On this fine evening, we wanted to share with you a little preview of coming attractions, which will hopefully appear in future posts. Two of our projects revolve around Microsoft System Center Service Manager and IPv6 (separate endeavors). Both of these hold good promise for our organization and where we go with each may help you as well.
Through the years, we’ve used a couple different help desk and change management tools–Track-It! and Alloy Navigator–and in each, we’ve run into issues and shortcomings. Track-It! was fine as a ticketing system, but provided very little correlation (if any), no audit trail, and sparse asset management. Alloy is a step in the right direction with a pretty comprehensive set of features, ranging from Purchase Orders to Incident and Change Management to Asset tracking, but the application and system itself are fraught with bugs, counter-intuitive processes, etc. In other words, lots of ongoing work which is worthy of many tickets itself.
So we’re venturing into Microsoft’s Service Manager territory and are very interested in the integration with the rest of the System Center suite (Configuration Manager and Operations Manager), as well as Active Directory. We’re also checking out Provance IT Asset Management, a management pack for SM, which enhances the product and provides an otherwise absent financial piece. Looking good so far!
On the networking side, we’ve been in the R&D phase with IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) for a few months now since receiving our own /48 block of addresses from ARIN. The documentation online is a bit sparse and mostly targeted to either consumers (Teredo) or ISPs, but we’re finding some nuggets in the digging. Some good resources thus far are: