blartfast's blog

Novell Service Desk uses Category and then Type to define Items in its CMDB. This post discusses how they are used and provides an example to illustrate the concept.

What’s new

Version 6.5 includes refinement and expansion of existing application functionality, while also incorporating numerous new features and Customer requests. The following is a summary of the updated and new functionality.

Novell Service Desk 6.2 is coming out shortly. Here's a summary of what's new and fixed from v6.1.3.

Organizations would rather chew their own legs off than hear about technology.
This should not really come as a surprise to anyone involved in I.T; the organizations we all work for don’t care about technology or how it works. They do care that email works 24×7, that documents can be printed, internet access works. Do they care that the company uses OSPF to route IP packets? Or that applications run on virtualised servers? The NAS has 10TB of storage? In a word, No.

Here’s a test to prove my point. Next time you see some one else in the organization who is not in I.T, engage them in a conversation about the differences between IPv4 and IPv6. See how long it is before they either run away or eye glaze becomes apparent.

Let's not talk technology to the organization. Let's use terms that are meaningful for all such as ‘Email’, ‘Printing’, ‘Internet access’ etc.. Let's present technology in an acceptable, understood way. Let's talk Services.

Novell Service Desk for ITIL Service Management provides service organizations all they need to adopt a lifecycle approach to service management, irrespective of their current level of service maturity, available resources and capability. Such capacity guarantees organizations control over their ITIL adoption process, whether they choose to use internally trained staff or outsource to industry specialists for their ITIL implementation.

Our objective to create a single Virtual Machine that runs Novell Service Desk so that we can explore the capabilities of this new solution from Novell. To do this we will

a) Create a new VM using SLES JeOS
b) Upload Sun Java and Novell Service Desk installer into the VM
c) Perform the installation and start Novell Service Desk
d) Load a browser and give it the URL for Novell Service Desk