By Dick Stark and Wade Wennik

What’s new with Remedyforce Winter 14?

BMC hosted a Remedyforce Winter 14 preview webinar last week for its customers and partners. Winter 14 adds significant improvements and BMC is making it much easier and quicker for its customers to upgrade. The new release of Remedyforce focuses on the themes of usability, IT productivity, gamification and integration.

Winter 14 brings with it the integration of MyIT, which can cut support costs and boost customer satisfaction enabling the productivity of social collaboration. End users and service desk analysts can view, post and comment on technical issues for peer support or use the One-to-Many channel that lets IT departments help multiple customers in real-time. Service desk staff can also review questions, appointments and requests in the activities stream.

Also new is the IT Staff Console which allows IT staff to access and manage Incidents, Service Requests, Tasks, Problems, Change Requests and Releases from a centralized screen and enables the user to navigate between open records and add attachments to improve communication and information flow. This can reduce the mean time to repair as well as process flow enforcement and accompanying documentation of ITIL best practice in the problem management.

The Winter 14 update also brings with it gamification. This allows management to motivate IT staff with real-time feedback, incentives and rewards to create a more productive team. Winter 14 also has improved customization features. For example, the self-service portal can now be branded, including color customization and imagery. These configurations can be broken out by multiple internal or external audiences (Human Resources, Business Partners or Customers) to create unique experiences.

CMDB enhancements, reconciliation and normalization via BMC Atrium is also available. This allows for simplified reporting, imports, integration and data management. Normalization and reconciliation of asset data imported from the multiple discovery tools including the BMC Atrium enables the management of a single authoritative source of inventory and configuration data in Remedyforce. New Remedyforce customers will now be using CMDB 2.0 data model. Customers upgrading have the choice to migrate to 2.0 or stick with the older data model.

Another new feature is the “Push” updates where customers no longer have to grant access to BMC Support to upgrade their Org. Upgrades can be scheduled for either Sandbox, Production or both. Customers must continue to contact BMC support or their customer success manager to schedule upgrades.

Other Key Integrations Include:

• BMC FootPrints Asset Core
• BMC ADDM & Atrium CMDB
• BMC BladeLogic Client Automation
• Bunchball Gamification
• Cloud Coach Project Management
• OneLogin Identity Management
• Survey Monkey

Availability

BMC has already begun pushing Remedyforce Winter 14 to Sandboxes starting February 23rd and all Sandboxes should have been updated by March 5th. The final production release was Monday, March 24.