Sunrise responds to market demand

Sunrise Software has launched significant new features for its IT Service Management solution. Sunrise ITSM now comes with new capabilities to address market demand, including IT risk management, project tracking capabilities, IT training and skills management and monitoring, and support for detailed timesheets and expenses tracking. In addition this latest version of Sunrise ITSM also comes with new Wallboard (a graphical display of real-time key metrics for staff and managers) and Mobile configurations, as well as a range of new reports to support the extended features.

Neil Penny, Product Director at Sunrise Software commented; “This is a major upgrade to Sunrise ITSM and includes many features that have been requested by our clients and in response to market demand. These new features go well beyond the traditional confines of the Service Desk moving Sunrise ITSM into a tool for providing control and visibility across the entire IT operation.”

The new Sunrise ITSM IT risk management feature includes a number of risk related services. The new solution provides a system of record for governance, policies and procedures, giving staff easy access to these important documents. The solution enables users to create a library of risks, including operational and project risks and is also linked with the appropriate modules (Change, Problem, Release, etc.) within Sunrise ITSM. Having identified the risks, Sunrise IT risk management tracks the mitigation controls, which are assigned to owners for action. The final element of IT risk management is Audit Management, which provides feedback and traceability in the form of audit observations, and the tracking of corrective and preventative actions.

Neil Penny explained; “IT risk management is moving much higher up the corporate agenda as we see many more instances where IT outages can result in loss of reputation, loss of business and in some cases, significant financial penalties from regulators.”

New Work Orders have been introduced, enabling service departments to better track the resolution of Incidents, Problems and Changes where external organisations, for example, a supplier, is involved.

Project tracking functionality has been introduced that allows project managers to monitor individual projects at a business level. This is an alternative to using standalone packages, such as Microsoft Project, and is useful where a higher level approach is appropriate. Project management enables users to define and track project details such as start dates, objectives and tasks, monitor progress against milestones, manage issues logs, document requirements, and identify resources used and required.

Another new feature of Sunrise ITSM is additional functionality for recording the resources and effort required to investigate and resolve Incidents, Problems and Changes. While it has always been possible to track these within each discipline, users are now able to track timesheets and expenses through more functionally rich facilities. These two additional modules provide control and visibility of the process. Staff or contractors simply submit their timesheet and expenses online, where they can be reviewed by a manager and queried, approved or rejected as appropriate.

Finally, the new version of ITSM includes IT training management. IT departments are now able to manage training and skills more closely. Training course schedules can be published, with the associated skills. Staff can book onto the courses and when completed, assuming they pass, the skill is added to their record. The system also manages the skills database and alerts if any skills need refreshing, or certificates need to be renewed.

Neil Penny added; “While our service management platform, Sostenuto has delivered much new technology related functionality to our customers on a regular basis, updates to the configuration of Sunrise ITSM provides a much larger step change. With this latest configuration we have studied market trends and included functionality requested by our customers to ensure that we deliver a solution that provides the tools the IT department needs to truly align itself to the business, becoming a proactive partner to the business, and enabling IT ultimately to take a seat on the Board.”