Blog & Resources

Solution Accelerator – Decision Engine

A few weeks back, we introduced the Cireson Decision Engine, which is in essence, a Solution Accelerator that we use internally by our Professional Services team to help deliver a dynamic experience to our customers in their Service Manager and Orchestrator projects. Below, please find the outline from this presentation as well as the download link for the Decision Engine

Read More »
Cireson Blog Image 4

5 interesting facts you probably don’t know about MS Azure

With the pace of change in Microsoft Azure in the last 24 months and the volume of technical, marketing and other content related to Microsoft and the cloud, there is a lot of interesting information that gets lost in the shuffle. I wanted to share a few bits about the core and History of Microsoft Azure I think you’ll find

Read More »

4 Tips for Optimizing Service Manager 2012 SQL Performance in Azure

If you have not already heard, here at Cireson we recently moved our production System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager (SCSM) + Cireson environment up to Azure. Our motivation was not only technical, but financial. As the saying goes “If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense”. In any case, I know performance of System Center SQL databases is a

Read More »
Learning ALMs

Automated Installation of Cireson Portal or: ALMs for the poor

Brief history & ALMs When I first started with Cireson some months back, we were just wrapping up development on V3 of the self service portal (SSP), and I was tasked with creating the setup program that would make it easy for anybody to install the portal, get version updates, and generally have a good experience in doing so. Obviously,

Read More »

3 Tips from Cireson’s Service Manager 2012 R2 Move to Azure

Moving workloads to Azure to achieve cost savings and performance advances is something you may have heard Microsoft evangelizing in the last few months. Well, here at Cireson, we actually made the jump with our production System Center 2012 R2 Service Manager (SCSM) + Cireson environment. Yes, this is same one we use for all our internal and customer-facing support

Read More »

Disappearing Outlook

I woke up this morning looking forward to getting some work done while everyone else was away to play and ran into an unexpected problem. Apparently while I was sleeping my outlook window decided to play a game of hide and go seek. It was invisible this morning and I was unable to find it or get it to appear

Read More »

CSS, what CAN’T it do for you?

Powerful CSS I’ve been working with a good bit of CSS recently, customizing the Cireson Portal to look quite a bit different than the OOB experience. Some CSS properties are fairly standard, but others are not well-known, or known at all. I’ve picked a few interesting ones to demonstrate just how useful they can be. :before and :after These two

Read More »

Outlook Console: The Underrated Beauty!

Hey, hello, howdy, hi. It’s been a while since the Outlook Console has been released by Cireson, however, I feel like it does not get the recognition it quite deserves – thus, this blog post. Let’s take a second to talk about this sucker, shall we? First, who spends most (if not all) of their work life in Outlook Console? Yes,

Read More »
Understanding Hash Collisions

Hash Collisions

Understanding Hash Collisions A GUID (globally unique identifier) is a 128 bit value that can represent 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique values = that’s 340 undecillion. You can see why programmers use GUIDs as unique identifiers. It would take billions upon billions of years to generate two GUIDs that are the same. A hash is a value that is calculated by running some data (like a GUID) through an algorithm, which

Read More »
Working with asset management

Asset Management: What You Didn’t Consider

Asset Management, the word itself, means something different to every person in the IT department. To the help desk analyst, it’s another clunky system to enter data into. For the IT Director, a knock on their attempt to show IT as an asset to the business. So, what does Asset Management really do? The question is, what does it prevent?

Read More »