Version 12.1.01 is available now. Whether you’re already in production with version 12 or a novice, take some time to get it installed and give us your feedback. This release was highly developed based on customer feedback and future versions could only get better once we hear from you. Don’t be left out.
As you read through the 7 reasons you’ll love the summer release, think about how these will benefit you and your organization. Here are some of the great things you’ll see in our next release.
1. Extensive User Acceptance Testing
Version 12.1.01 is the 1st service pack of the 12.1 minor release that introduced the migration tools to get from the 11.6 platform to the 12 platform. As with most service packs, the main focus was on defect fixes and performance improvements, but there are also some interesting capabilities I will get into later.
In an unprecedented move, BMC actually hired partner and service consultants for a week at a time to test typical week long engagement scenarios. They used their knowledge of past engagements and implemented the same requirements their customers had given them previously. Here are some samples of what they had to say. “I didn’t run into any showstoppers.” “I’m very impressed with this version, and very happy with the results.”
2. Performance
Even without a major effort in this area, development was able to make a few key modifications in selected areas to boost performance. The results surprised even us as some general defect corrections lead to an overall snappier user experience, especially on the administration side. Once again, I think the quotes from our implementation specialists who got an early preview tell the story best. “Pretty amazing, performance is significantly faster.” “Seems to be performing much better.” “Navigation and publishing seems to be better in general.”
3. Customer Sign Up
User Management is always a chore no administrator looks forward to. It becomes increasingly more difficult if you are dealing with external customer support or work in an organization with a lot of turnover like a university. With the customer sign up feature, you can now allow users to create their own accounts as they need to use the system and eliminate that user management headache. Along with the introduction of the LDAP user import in 12.1.00, you can now handle both internal and external customer account creation with ease.
4. Portal Access
Early adopters to the version 12 platform fell in love with the ability to create unlimited, flexible portals. You could easily tailor the look, feel, and even the content based on the persona of the user whether that be a customer, service desk agent, manager, or administrator. It soon became apparent that people loved this so much, they were creating even more specific portals tailored to specific groups of people like their various customer groups. Limiting who had access to each of the portals became a must. It’s great that the administrator now has the ability at the system role level to determine who can navigate to which portal.
5. Java 8 support
Making sure your systems are the most secure they can be could be an overwhelming job sometimes. Throw in the word Java in the light of recent events and people begin to panic. Everyone wants to be on the latest release and we at BMC agree. Rest easy now that your Footprints server could utilize the latest, most secure version of Java to power the application.
6. Optimization of seeing records linked to other records
With FootPrints being so flexible, you can track a lot of different things and how they relate and interact with one another. If you’re looking at an Incident, sometimes you want to know what Problem record it is linked to. Sometimes you want to see what Change Request caused the Incident. You obviously need to know what Contact and CI is linked to it. How about what Service is affected. Are there any tasks related? Different audiences want to see different things at different times and they may not even apply all the time. Unfortunately, in the past you had to have a different grid on your Incident form for each of those possible scenarios.
Now you can have as many or as few grids on your form as you want. All the previously mentioned scenarios could be consolidating into 1 grid with the ability to sort, filter, or group by various linked record properties. This not only makes for a better user experience, but also reduces the time it takes to load your Incident form. After upgrade, simply edit your form and consolidate your link controls to take advantage of this enhancement.
7. User Experience Enhancements
We listened to your suggestions! There are several minor tweaks to how people interact with the UI that will make both the Agent and Administrator smile. Agents will enjoy the speed and simplicity to getting their day to day jobs done from searching, to creating, viewing and editing Tickets. They will now be able to search for numbers in fields from past tickets for those common error codes and serial numbers that come up often. When creating Tickets, being able to type ahead to get to choices in long dropdown lists will saved time. When viewing records linked to other records, being able to choose which columns appear and have that save for you the next time you do the same task as well as easily navigating to the full details of other linked records will also increase productivity. For the administrator, some rules enhancements will be received warmly. From viewing your large list of rules in an easier to work with grid mode to being able to setup rules to create link records that inherit field values from their parent, there’s lots to smile about.
Source: 7 Reasons You’ll Love the FootPrints Summer Release
[:es]
