Software Request Approvals Made Easy
At Cireson, we’re constantly innovating to bring new features and functionality to our products with the goal of making everyone’s life within the support stack easier and more productive. We collaborate with our customers and the community to identify ways to provide Support Teams with the tools to deliver the fastest and most comprehensive Incident Resolution possible.
Cireson Remote Support is really what we see as the next iteration of this goal. It integrates with our existing products for Microsoft Service Manager, as well as other Service Desks including ServiceNow, Cherwell, ivanti, BMC and more. Levearing Microsoft Configuration Manager (SCCM), Remote Support brings powerful and secure remote support tools to the lowest tiers of the support organization.
Today I’m going to showcase a new feature, Software Request Approvals, that was recently released.
Introducing: Software Request Approvals for Remote Support
One of the key functionalities within SCCM is its the ability to deploy software. There are many ways to do this within the SCCM Console, ranging from complicated to very complicated. Within Remote Support, we offer the software deployment app which helps to simplify this process. In addition to this app, we’ve come out with a new way to quickly and easily approve software requests, levearing SCCM’s Software Center functionality.
This is how a user requests an application from Software Center:
Currently, when a user requests an application within Software Center that requires approval, it goes into a nested list within the SCCM Console. This is easy to miss, and there are limited configurable event notifications.
The cumbersome software request approvals experience leads a lot of customers to avoid using this functionality. With Remote Support, our aim is to bring this list to the forefront and delegate the approval process within the Support Team. By making this functionality more accessible to the support organization as a whole, we’re able to streamline the process and deliver faster resolution for end users and avoid unncessary support escalations.
In order to accomplish this, we decided to use a core navigation link and an easy to read approval list. Take a look:
As you can see from the above screenshot, we’ve made it very easy to navigate and identify what needs to be approved. This grid is also configurable, searchable, and filterable to your needs. We’ve included actions on the right-hand side to make it easy to approve a request, but you can click on the left-hand column for more information on the request as well.
Once you are on the request details page, you can easily access the Actions tab and from there, you are able to easily Approve or Deny the request.
Once the request has been approved (or denied), the status will be made available within Configuration Manager and passed forward to the user so that the next phase of the process (assuming it was approved) can continue.
Role-Based Permissions
One key part of the Software Request Approvals functionality is the permissions layer that we are providing over the top of what is available within Configuration Manager. While we support the basic Configuration Manager RBAC, we also provide the option to overlay more specific permissions to the application interface, allowing you to safely delegate down to lower tiers of your Team.
Summary
Wrapping things up, let’s take a quick look at the new functionality:
- As a end user, you can utilize SCCM’s Software Center to request new software that has been made available but requires approval
- As an Analyst, you can now easily view, approve, or deny software requests from within Remote Support
- As an Administrator, you can delegate software approval down to the level your company policy requires
All of these things together help to get your users back into the fight as quickly as possible, closing tickets, and avoiding the costs of unncessary escalations.
