasionally it can happen that they get excited and someone smashes in a backhand volley."
OK it didn't wipe away all of my concerns, but still I really like to see some humor at work. :)
The autoreplies we don't care about but the questions and feedback can be interesting to pay attention to. I want to build some workflow to filter out the interesting stuff and attach to the relevant ticket in the system or automatically deal with them in some other way in the cases where it is not possible to find the corresponding ticket. So far I didn't get the permission to do this development.
Instead I was asked to set up an autoreply in the exchange account for every incoming e-mail that comes from within the company. In this autoreply we are just going to inform the end user that they've sent an e-mail to a system and no person will read the e-mail and that they should send the e-mail to some support address.
So I did, but I was a little bit concerned that Exchange was not smart enough to deal with the auto-replies from end users on vacation. If our system sends an e-mail to a user on vacation and and the users e-mail account sends an auto-reply to our system that send an auto-reply back to the user that sends an auto-reply again and so on... You get the picture. It will become like a ping pong match.
I sent an e-mail to our e-mail support group asking about the risk of an ping pong match. I really liked their answer.
"Usually Exchange is smart enough to not start a ping pong match that it can not win. But occasionally it can happen that they get excited and someone smashes in a backhand volley."
OK it didn't wipe away all of my concerns, but still I really like to see some humor at work. :)
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