SAManage IT Management Blog

We have extended the SAManage API to provide our users and partners with the ability to create, modify, or delete users in their accounts directly from the API. The recent addition to the API makes it easier to integrate with on-premise solutions and manage your user’s access from one central repository such as your current LDAP.

Getting a list of all users

This request returns a summary of all users available in the account.

GET “https://app.samanage.com/users.xml”

curl –digest -u “username:password” -H “Accept: application/vnd.samanage.v1+xml” -X GET “https://app.samanage.com/users.xml”

Creating a user

The following request will create a new user in the account. When a new user is created an activation email is sent to the user’s email requesting that he actives his new account and select a password.

POST “https://app.samanage.com/users.xml”

curl –digest -u “username:password” -d “<user><email>a@d.com</email><first-name>a</first-name><last-name>b</last-name><phone>1234567890</phone><roles><helpdesk_user>1</helpdesk_user></roles></user>” -H “Content-Type:text/xml” -X POST “https://app.samanage.com/users.xml”

Updating a user

The following request will update user properties for a specific ticket.

PUT “https://app.samanage.com/users.xml”

curl –digest -u “username:password” -d “<user><email>a@d.com</email><first-name>a</first-name><last-name>b</last-name><phone>1234567890</phone></user>” -H “Content-Type:text/xml” -X PUT “https://app.samanage.com/users/1518.xml”

Visit our website to learn more about the SAManage SaaS IT management API.

This week’s enhancement lets you add RSS widgets to your SAManage IT management dashboard, and makes it easier to stay on top of your IT news (or any other RSS feed you subscribe to).

To get started, click on the Personalize icon on your dashboard and select the Other tab:

To get you started, we included a few of our favorite IT news feeds (yes, this blog included!), and you can add your own custom feeds. Selecting an existing news feed adds the RSS widget to your dashboard.

Clicking on any of the links in the RSS widget opens a new window with the article’s information. Staying on top of your IT news has never been easier!

Add your customized feed

To add your own RSS feed to the dashboard, select the Custom RSS Feed widget, than click on the edit widget, enter your feed’s URL, and click apply.

Your custom feed will show up on your dashboard!

Comments? suggestions? let us know what you think!

Today we are excited to launch the new dashboard, with ability to personalize and add / remove widgets showing more information about your IT assets, contracts and help desk tickets. The dashboard provides a real-time snapshot of your assets and key indicators for your account:

Personalize your dashboard by clicking the Personalize icon to select the widget you wish to add:

You can drag and drop widgets to organize your dashboard, or remove widgets from your dashboard. Some of the widgets can be edited to further personalize the information displayed:

The new dashboard provides an easier way to organize and manage your IT information. As always, let us know what you think!

This week’s addition is the ability to make mass changes on assets, tickets, and contract properties. With the new feature you can select a group of computers and assign them to a site, attach to a computer lease contract or a service/repair agreement, or select a group of tickets and assign them to a new ticket owner.

Using the Mass Update

Click on the Mass Update icon on the upper right corner of each module. You will see the Mass Update frame poping up:

Select the items you wish to update using the checkbox on the left side of each item. The Mass Update status bar would indicate how many items are currently selected and will be affected by this mass update action.

Next, select the property you wish to modify, such as category, department or site, and choose the new value for that property. When you are done with your selection, click the Update Selected icon on the lower right corner.

The system would update the properties for the selected items with the new values you chose, and indicate how many items where actually changed by this action.

Where can you use it?

The new Mass Update feature is available with Computers, Software, Other Asset, Contracts, and Tickets. Each module has different properties you can update based on the context, and you can view all the available properties in the Mass Update frame for each of the modules.

We are off to a great start in 2010, and we’re very excited about what we have planned for the year ahead. We wanted to share some of the things we’ve been working on recently.  We’re really looking forward to launching these updates, and we hope you will be too:

IT Asset Management

• Software Metering. Many users have asked us to add this capability.  We’re planning on releasing an updated agent with software metering capabilities shortly. You’ll be able to see which software is actually being used and how often.
• Agent Auto-Update. The new software metering agent will support remote auto-update, and provide an easier way to update your SAManage agent in the future.

IT Service Management

• ITIL-Based Service Desk. We are busy upgrading the help desk component to a more comprehensive IT service desk based on ITIL. This is going to be a great addition to our service, as it will allow users to implement the ITIL framework in a way that is tightly integrated with our IT Asset Management capabilities.
• Service Catalogs. Allow IT organizations to manage and publish a service catalog defining all services available by the organization. Based on the ITIL framework, service catalogs allow organizations to further streamline their service and support processes.

Platform

• Dashboard. We are getting ready to release a new version of the dashboard.  This new edition will offer more extensive customization, a wider variety of widgets, and enable you to add as many widgets as you’d like from all areas of the service.
• Customize Views. Select the columns in each view, and re-order them based on your unique preferences or needs.
• Mass Update. This feature provides an easier way to make bulk changes in each area of the service.  For example, you can close multiple tickets, reassign a group of computers to a site, change the status of multiple assets, and much more.

We’ll keep you posted as each of these new features becomes available.  And, of course, we continue to welcome ideas and suggestions from you.  Your feedback and input helps us determine what new capabilities and enhancements should be added in the future.

Online IT Management Software

Discover how on-demand IT Management software from SAManage can help you gain instant visibility into your assets and improve your service levels. Sign up for a free trial today.

Today, in response to frequent requests from our users, we are launching a complete revamp of the system’s views and reports. The new reporting capabilities will allow you to:

1. Create new reports in each part of the service (inventory, contracts, help desk and all other areas)
2. Use multiple criteria and filters within each report (for example, you can report on only those laptops running Windows XP in the New York site)
3. Modify, delete, and rename reports, or organize them based on your specific preferences
4. Select a default report for each section of the service (for example, make “my active and overdue tickets” the default report in the help desk area)

These new and improved reports empower users with greater functionality and control than ever before, allow them to access and analyze important information about your assets in an almost unlimited number of ways.  For example, they can rapidly build and execute custom queries, filter and sort the information contained within reports, and much more.  This enables them to more efficiently and effectively manage your assets, and makes it easier for them to uncover the important patterns and trends that impact the performance and value of your technology environment.

Each report can be saved and exported to a variety of common formats including CSV, PDF, HTML, or RSS/atom feed.  So, users can email reports to peers, import them into other applications, save them for future reference, or print and distribute them.

In addition to the expanded reporting capabilities, we have redesigned parts of the user interface to better support these new features, and to make it easier to navigate through and locate critical asset-related information. As always, your feedback and ideas help us to make continuous enhancements to our system, so please let us know what you think and what further improvements you’d like to see.

We have launched a number of user interface changes to make it easier to navigate through and locate critical asset-related information. As always, your feedback and ideas help us to make continuous enhancements to our system, so please let us know what you think and what further improvements you’d like to see.

Enhanced table usability

We made changes to the table’s header and separated the module’s main actions (such as creating a new ticket or exporting data) from the header to highlight these actions. The table’s header is now organized around the activities relating to the new reporting capabilities – selecting, creating or modifying reports for each module, where the area above each header is dedicated to action in that module. Here is an example:

Enhanced actions on assets

There are many actions you can perform on various places in the system, from tagging assets to modifying their status or assigning them to individuals. We made it easier to see the areas you can modify with the addition of the new edit mark. Here are a few examples:

The new asset details page is another example:

We strongly believe this enhancement would make it easier to use our IT management service and provide a more intuitive user experience. As always, let us know what you think and how we could further improve!

Asset lifecycle management is an important business discipline, one that enables companies to more effectively manage their technology systems and all related activities from the time they are acquired, through their disposal and replacement.  This type of enhanced, end-to-end administration ensures maximum return on each and every system a business invests in.

Today we’re adding new asset lifecycle management capabilities to SAManage, to help our customers better manage their IT Assets.

With the new asset lifecycle management features, you can now create a comprehensive journal that includes all important dates for each asset you own, or associate any asset with a hardware lease or maintenance / warranty agreement, to gain better visibility into not only the system itself, but any related service plans.  You can also maintain a more complete and detailed purchase record for all computers assets you acquire.

Each asset now includes the following areas:

Dates - This section captures any important date in the asset’s lifecycle including date of acquisition, date of installation, date of assignment to a user or subsequent reassignment to a different user, any dates of service or repair events, and the disposition date. The system will automatically set some of theses dates for you.  For example, dates will be dynamically logged into the journal when the asset is installed for the first time, any time the asset status changes, or when new user information is entered. The date journal can also be used to plan for future event assets, such as upgrades, or to outline an anticipated disposal schedule.

Maintenance / Warranties - You can tie any asset to a maintenance contract, or easily add any new maintenance contracts you engage in. This allows you to see, at a glance, how each asset should be serviced.  As a result, you can more effectively track the related service plans for each asset, so you know what options are available when a system needs maintenance or repair.

Lease - You can easily add an  asset to an existing hardware lease contract, or add new lease contracts into the system. This helps your IT staff better track when the lease will expire, so you can more effectively plan for next steps, such as renewing the lease or purchasing the system, or returning the asset and replacing it with a new one.  Additionally, this enables more precise and accurate at-a-glance monitoring of multiple products that are governed by the same lease.

Purchase – When you purchase an asset, there are a number of important details that must be logged and tracked.  With SAManage’s new asset lifecycle management capabilities, you can track such vital information as the purchase order number, the actual cost of the asset, and the vendor you purchased it from. This creates a more comprehensive purchase record, for future reference.

SaaS-based IT Management Software

Discover how SaaS IT Management software can help you gain instant visibility into your assets and know exactly what you have.
Sign up for a free trial of SAManage IT Management service.

Today, we’re adding a new feature – computer assignment rules – to help you more easily correlate assets to sites and departments. These new computer assignment rules will allow you to automate how computers will be assigned to sites and/or departments, based on the domain they belong to, an IP address range, or the prefix in the computer’s name.

The new rules are accessible from within the organization setup section of your SAManage account. This section is where you create your sites and departments in the system. As you enter new sites and departments, you can now also add rules that correlate assets into each organization unit. Any time a computer in your inventory matches one of these rules, the rule will be automatically invoked and the computer will be assigned accordingly.

Setup your organization's sites and departments

To use the new assignment rules, simply navigate to the organization setup section, and click on ”Add Rule” next to the site or department.  Or, you can click on ”Create New Rule” at the bottom of the page. Select the rule type (domain, IP range, or name prefix) and the matching value, then select “Assign to Site”, “Assign to Department” – or both. When you’re finished, click on “Create Rule” to add it to the system.

Create computer assignment rules

As you create or modify rules, you can test them by clicking ”Apply Rules”.  This will immediately execute all rules. The system will also periodically invoke your rules, to accommodate for any alterations, or any new computers that have been added to your computer inventory since the rules were last executed.

The new assignment rules make it easier to manage and organize your asset inventory. Learn more about IT asset management solutions from SAManage, and how they can help you better manage your technology environment.

We’re excited to announce the release of our enhanced Mac agent including a new installer that makes it a lot easier to deploy SAManage’s SaaS IT Asset Management service on Macs and effectively manage the inventory of your Mac computers. The Mac agent deployment is now completely wizard driven and can be easily deployed on Mac’s running MacOSX 10.3 and above by following the instructions available on our deployment guides.

The updated Mac agent is a great enhancement to our on-demand IT Asset Management service. We already have many customers that are using SAManage to manage their Mac asset inventory and we believe the new release would make it even easier to get your Mac inventory in order.

SAManage Mac Inventory Agent Installer

The SAManage Mac agent is available for download on our website, and there is a detailed deployment guide with step-by-step instructions.

Ready for next generation IT Management?

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Get started today: Sign up for a free 30-days trial of SAManage IT Management service.