Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

April 2022

VXLAN vs VLAN: a Definitive Guide

With the widespread adoption of cloud technology, data centers play a huge role in running key applications and business processes for organizations around the world. In 2022, the IT spending on data centers is expected to be $227 billion, and $237 billion by 2023. To run these datacenters profitably and deliver quality service to their customers, organizations are constantly trying to squeeze out maximum performance from the hardware.

5 Steps to Ensure Your ITSM Practice is Up to ITIL Standards

Ever since it was first introduced, ITIL has become one of the leading frameworks for IT service management. With its clearly defined processes and services as well as logical distribution of roles and responsibilities, ITIL has helped organizations streamline their IT process and deliver value to stakeholders. The framework has helped organizations in their digital transformation by bringing together the stakeholder’s vision and the IT department's implementation.

Mental Health and the Service Desk: How Leaders Can Safeguard Their Teams

The COVID-19 crisis has changed the way we live and work forever. It’s been a rough few years and one of the things that we’re still not sure of is its full impact on mental health. So many IT professionals went to extreme and heroic lengths to keep systems up and running during the pandemic.

Your Guide to Picking the Best Incident Management Software

“Expect the best but prepare for the worst” is more than a cliché; it's solid operational advice. And that’s why the incident management software you choose will spell the difference between things running smoothly after a hiccup, or you scrambling to get everything back together after it goes down in flames. Time, money, effort, and resources should be spent where they belong: keeping things chugging along and improving constantly.

5 Must-Haves For Your Service Desk Implementation Project Plan

Change can be scary. There's no denying that. And when a company’s entire infrastructure is at play, even more so. Whether you’ve just decided to take your company to the next level by unifying all your teams under the same service desk. or you are looking to transition into a brand new service desk platform, a well organized and smooth implementation process ensures that your foray into this new territory is as hassle-free as possible.

Choosing a Fleetsmith MDM alternative before its discontinuation

There's no doubt that Fleetsmith's recent announcement of their upcoming discontinuation has left many users scrambling to find a new mobile device manager or MDM solution. While the decision is certainly disappointing, it doesn't have to be the end of the world. In fact, there are plenty of great MDM solutions out there that can pick up where Fleetsmith leaves off. One of them is definitely InvGate Insight.

How to Migrate to InvGate Service Desk in One Day

Getting started with a new ITSM tool can be intimidating - but migrating from one service desk tool to another is likely much more complicated. Over time, there’s so much data, not only from your tickets but also your knowledge base, users, and so on. Moreover, the company is comfortable using the software, they know how to navigate and interact with the interface. So, it’s very rational to fear a platform change.

WIIFM: A Key Tool for Change Managers

The first rule of change management is that people don't like to change, and anyone involved in managing a major change will tell you this is all too true. WIIFM is an acronym that stands for What Is In It For Me. In essence, it’s a truth that leverages some cold, hard facts about human nature to actually facilitate change. So, while it’s a bit of philosophical insight, it’s also a useful tool for organizational change. WIIFM helps by doing three things.

How to migrate to InvGate Service Desk in one day

Forget about time-consuming setups when migrating from one #helpdesk to another. You can do so in just a day with InvGate Service Desk! Whether you are migrating from another service or if it’s your first time with a Service Management tool, there is a lot of foundation data you’ll need to have at hand before starting. This step-by-step guide shows you how to import - or quickly create - users, a #servicecatalog, and a #knowledgebase.

Build your Service Desk in 5 minutes with InvGate

5 minutes - that's all you need to set up your trial demo of InvGate Service Desk! Follow these steps, and get ready to explore the #helpdesk and experience firsthand what a good service it is. At InvGate, we’ve built Service Desk to provide you with powerful automation & smart ticket management tools to drive unmatched collaboration between users.

How to Define a Clear Help Desk Ticketing Process Flow

An efficient service desk is a major component of a great customer experience. When a customer has a query or they’re facing any issues with your products or services, they expect a quick solution. And any delay or inefficiencies within the help desk operations translates to a delay in resolving customer queries. This will frustrate your customers and create a poor customer experience. A clear help desk ticketing process flow can help you avoid this situation and create an efficient help desk.

7 Benefits and Limitations of Help Desk Software

There’s no question that modern help desk solutions bring amazing benefits to organizations; IT help desk managers have understood this long back. It’s a great tool in a help desk’s arsenal, streamlining processes and improving efficiency, and at the same time bringing significant savings on resources for the organization. But the fact is that it is just a tool. It’s important to remember that a help desk software is not the entire help desk, but just one part of the picture.

How to Build a RACI Matrix for ITIL

Management is also often about accountability. Well, let’s scratch that, it’s always about accountability. And when it comes to IT Service Management (ITSM), that accountability goes double, because we’re dealing with processes that cover your entire organizational structure. That’s when the RACI matrix comes in, an acronym that’s so fundamental that it’s covered by the ITIL Foundation Exam. Today, we’ll learn all about it, and why it can help with service design.

Conflict Management and the Major Incident Management Process

Major incidents are, by their very nature, stressful and intense. The ITIL 4 definition of a major incident is: High-stress situations can cause conflict that left unchecked could delay the fix effort. Since we already have a definitive guide on incident management, this blog post will focus specifically on the major incident management process.

How Happy Are Your Users? A Deep Dive Into User Experience

For as much as everyone in IT knew about the importance of experience in previous years, 2021 really felt like the year where the true importance of it finally rose to the awareness of people working in all sectors of Enterprise IT. We could try and extrapolate why that is – 2021 was also the year where many employers started return-to-office initiatives, and the year where the true extent of our labor overhaul started to really sink in.

Service portals prove to be more efficient for IT support services

For as much as everyone in IT knew about the importance of experience in previous years, 2021 really felt like the year where the true importance of it finally rose to the awareness of people working in all sectors of Enterprise IT. Companies are implementing Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) at a faster pace, and 85% of organizations also self-report understanding the need to deliver a better employee experience, according to a study by AXELOS and itsm.tools.

AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud: Which Cloud Provider is Best?

Over the last two decades, we have seen companies move to the cloud in hordes and presently, the cloud is often the default option for almost all new enterprises. Only companies in a very narrow niche are sticking to on-premise solutions. And the trend is expected to continue. In 2021 alone, the end-user spending in cloud computing was around 482 bn USD.

All About ITOPS: IT Operations Roles & Responsibilities

IT Operations or ITOps have long been a key part of IT service management (ITSM) for organizations. It has played and continues to play an important role in maintaining organizations’ IT infrastructure up and running and making IT available to all employees. Unlike the service desk which directly communicates with the employees, the activities of ITOps rarely involve direct contact with the users they serve.

7 laws of UX to improve the experience of IT managers

Besides features, integrations, and needs, #userexperience is crucial when selecting products, build custom solutions, or design usability studies. Tools that abide by #uxlaws increase their chances of adoption since they are based on utility, ease of use, and efficiency notions. Whether you're on the creator or the user side, Matt Beran - Invgate Product Specialist - listed 7 #lawsofux needed to make a wise decision. Find examples of each one of them in the video!

Keeping a Detailed Hardware Inventory: Best Practices

Hardware and asset management is not easy even in relatively small organizations with 20 or 30 employees. As the size of the organization increases, it becomes difficult to keep track of all the laptops, printers, and other hardware used by the employees. This is where a detailed hardware inventory of IT assets becomes useful. A hardware inventory can help you keep track of all devices and equipment owned or used by your organization.

7 Laws of UX to Improve the Experience of IT Managers

The process of looking for a suitable software to work with doesn’t involve its functionalities and integrations alone. It’s not limited to your company and your own needs, either. Finding a tool that does everything you want is the ultimate goal, but if the layout is confusing or if the learning curve is too steep, the dream can rapidly become a nightmare. For that reason, besides features and needs, you should also focus on the laws of UX.

Apple Zero-Day: How to Spot Devices to Update in Your Company in Seconds

Just a couple of days after Google announced a high-risk zero-day vulnerability in Chrome, Apple disclosed two zero-day vulnerabilities affecting their operating system on both mobile and desktop devices. The company has already issued updates for its iOS and macOS users. The patched versions are as follows: As for the Apple zero-day exploits, they were reported anonymously.

5 Important Things To Consider Before Moving To a Cloud-Based ITSM Solution

It should come as no surprise that cloud-based ITSM solutions have become so popular. As we’ve explored in our comparative piece: they are easily deployable, they tend to be less costly as an upfront investment and they are highly customizable to fit different IT infrastructures and team functions when compared to their on-site equivalent.