Techport Multi-Tasks at Lunch & Learn Session in Del Mar, CA Keeping up with trends and news from the ever-evolving IT landscape can be difficult. One of Techport Thirteen's goals is to help break through the noise and marketing hype, and get you the information you need to make your organization successful in a changing world. On October 18th, Techport Thirteen and Hewlett-Packard teamed up for a lunch-&-learn session covering Cloud Computing - How Do You Separate Hype from Reality. Participants learned that with Cloud Computing, they will have the agility their organization needs to meet demands at a lower cost. Joshua Bey (middle) of Techport Thirteen welcomes session attendees With over twenty professionals in attendance and with a lively question and answer session at the end, the event was highly successful overall. When asked his thoughts on the session, Alfred Lew of Inuit replied, "Today’s event was helpful to me because we covered the cloud’s history and evolution, and then moved on to discuss the various cloud adoption methods that are in use today." Do you have an idea for a future lunch-&-learn event or know of a similar event that Techport Thirteen should consider attending? Please contact us to get the discussion started.

Are you interested in taking your HP Service Manager solution mobile? Most likely, the answer is an emphatic yes! Hewlett-Packard has wisely included a Mobile Applications component to the new Service Manager v9.30 release to help clients achieve their mobile goals.

The Mobile Applications client connects your company's people and information by providing your team access to the Change Management and Incident Management applications through the use of smartphones. Service Manager Mobile Applications enable your Change Management and Incident Management staff to have 24x7 mobile access while out of the office so they can:

• approve and deny change requests
• view newly-assigned tickets
• reassign incidents to the proper support group
• continue working on-site with customer

Because field engineers are typically tasked to work with business users at a customer site, they spend most of their time away from the office to resolve tickets. When Change Approvers are away from the office, they need a way to quickly approve or deny changes, so that pending work orders can be assigned. These users can log on to Service Manager Mobile Applications from a smartphone to receive and view work assignments; and review and approve or deny pending change requests. These quick responses improve business metrics, as service level objectives are met.

Interested in learning more, or seeing a demonstration of the new Mobile Applications client in action? Or do you already have a mobile solution in place or are currently considering an alternative? Contact Techport Thirteen and we would be happy to answer your questions.

HP released a rather large application patch for HP Service Manager v7.11 systems, entitled Application Patch 2. The patch contains a large amount of fixes to the base application, including a correction for a critical application hanging symptom that occurs under certain circumstances.

This patch is available for Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Linux and Sun Solaris operating systems. Installation instructions may be found within the Applications Patch Manager Guide for HP Service Manager v7.11.

For a complete listing of the included fixes and service requests, please refer to the patch description found on the HP Support website. Authentication using an HP Passport ID is required to access the description.

As always, if you need assistance or have questions regarding the latest HP Service Manager support information, please contact Techport Thirteen. We are here to help.

...the HP Service Manager change management workflow tab can fail to display if one of the phases of the change or task category references an ApprovalDef record which has a NULL value for the “Approval Condition” or Sequence fields? You may see errors like:

    Exception setting XML Model: java.lang.NullPointerException

    An error occurred while generating workflow information, please check that your workflow
    environment is loaded and up to date

To resolve this issue simply set the “Approval Condition” field to “true” (or any other desired value) and/or the Sequence to “1” (or any other desired value) in the ApprovalDef record. The normal change management applications do not have a problem with a NULL value for this field as they will use a nullsub value. It is only the workflow tab that will fail.