SupportConnect - CA Service Management Newsletter, Version 07.02
  

NOTE: E-News technical information is dynamic and links in archived copies of these technical newsletters may eventually become invalid as the products evolve. Please check the support web page for your product to get the latest technical information.


Computer Associates
E-News
CA Service Management Newsletter
Version 07.02
June 19, 2007

In This Newsletter

Product News
> SCM Product Renaming
> You Talked. We Listened. Coming in Second Quarter 2007: CA Support OnLine, Your New Online Support System
> Service Management
> CA Announces CA CMDB 11.1 With Cohesion and Oracle Support
> Unicenter® Asset Portfolio Management 11.3 Now Generally Available
> New Service Management Releases Available - Unicenter® Service Catalog and Service Accounting r11.2
> CA Change Managementt
> CA Endevor® Change Manager r7 SP3 Upgrade Instructions
> CA Endevor® Change Manager r7 SP3 Problem List Information
> CA Endevor® Change Manager BC1PSDL Utility Information
> CA Harvest Change Manager Remote Transport Option r7.1 is Now Available

Product Updates
> New Service Support Product Roadmap
> Latest Supported eIAM Build For Unicenter® Service Desk 11.2 - Windows eIAM Version Only
> Latest Published Fixes

General Information
> Get Involved - Join the PLC and Provide Input on Future Product Direction
> Incident and Problem Management Green Book
> Iterating on IT Service

Special Events
> CA Service Management Event Calendar

Product News

SCM Product Renaming
As part of a major branding effort across all CA products, focused on new customers, we have taken the opportunity to present the CA Software Change Management products as a cohesive family. We also took the decision to make the new names better reflect their function to reduce the confusion commonly caused by "cute" names. The result is that
"CA Harvest Change Manager" is now known as "CA Software Change Manager for Distributed", "CA Endevor" is now "CA Software Change Manager for Mainframe" and "Change Manager Enterprise Workbench" is now called "CA Software Change Manager". The Software Change Manager component of the name can be abbreviated to "SCM". We hope this better reflects the natural complimentary roles these products play to each other. We are already using the names in marketing materials and on ca.com and we expect the next major releases of all the SCM products to use the new names in the documentation and product screens. Every effort will be made to retain the existing names for utility functions to minimize any disruption to your existing scripts, jobs, and procedures.

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You Talked. We Listened. Coming in Second Quarter 2007: CA Support OnLine, Your New Online Support System
As part of a comprehensive, long-term program to improve the way we provide you with support, we're pleased to let you know that we introduced a powerful, new online Customer support system at CA WORLD® 2007. This new system, built from the ground up with Customer input and suggestions, provides the foundation for a number of current and future improvements. CA Support OnLine will provide you with easy access to product updates, notifications, and other E-News related information, and will eventually replace E-News as you know it today.

Read this document to find out what this means for you as a CA Customer and what it means for you as an E-News subscriber.

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Service Management

CA Announces CA CMDB 11.1 With Cohesion and Oracle Support
CA CMDB, r11.1, gen level 0704 is now available. Minimizing operation risk by managing relationships is the fundamental purpose of a CMDB. CA CMDB release 11.1 makes this objective more easily accomplished by including Cohesion as part of the basic CA CMDB solution offering. Our seamless federation among these two products empowers the CA CMDB with the ability to discover CIs, discover relationships among CIs, and automatically populate the CA CMDB repository with this information.

Much of the power of the CA CMDB is its ability to aggregate data from IT silos across the infrastructure and to integrate those IT silos into a logical entity. Designed to work with our Universal Federation Adapter, the MDR Launcher accomplishes the federation/integration of nearly any IT silo found in your business. In short, the CA CMDB enables federated information from nearly any source to be presented to users of the CA CMDB as simply as a mouse-click.

For more information, please refer to the GA announcement letter on the CA CMDB Page on SupportConnectSM.

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Unicenter® Asset Portfolio Management 11.3 Now Generally Available
We are pleased to announce that Unicenter Asset Portfolio Management r11.3 is now available for SQL Server and Oracle. New features include:

  • Hardware Reconciliation
  • Multi-Tenancy
  • Hide Asset Fields by Type
  • Additional Attributes on Objects
  • Hardware Reconciliation Enhancements
  • Cost Center Hierarchy
  • Web Services
  • Notification Attachments
  • Compare Security Roles Utility

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New Service Management Releases Available - Unicenter® Service Catalog and Service Accounting r11.2
Unicenter Service Catalog and Unicenter® Service Accounting r11.2 are now generally available. While each of these products is a standalone solution, they are also tightly integrated to run on a common database and provide a comprehensive service management solution. Ingres® database is included, but with r11.2, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are also supported.

Here are some highlights of features of Unicenter Service Catalog and Service Accounting r11.2:

  • Out-of-the-box Service Offerings based on Service Catalog Best Practices
  • Web store UI to request and review personalized status and history request fulfillment
  • Comprehensive resource usage measurement and service pricing
  • Solution focused integrations - Including integration with Unicenter® Service Desk to automatically launch change orders when appropriate to fulfill a service request; as well as integration with Unicenter® Asset Portfolio Management to automate asset availability

To view CA readiness plans for Service Desk, Knowledge Tools, and other CA products for Microsoft Vista, Office 2007, and Exchange 2007, see CA Product Readiness Plans.

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CA Change Management
CA Endevor® Change Manager r7 SP3 Upgrade Instructions
Be sure to read the CA Endevor Change Manager r7 SP3 Product Maintenance Letter (PML) upgrade instructions as it contains information of critical importance regarding the SMP/E upgrade information, as well as information regarding future of CA Endevor maintenance.

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CA Endevor® Change Manager r7 SP3 Problem List Information
With CA Endevor Change Manager r7 SP3, a problem list has been created which identifies the PTF's published since r7 SP2 and that are included in r7 SP3. We believe you will find this information helpful as it displays the problem number, APAR, and a brief description of the problem.

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CA Endevor® Change Manager BC1PSDL Utility Information
Read the CA Endevor Change Manager Processor Group Symbolic Override Utility for r7 SP2 and above as it contains details of critical importance regarding a new utility that will identify and delete unused Processor Group Override symbolics.

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CA Harvest® Change Manager Remote Transport Option r7.1 is Now Available
CA Harvest Change Manager Remote Transport Option r7.1 is a client-server add-in, which allows CA Harvest Change Manager to control code on any platform equipped with a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server. It supports check-in and check-out of source code from and to these platforms. It is certified on IBM iSeries and Apple Mac OS/X. Support for OpenVMS is currently underway.

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Product Updates
New Service Support Product Roadmap
A new version of the Service Support product roadmap has been published to SupportConnectSM. This document details future product direction for the Unicenter® Service Desk, Unicenter® Service Desk Knowledge Tools, Unicenter® Service Desk Dashboard, and CA SupportBridge products. To view the roadmap, go to the Unicenter Service Desk product home page on SupportConnect at
supportconnectw.ca.com/public/uniservplus/uniservplus-sd_supp.asp or any of the other product home pages.

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Latest Support eIAM Build for Unicenter® Service Desk 11.2 -
Windows eIAM Version Only

To upgrade eIAM, you must first download Service Desk Patch QO87327 and then install the latest version of eIAM located at the following FTP site:

ftp.ca.com/pub/iTech/eiam8.1/buildSep1816/.

For more information, please refer to posting on SupportConnectSM: supportconnectw.ca.com/public/uniservplus/infodocs/uniservplus-sd-eiamr112-ann.asp.

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Latest Published Fixes
For details of all the latest published fixes, please visit the support web pages and select the product(s) of your choice: ca.com/supportconnect/.

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General Information

Get Involved - Join the PLC and Provide Input on Future Product Direction
The Service Support Product Line Community (PLC) provides a forum for active and ongoing communication between customers, development, and support. The PLC is in addition to existing User Groups and focuses on communication on a worldwide basis to all customers. The Service Support PLC covers the Unicenter® Service Desk, Unicenter® Service Desk Knowledge Tools, Unicenter® Service Desk Dashboard, CA SupportBridge, and CA CMDB products.

Benefits of belonging to the Service Support PLC include:

  • Access to a forum for exchanging information, experiences, and best practices
  • Ability to voice business issues with peers - including industry standards, government regulations, and/or other trends
  • Access to the PLC website for access to product line information (product roadmaps, presentations, etc.)
  • Increasing the technical advantage of your organization
  • Discovering new ways to leverage your current solution, increase access to product knowledge, and improve user experience
  • Providing input on future product direction to the CA Development and Product Management teams

The process of providing feedback and ranking future enhancements is about to begin, so please join the PLC as soon as possible.

PLC membership is open to all customers who are actively using any of the above mentioned solutions. Customers can join a PLC by visiting the CA Customer Communities website at causergroups.com. For more information, people can email the Customer Programs Team at customerprograms@ca.com.

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Incident and Problem Management Green Book
CA has published a new document called the Incident and Problem Management Green Book. This book was written by CA's Service Management experts and provides recommendations and best practices for implementing the CA products to support incident management, problem management, and the service desk function. The primary products that are addressed are Unicenter® Service Desk, Unicenter® Service Desk Knowledge Tools, and Unicenter® Service Desk Dashboard, and we've also included chapters on CA CMDB and CA SupportBridge. Here is a partial list of some of the chapters in this new guide: Self-Service, Knowledge Management, Support Automation, Service Level Management, Reporting and Measurement, Architectural Choices, and Security. This book can be downloaded from the Service Desk product home page on SupportConnectSM:
supportconnectw.ca.com/public/uniservplus/uniservplus-sd_supp.asp.

CA Green Books
Announcing Incident and Problem Management

As announced at CA WORLD® 2007, CA is rolling with an exciting new initiative that aligns with our goals to continually enhance our knowledge base and further contribute to our customer and partner success. We call this initiative "CA Green Books".

What are CA Green Books?

CA Green Books are online publications that provide best practices and considerations for real-world CA solution implementations and deployments. CA Green Book knowledge is based on the experiences of our customers as well as global CA team members from Field Services, Technical Support, and Development.

CA Green Book teams compile and create the content, and field practitioners (internal and external) conduct quality reviews of the material. In addition, CA's dedicated Technical Publications organization provides editing and publishing services. These collaborative efforts and knowledge combine to produce comprehensive publications that deliver valuable information to our customers and business partners.

CA is pleased to announce the availability of the Incident and Problem Management Green Book. We welcome you to review it at: ca.com/greenbooks.

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Iterating on IT Service

Figure 1

Marvin Waschke is vice president of development and senior technology strategist, in CA's Business Service Optimization business unit, where he managed development of CA's service desk product. A recognized-expert in service management applications, Marv has served as a representative to Network Management Forum trouble ticketing standards committee. For CA, Marv chaired the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Support Work Group, and now sits on the Service Management Language working group and the CMDB Federation Working Group. Marv's opinions on IT service management and standards appear regularly in his blog 'Iterating on IT Service' found at ca.com/us/blogs.

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Special Events

CA Service Management Event Calendar
itSMF USA 2007 Conference and Expo

As the fastest growing IT organization in the world, itSMF USA has the expertise necessary to help you unify IT service management by bringing together professionals and strategies to lead the industry toward a profitable future.

September 16, 2007, 5:00 p.m. - September 19, 2007, 5:00 p.m.
Charlotte Convention Center, Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

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