By Dick Stark

Last Tuesday, RightStar hosted a Webinar, “What’s New in BMC Remedyforce Summer 16.” Remedyforce just keeps providing more value. One perfect example is that agentless discovery is now part of Remedyforce The new release of Remedyforce allows users to discover assets and pull them into the CMDB, at no extra cost!

Agentless Discovery. We pointed out that agentless discovery was “borrowed” from BMC’s Client Manager, formerly Asset Core, and “if you want the other pieces, for example software license management, patching, compliance management, and financial management, users can look at the premium and premium plus options.” Agentless discovery offers an excellent value for those organizations looking to get started with configuration management. What else is new?

Service Health. This is a new self-service tab that allows organizations to display health of business services to the rest of the organization (its end-users). It shows both the current health and future planned outages. Similar to the broadcast function, end-users can check out that status of business services, rather than calling the help desk or submitting a ticket. (A service like this would have been helpful for me when returning from Atlanta on Thursday. Trying to check the status of my flight, I was very surprise to discover that the Southwest web site was down with no indication of why or when service would be restored. The outage was not just confined to the website–we boarded the airplane with the gate agent checking off our names manually with a highlighter, just like what airlines did this in the 1960s.)

Smart Suggestions for Self Service. Similar to Remedy’s Smart IT, Smart Suggestions helps customers and clients find the information they need more quickly based on their ask or need. Smart Suggestions extends to self-service broadcasts, knowledge articles, common tickets, and service requests.

How does this work? When the end-user starts to type in the issue, “suggestions” pop-up so the end-user can try to resolve their own issue. This is especially useful for specific organizational applications that may not be available using a google search.

Make Surveys Pop. Customer satisfaction may be the most important metric for the service desk, and surveys should be completed not by a fair cross-section of users, not just the angry ones. So, rather than the old style with just a list of questions, the new survey allows users to slide a bar, with more colors, making the response time even faster.

Mobile for Self Service. End-users now have access to the Salesforce1mobile app. The prior beta release allowed submission of incidents and knowledge article viewing only. Now, end-users may view broadcasts, respond to approval, and create and update incidents. What makes the app so easy—it works for both end-users and service desk staff.

One feature that is only available on the mobile app is CIs and Assets. Now users can see what applications, e.g., SAP, and assets, e.g., Dell laptop they are associated with or assigned to.

Finally, what about availability? BMC began pushing Remedyforce Summer 16 to Sandboxes on July 15 with the production push on August 12.