By Dick Stark

On Thursday, RightStar hosted a RightStar webinar, “See What’s New in BMC Remedyforce Spring 15.” Remedyforce continues to improve and BMC is making it much easier and quicker for its customers to upgrade.  Because of competition Remedyforce just keeps providing more value. One perfect example is Smart Suggestions.  Just like Remedy’s Smart IT, knowledge articles, templates, and broadcasts are automatically and intuitively suggested.

With Smart Suggestions enabled, help desk analysts have a quick and easy access to relevant information while working on an incident in the Remedyforce console. Analysts can view suggested knowledge articles, broadcasts, and templates that might be relevant to the record. They can browse the suggested knowledge articles, broadcasts, and templates, and link relevant records to the incident. The smart suggestions are displayed based on the description and category of the working record.  The obvious benefit is in the time it takes to resolve an issue, which translates to real dollar savings.  Other new features include:

• Service Request Definition (SRD) Enhancements. The wizard to create SRD has been improved to make it easier for administrators to set up and create SRDs.
• Remedyforce CMDB enhancements.
• Segregation of incidents and service requests.
• Remedyforce console enhancements.
• New reports. Eleven new out-of-the-box reports are now available.
• Remedyforce Configuration Data Integrity Tool. A new tool which has been added in to help administrators identify active templates, request definitions, suggested owners, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that reference data in other objects that has been deleted. For example, an administrator might have created a template that sets the assigned user to “Allen User,” but since the template was defined, “Allen User is no longer with the company. The tool uses the Remedyforce Utility Service to run a batch job daily at 12 AM to identify these impacted records. If an impacted record is found, an email with the Remedyforce Configuration Data Integrity report is sent to Remedyforce Administrators (users for whom the Remedyforce Administrator check box is selected.) This report lists active records that are impacted by deleted, modified, or unused (inactive) records in other objects

Finally, what about availability?  BMC began pushing Remedyforce Spring 15 to Sandboxes starting June 7 and all Production ORGs should be updated by the middle of July.