Networking at the fourth SavvySuite Customer Forum

This year’s SavvySuite Customer Forum took place in Worms on 16 and 17 May 2017. Due to holidays and trade fair dates, the event was held about a month earlier this year than in previous years. syscovery invited its customers to Worms for the fourth time. As in the previous year, the customer forum took place in the “Das Wormser” event centre.
Dr. Peter Schwamb, Managing Director of syscovery, welcomed about 30 participants to the Liebfrauensaal at 11 am.

In his key note, he took a look at current developments in the area of cloud technology and noted that this offering is slowly establishing itself on the market.

Afterwards, the participants introduced themselves briefly. The longest journey this year was from Zurich and Sofia.

The first presentation was dedicated to the release 1.9.4, which was released in December 2016. Some participants had already made experiences with the new release, the others received the information about the new features from the head of Savvy Suite product development, Bastian Wolf. In addition to minor improvements in the display of tasks and mandatory fields, Microsoft’s Edge browser is now also supported. In the area of key users, there were improvements in the triggering of collective changes in the Web application and extensions for new orders from the catalog and for accessories.

During the lunch break, while enjoying wraps and mini-burgers, customers met with syscovery staff who would otherwise only contact them by e-mail or telephone. Thus one could finally assign a face to the telephone voice and get to know each other personally.

The first customer presentation was held by a customer from Zurich. He used many key figures to describe the development of the system since its introduction five years ago. Initially 250 articles in the service catalogue have now grown to 7,000, and six responsible employees have since become one. The next big step is to switch to a cloud-based system.

Another regular component of the customer forums is the presentation of the change proposals for the next release. Customers who participated in the Feedback & Future Workshops with syscovery product development during the year were able to submit suggestions for changes. These were consolidated and elaborated in 5 proposals. Uwe Sacherer explained the proposals on the following topics

  1. quick steps – simplifying order placement for self-service users
  2. price display – extended display of prices in the order process
  3. simplified administration of representations
  4. change the assignment to system transport changes for data objects
  5. queries to the client – service recipient – approver

With 18 points, the proposal number 1 for the introduction of an additional option for self-service users came in second place. With 21 points, the winner and thus scheduled for implementation in the next release, proposal 2 is to list the price display in detail for each item in the order wizard and on the approval item detail page.

During the coffee break there was the opportunity to clarify questions that had arisen on two demo systems and to try out the latest developments for oneself. The experts of syscovery were available for all questions.

The last customer presentation of the day was about centralized workplace management. The speakers described the challenges and progress of introducing standardized products in a very large organization with many national companies.

The day ended with a visit to the Spohr winery in Worms-Abenheim, where a bottle or two of wine was tasted in addition to various delicacies (e.g. asparagus tarte flambé). Between chops and oven slippers with strawberries, one or two SavvySuite configuration questions were discussed.

Uwe Sacherer opened the second day of the customer forum with an overview of the latest module of SavvySuite, Work Order Management. Various sample processes were run through in the administration application and the Web application. The possibilities of serialization, integration of different workflows and escalation were explained in theory and demonstrated in practice.

The next presentation was about the connection of SavvySuite to the Microsoft System Configuration Center Manager (SCCM). Sherzod Ubaydulloev compared the possibilities of software management via device membership in an AD group and management via direct control of the SCCM via the PowerShell connector. Various options for using individual packages or collections were explained and evaluated.

The topic cloud was the focus of Klaus Kirchner’s lecture. He explained the motivation of syscovery to implement a transfer to the cloud for the in-house SavvySuite, in this case Microsoft Azure. This was about the flexibility of not having to take hardware with you for worldwide training, scalability and certification. On the basis of statistical evaluations and model calculations, however, he also showed that such a change is also purely financially worthwhile.

As usual, the participants used the lunch break for a lively exchange of experiences. The new concept with finger food instead of a hearty meal met this purpose and was highly praised by the participants.

As usual, the conclusion was a look at the roadmap. This time Bastian Wolf not only reported on the medium-term topics (key user functionalities in the OM/IDM module; decentralized catalog administration). He also looked at the current development of Release 1.10. Here he dealt in more detail with the following topics

  • Release for Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016
  • Changeover of the installation procedure: Update installation also for major releases
  • Administration of 32 languages
  • Configuration of order proposals in the administration application
  • Ordering and managing data folders and associated permissions
  • Cluster analysis of inventory data

Around 2:30 pm Peter Schwamb said goodbye to the participants. Almost all participants were very satisfied with the event and took home one or two suggestions for possible extensions of the SavvySuite.

Translated using https://www.deepl.com/translator