Great Utilities for Mobility and Beyond

Freshservice - Complete IT Helpdesk Solution.

freshservice.com

If your company is large enough to have multiple IT service requests daily, you may be looking for a way to log and track all of these disparate demands on your time into a manageable workflow. In my new role at Garrity Solutions, I found myself responsible for an overwhelming array of IT related tasks on top of my daily development and production workload. I started digging around for a canned IT ticketing solution, and sure enough Freshservce delivered what I needed, perhaps even more than I needed.

The most basic feature I wanted was the ability for a potential user to simply send an e-mail to the system, and thus have a ticket created. Freshservce does this, and it works great. What you do then depends on how you configure your system. I wanted to control the process of registration, so after receiving a ticket request from a user, I can easily send them a sign-up request. Mostly this service is used me to keep track of my IT tasks, so each item is numbered, can be organized and tagged, and ultimately marked as resolved. It’s also useful for searching resolutions, so that if you forget the specifics on say resolving an IP address conflict, then you can save the info into the system so that you (or someone else) can search for these solutions. The caveat is that you have to input all of this info… it is only as smart as you make it.

Companies of all sizes can use Freshservice for managing their IT services. There are both free and paid levels (https://freshservice.com/pricing), with incredibly fair pricing based upon your needs. The paid levels add higher-end features like unlimited users, custom roles and contract management. I used the free service, which was fine for my needs. The good thing about Freshservice is it’s expandability. The bad thing is that you are forced to customize the myriad of features so that when users log a ticket, you can categorize and tag it. Perhaps it’s not fair to call this a “bad” feature, its just that you must spend the time to drill down through menus for products, vendors and potential solutions, defining the generic ones to suit your companies specific IT needs.

Evernote

evernote.com

I started using Evernote several years ago when I worked at the Times Picayune. I had just started a daily web surf log of my exploits online. I had also just gotten an iPad, and loved the experience, but soon found that storing common accessed files on my work computer, my phone, my laptop, or my home desktop was getting insanely complex. Which article was the last version I edited? I wanted a centralized place to store writings, urls, web clippings, images, word docs, rich text files, PDF files; you name it.

I found Evernote a great utility for organizing my thoughts, especially if you are a writer. The interface is extremely easy to get used to, and organizing/finding your stuff relatively simple. I soon started archiving recipes and my Star Wars novel ideas (yep, I’m a nerd). Later, I started using it as an IT LOG to record my daily meanderings and problem solving exploits at Garrity Solutions. It comes in handy when I need a searchable, tag-able (with the Tags feature) daily log of events and resolutions. You can also share your stuff with other people, and manage rights to access, editable/locked, etc.

The basic free version is fine, but the plus/premium levels add more features and more space for storing your horde. There are Mac and PC app versions, iOS, Google Play for android. So until Apple programs a way to synch files and folders across iOS / MacOSX, looks like I’ll have a need for Evernote.