We use ServiceDeskPlus as our helpdesk and inventory system. When we were researching, it stood out in that it had a good price point, an active community behind it, and most importantly, had both an online demo and a downloadable evaluation.
Since our purchase, the product, and pricing, has changed. We have unlimited nodes for the inventory, but new customers have to pay by the node.

Overall, we like it. Being web based, we can touch it from any PC in the company, or even remotely. However, the coding of the site is such that it does not work fully with iPhones or Windows Mobile browsers (Opera), so some options are not available.

I think our two biggest issues with it are not really its fault. Initial setup and organization (being new to running helpdesk software) kept us from realizing its potential, and maybe still hinders us slightly from time to time. The other issue is just being thorough and always keeping it updated.

The way the inventory side works is not very straight forward… handling PCs and chasis essentially as two different items, and not in a convienent manner. Also, it does a central sweep to detect hardware/software, which does not seem as reliable and acurate as using remote agents.

Another goofy issue is that the idea of using it to track tasks is inheritantly difficult, as the task is not automatically linked to the issue it deals with.

The last big issue that comes to mind, and it would be the item I urge you to evaluate closely before purchase, is its limited searching. To SDP, a task is different from a note, which is different from a request… basically each element is its own entity. And only a few of these are at all searchable, and even then, only individually… you may need to repeat the search multiple times to cover all the bases. It also does not handle boolean searching… so unless you know exactly what you want, you won’t find it. This, in a helpdesk product meant to aid finding information, is a huge issue.

What we quite like about it is the reporting side. We actually use it for time keeping, and it works fairly well. We are always on the lookout for new software, as this product is not perfect, and its ongoing subscription means each year we are financially motivated to seek out alternatives.

If you have specific questions, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to provide more detail.

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Interestingly enough, sometimes when things run too good, it is a bad thing. That reminds me of a situation I had many years ago, as an entry tech. I was tasked with changing a simple network setting in a company’s main server, however with NT4, it required a restart. This was acceptable, a quick 5 minute outage was planned. The trouble is, once the system rebooted, there was not networking at all. Being new, it took me a good (andhighly tense) 10-15 minutes to determine my config change was not at fault…that the network card simply had died. It turns out, this was the first reboot of the server in 3 or 4 years… and the NIC apparently was ready to fail upon the next power cycle. A new NIC was acquired, and a 5 minute “coffee break” turned into an hour outage.

A similar situation just presented itself on our RIS box. It had ran for a good 6 months without a reboot… humming away. ESX, as good as it is, still cannot manage disk space superbly on the fly, so we had to take the server offline to do some storage adjustments. Upon starting up, it acted very strangely… not showing the Disk Manager to the user, amongst other things (which is rather frightening immediately after doing storage maintanence). Other symptoms were that it was slow to boot, and the Server service (and dependancies Computer Browser and Distributed File System) would fail to start.

It turned out to be a very simple issue… we were able to determine that the Print Spooler service was causing issues with those other services, and that we could no longer view printers from the control panel (even with the Spooler service started and restarted). About 6 months ago, a tech had changed the 10 or so printers to keep printed documents. Well this server handles our label printing, so in those 6 months, over 300,000 print jobs were handled. All of these files hanging around inside the SPOOL folder were the root cause of the issue. Cleaning them up returned everything to normal.

Lucky for us, the system was able to run fine, it was simply the reboot that highlighted the growing problem. I know that people like to brag that their servers run for years rock solid without a reboot, and it is true that rebooting stresses the electrical components of a computer, but I am a firm believer in running scheduled reboots periodically (and monitoring the results). I would rather a problem surface during a maintenance window rather than during peak hours, when staff is away on vacation, as a result of a unexpected reboot or similar situation.

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Get KB938194, which seems to focus on video driver issues, ppp connections and printing.

Get KB938979, which deals with video editing, memory management, speeding file copies (yay!), and improving hibernation (YAY!).

The first update does not seem to address much that I have had problems with, but the second one certainly does. I will post and update to share if I notice an improvement or not with my hibernate/network woes.

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Having taken a bit of a break from blogging, I did not realize there were many people having trouble with BlogJet 2.0 (the best tool I have found to compose blog entries) and Vista. Yesterday, on my desktop Vista PC, BlogJet worked fine. However, on my Vista laptop, it would crash immediately upon boot. Turns out that for whatever reason, BlogJet may need to be added to the Data Execution Prevention exclusion list. Follow the link to find out how.

Finally! BlogJet 2.0 now works with Windows Vista – Rod Trent at myITforum.com.

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My prior experience with VMWare Converter was decidedly mixed at best. A basic 2003 server finished the conversion fine, and worked without trouble in the Server product. However, another server, our main information/application server, while not indicating any troubles during the conversion, failed to load in Server. All I got was a black screen. It would not even load the VMWare BIOS screen. I did some quick searching, but the only thing I could find online was about an incompatibility with a 2000 SCSI driver. My system had the suspect file, so I decided to leave it be and move on. My third attempt at a conversion was our Great Plains accounting server. This time, the conversion process failed.

Conveniently, the ESX server was now up and running, so just for the heck of it, I pointed the converter at the image made of our App server, the one that would not start up in VMWare Server. The tool took some time, about 45 minutes (the image was over 100GB), but lo and behold, upon finishing and booting, the server was running just fine inside ESX. I have no idea why it would not work in VMWare Server, perhaps it was too large a file. At any rate, with my new found confidence, I decided to give our Great Plains server another go. I removed some unnecessary databases/backups off the server, bringing down the file size, and decreasing the time requirement. Progress was smooth and reasonably quick, and once again, ESX started the OS sans problems.

I am running some additional benchmarks. So far, they point a very positive picture for ESX, but they are only preliminary. It is not a true apples to apples comparison, as the hardware running both servers is older and thus slower than the server running ESX. However, so far, ESX is putting up some impressive results. Running a single VM, with 2 cores assigned to the VM, Sandra is showing numbers on par with the live system. Giving the VM 2 additional cores shows a tremendous speed increase. While you may say it is not fair to compare apples to oranges, to us, it makes sense. The newer server is certainly not twice as powerful as the live servers running our systems. But if it is capable of consolidating our two most demanding servers into one, without sacrificing speed, it is a big win in manageability for us.

Tomorrow, I should get some results of both VMs running simultaneously, using Sandra as well as SQLIOSIM. At this point in time, the experience has been running local disks. Of course, VMWare’s advantages shine more in the SAN world. If we were not purchasing a SAN in the near term, I may not be as excited as I am. I just hope the speed of the SAN does not disappoint compared to the local disk array I am currently using.

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It seems like the technical issues are not causing too much difficulty, it is more on the change management/user work flow side of things that we struggle. And this struggle has minimal to do with the Purkinje app. Really, it is the fact that now we want to store as much information as possible in the RIS, without harming our booking department’s productivity.

Thankfully, our booking manager is a great lady, and if today is any indication, we are taking large steps forward. After an afternoon pow wow with her, we have identified ideal scenarios, as well as troublesome issues, and potential work arounds. Now, I just have to speak to our developer to see what he things of my proposed “fixes” to problems!

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Microsoft to buy medical info search company | CNET News.com.

The real news here in my eyes is that Microsoft has plans additional forays into the health care market. Only time will tell if that means eventually getting into RIS/PACS. I have long thought that if Microsoft were to enter these markets, at a minimum it would serve to help standardize things significantly.

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The event started with the keynote presentation. On stage was the president of Microsoft Canada. This individual initially was quite awkward on stage, but he did get more comfortable as the morning went on. He brought up a consultant that has worked with CICICI. This speaker focused on business topics, never relating them to Microsoft of the IT industry. It would seem he may have been brought in to fill up time.

They moved onto a technology demo, focusing on Office and telephony integration. Very impressive demo. Through Outlook, he checked his voicemail, and then through a telephone, he was able to edit his calendar in a fairly seamless fashion. Last I looked, this required very specific PBX hardware to tie in, but I hope they expand the supported hardware base, as this would be amazing to set up in our company.

Throughout the event, Sharepoint 2007 was hyped. It does seem to be a fantastic product. The ability to manage workflow should be a boon to many businesses. Unfortunately, I think many such businesses will get excited over the potential, and lose track of the implementation of such a solution. Getting it to work right will take a lot of forethought and planning.

Another neat concept of Sharepoint is that it now auto builds wiki’s and blogs for projects and people. Perhaps not so useful for us, but again, others will like this functionality. They also mentioned the Groove product, which allows external access to data. This is not part of Sharepoint, and it would seem that it should be. Perhaps next version.

Sharepoint has replication features that are bandwidth friendly. Only the changed information gets replicated, not the entire file. Also, it has excellent auditing features, can log every touch of a file, including prints.

Vista information was very minimal. This was unfortunate, as many of the diverse audience came specifically for Vista information. Perhaps this is representative of the fact that there is not a whole lot of new functionality in Vista.

They of course showed off Flip 3D. I personally do not like this feature. I am much more impressed by Apple’s similar feature, which shrinks all the open apps so you can see them at the same time. More powerful I think. Also, searching was talked about prominently.

They reminded me that you can save searches, a feature I had known about, but forgot to ever try.

As for new features that I was not aware of, they put the spotlight on the Mobility Center (Windows Key-X), and a new way to set up virtual meetings. The mobility center is handy, in that it gives instant access to commonly used functions, such as volume, external display, power settings, and network settings, among others. The other feature, Windows Meeting Space really caught my eye. It lets you setup a meeting between two Vista PCs in a very simple and easy manner. You can share a program or your desktop, create handouts (files) that everyone has access to, and it even creates an Ad Hoc wireless network so you do not need a wireless access point, very handy indeed.

They also had some information on a product called Proclarity, which seems like a potential competitor to Crystal Reports.

Overall, I was impressed with the event. Most of the speakers were engaging enough, and they mixed in lots of demos, which really help to illustrate what they are talking about.

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