Budgets have been steadily decreasing in IT for years. This has forced a single service desk analyst to complete a level of work that multiple headcount would have been asked to do in the past. What’s more, service desk teams are adapting to working almost exclusively from home and are being asked to support an increasing number of remote workers

[Article Updated on 4/15/20] If you haven’t heard, on October 13th, 2020, Microsoft is ending support for Basic Authentication in Office 365. This is done as part of a shift to the more-secure OAuth 2.0 authentication method and will help reduce the chances that credentials can end up in the wrong hands. More information can be found in Microsoft’s post

On-premise software has more than it’s a fair share of issues, due to all the varied types of hardware and software it is mixed with depending on the customer, this in comparison to cloud software that is always running in the same environment and on a small set of web browsers. With this in mind, you are bound to run

When working with Service Manager, and specifically with the Cireson Service Manager Portal, it’s essential that you can access as much information as possible. When you are troubleshooting a customer ticket, there should always be a sense of urgency with remote support, because an employee or customer typically will not take the time to enter a ticket if it’s not

Introduction: The dashboard challenge I love leveraging dashboards to track and monitor activities and measures. The Cireson Portal dashboard provides flexibility in layout, content, and datasources to show information in real-time within the Portal application. On my dashboard I have been working with two charts; Tickets Closed and Tickets Created. These charts share the same axis type but I’d really

User Accounts and Groups Checklist Worksheet When installing Microsoft System Center Service Manager, there are a lot of things to consider to make sure the install goes well and will be easy to modify in the weeks, months and years to come.  In order to maintain a secure, stable and maintainable SCSM environment, it’s important that all required user accounts

Search is a very important aspect of any Service Portal, and as such is one of the most used functions. With this in mind, we wanted to improve the search, all without losing the things that made it valuable in the first place. This is where we came up with the idea for a global search, and it’s largely been

Do you currently run System Center Service Manager (SCSM) and are you looking to upgrade your existing SCSM environment to the latest 2019 version? Or, are you looking at using SCSM 2019 as your ITSM platform because your organization is already paying for it as part of your Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA)?  It can be a daunting task, as SCSM is a very

The Problem.  I started looking into this issue once a few customers had reported it and wanted to see if there was a solution, so what was the problem? Well, adding these 2 fields to a custom portal form in the portal requires you to put the property name on the portal form. The property name is the target name

As a consultant with Cireson, I am often engaged with customers regarding SCSM Service Requests. The first things we discuss during these engagements are the most important factors to be successful. In this article we will talk in depth about the following factors: Not knowing where to start Trying to do too much Service Catalog navigation Not Knowing Where to Start  Where do we start when it comes

The focus of this discussion is how to use Business Services (as they are called in SCSM) to greatly enhance and automate your SCSM Change Management implementation.  If you haven’t had a chance to read our previous blog about creating an ITIL Change Management Checklist (which includes best practices to avoid common pitfalls), I highly suggest giving it a read, as it is a great starting point and