newsletter 45 webcenter and cloud computing

Overview
Although many organizations may not have characterized their current computing tools and productivity applications as “Cloud Computing” in the past months, the trend toward web-based applications that virtualised both application and the data into remote servers to gain productivity from a shared environment continues to grow.

Cloud computing is defined by Wikipedia as as:

Cloud computing refers to the use of Internet (“cloud”) based computer technology for a variety of services. It is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.
Increasing numbers of user applications for sales, support, marketing, business operations and general productivity now come in the form of an Internet application. The user typically has very limited knowledge or control of where and how the application is hosted, maintained, serviced and supported. Users require high availability of these applications and as such, a solid, well planned support /Help Desk mechanisms is a critical part of any cloud computing strategy.

Companies that develop and host these cloud computing applications for internal operations or as an offering for external clients need support mechanisms to quickly identify and resolve support issues. A well designed Help Desk support system for cloud-computing services will not only allow for quick reporting and dispatching of trouble tickets, but it offers options to create reports, application specific searchable knowledge bases and FAQs for that service. This is particularly important when a application or service user base grows and limited support resources are unable to keep pace with the increased user load.

What options do you offer now for your applications support?
A properly developed customer Self-Help customer portal offering FAQs and searchable knowledge bases or options to easily submit questions or trouble tickets can help to deploy an effective solution and manage the support of these applications. Persons managing the Help Desk need to be able to create reports and spot trends of questions and issues, dispatch and prioritize trouble tickets and questions. That information can be use to refine application user interfaces for these web-based applications. This centralized, web-based, database driven support application can provide these key metrics and reporting tools once the help desk is implemented.

These hosted, “cloud-computing resources” often change their interface and features from one day to the next without notice since the application is completely under the control of the application service provider. Whether small or signficant, these changes create numerous support questions for end users. Creating an effective support help desk to better serve that changing interface ius an essential part of an overall application support.

Applications need organized and well developed support processes just like IT
Traditionally Web+Center has been primarily deployed in the IT support role for hardware, software and networking related issues, but we have increasing numbers of organizations that now use our Help Desk Product to also support their internal or external “cloud computing” applications for their staff or customers. The Web+Center application allows issues to be directly routed to IT technicians, cloud computing application developers, and engineering services that support those cloud computing applications.

Internet Software Sciences Web+Center Free 2 tech web-based Help Desk system is perfect match for users already comfortable with web-based applications to help streamline your critical cloud computing application support processes. We are finding increasing numbers of organizations migrating Web+Center outside of their organizatonal firewalls to allow users to submit and update their support tickets any time (24X7) and anyway with todays variety of Interent Connectivity methods.

Conclusions
Web-enabled /Internet based “Cloud Computing” applications will continue to increase in their importance and productivity in the future. It is now time to review the support processes in place to support “applications” in addition to “IT”, and a web-based Help Desk System offers a natural, efficient support system for on-line users familar with web-based applications.