SysAid

SysAid 14.3 – It’s Your Voice that Matters

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Oded Moshe

6 min read

SysAid 14.3 – It's Your Voice that Matters

For me, one of the greatest things about introducing new features in new releases is the fact that they get even better – and it’s all because of YOU! SysAid 14.3 is a prime example, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but first I cannot stress enough how important it is for us at SysAid to listen and get feedback from all of you out there.

The best place to get this feedback is in our Community, where we communicate on a daily basis and the conversations are priceless. I encourage you all to join in – find the forum(s) and discussions that you’re curious about and hop on, or start something new. I’ll be there in addition to many of our staff from Product and Customer Relations, plus our dedicated Customer Community Manager, Michael Slabodnick, who is THE man to go to if you’ve got any questions or ponderings. He can be very philosophical at times.


Of course there are also additional communication methods to communicate with us (as well as with your peers), such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for example. And obviously there’s always the old-school email :).

So what features did we improve in SysAid 14.3 you ask?

I’ll take you through some of them.

  • Category-driven templates

A few releases ago, we introduced category-driven templates, based on your requests to be able to set up a customized form for various use cases based on categories. We developed this and allowed you to set up specific templates for categories and a default template to be used in case there isn’t a specific one selected. We were thrilled to get positive feedback from those of you who started using this feature right away. I specifically enjoyed hearing that for some of you it was exactly what you needed in order to enhance your IT service management (ITSM) experience. Again, I encourage you to share your experience in our Community and inspire others to do the same! Those who used what the category-driven templates had to offer found that in order to improve it further, it could use a small enhancement – being able to select a “don’t change” option. So, as part of our commitment to deliver valuable features to you and to follow up (check if any adjustments need to be made), we added this option in 14.3 – solely based on customers’ requests for this enhancement. This may seem like a small adjustment, nevertheless, it’s an important tweak for many of you. I would like to thank those of you who requested it – you just helped improve the processes for thousands of other SysAid customers that utilize this feature, and you should be proud!

  • Large window for notes

Let’s move on to another small, but important, adjustment. During a SysAid On The Road visit in the UK, we straight-out asked our customer what suggestions they had to improve the product. We insisted to get inputs, no matter how big or small. They told us that it would be nice if the size of the window that opens when you add notes was bigger – because they like to write long notes and, by default, SysAid opens a small window for notes. This is truly a small request, but it helps make the experience for this customer and others so much better.

These examples are just some of the improvements we are committed to delivering to you; all we ask from you is to speak up and suggest improvements. After all, most of you are very familiar with SysAid and utilize it in an admirable way, so your suggestions really are a contribution to the product, and as you know we even thank you within the product with a “contribution star” :).

SysAid Contribution feature direct from customers

  • New checkbox in Patch Management

Not all features we add are small. In fact, one of the latest additions in 14.1 was a rather large one – Patch Management – a functionality that had one of the leading amount of votes in our feature request forum, and many of you are already enjoying the integrated patch management capabilities we introduced. When delivering such large-scale functionality, it is natural that during the process of prioritizing and defining the scope of the feature, the time for adjustments and improvements comes post-launch. Luckily for us, this feature was swiftly adopted by many of our customers who gave us important inputs to help make Patch Management even better. One of these inputs included adding a checkbox to decide whether our agent is allowed to access the Internet to fetch the patches during the patch management process, or whether it should work only against its proxy (RDS). When we originally planned Patch Management, we built it in a way that covers most cases automatically, which is why it attempts to download from its proxy and retries 5 times before giving up and going directly to the Internet. Some of you requested that in this case they would prefer that the patch process fail – feeling comfortable with the fact that in these cases, it is planned to automatically open an incident so you can check out what went wrong. So in SysAid 14.3 we added a new checkbox exactly for this purpose, which can be found under Patch Management Settings:

SysAid Patch Management enhancements

  • Remote Discovery Services (RDS) enhancements

Other improvements were added behind the scenes as well to improve the experience, such as a feature to “warm up” the RDS cache to speed up the scan process.

We also added automatic alerts when RDS machines go offline so you can proactively check what goes wrong before actions fail.

Automatic alerts with SysAid RDS

Some of you suggested that it would be nice to be able to fetch the logs from the RDS from within the user interface, so we enhanced the RDS list with the action “Get logs”. This zips all the relevant logs from the remote machine and makes them available for download from within the RDS list as a link.

Enhanced SysAid RDS list, with "Get Logs" button

While our Cloud customers enjoy several releases per year, we are paying full attention to our On-Premise customers as well. As you recall, our previous On-Premise release was at the end of March 2014, and as promised, we were able to put together a quick additional On-Premise release due out in a couple of weeks (we are currently in Beta stage), which addresses many of the points you raised.

If you read through the release notes and bug fixes of 14.3 (these pages will be updated after the official On-Premise release), you’ll find plenty of enhancements and fixes that were raised by you and other SysAiders around the world.

So, enjoy SysAid 14.3, use the new features, tell us what you think, and then we’ll get quick to work with yet another On-Premise release before the end of the year – one that will include additional small and large enhancements for all of you to keep enjoying.


Please share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook where we are always listening.

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About

the Author

Oded Moshe

Oded is VP Products at SysAid, with over 15 years of experience in various product and IT management positions. Proud father of two young (iPhone/iPad-addicted) girls and one baby boy (that they’re trying to keep the gadgets out of his reach). Fond of new technologies, and enjoys good conspiracy books and movies.

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