Colleges and universities around the world are undergoing a transformation with the infrastructure of their IT services to meet growing demand. With faculty, staff, and students ranging from several thousand to tens of thousands, old legacy systems are not able to cope with the sheer number of computing devices within their facility. Everyone seems to have at least one or more smartphone, tablet or laptop with Wi-Fi capabilities looking to access the institution's network. The SAIT Polytechnic, a post-secondary institution with over 2,200 faculty and staff and 75,000 students in Canada, has selected the HEAT Service Management solution by FrontRange, the Hybrid IT software company, in order to manage the technical support issues the school was experiencing.
Before adopting the FrontRange solution, SAIT was using different applications for its academic and administration departments, which made it difficult to collaborate on common technical support issues. With HEAT Service Management, the school will be able to consolidate and automate support across different teams and service desks for students and staff. Now service requests will be able to get channeled directly through HEAT, allowing users to access the browser-based Web forms to manage the tickets for the requests they have made.
The deployment of HEAT now supports twice as many service request tickets, and considering there are more than 2,200 faculty and staff, the numbers can quickly add up.
"It gives us the holistic view of support that we need for our clients, the students, staff and visitors to SAIT. HEAT is now the support system used throughout the organization. It gives us the holistic view of support that we need for our clients, the students, staff and visitors to SAIT, said Scott Taylor, Manager of Technical Services at SAIT Polytechnic.
FrontRange has also announced the launch of the HEAT 2014.2 release with new business intelligence, integration, and workflow capabilities. This upgrade will give enterprises and service providers new important features to improve the overall configuration capabilities of their infrastructure with a more streamlined and intuitive administrator user interface. According to the company, it will be the first service management solution supporting both on-premises and cloud applications through a unified code base, giving users an evolving flexibility that will adapt to their future needs.
The new additions include: release package tool, saved search enhancements, updated form designer, updated administrator UI, XML import, enhancement support for MSPs, ad hoc report, and workflow.
"Enterprise and MSP service desks are becoming more strategic by the day given the growing complexity of IT and application infrastructures. To help deal with this complexity, we’ve added a considerable number of new capabilities to our HEAT platform that will have a direct impact on improving operational efficiencies and overall business productivity for our customers," said Udo Waibel, CTO of FrontRange.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
