alloy navigator 7 product evaluation guide...alloy navigator 7 product evaluation guide page 5 of 27...

P r o d u c t V e r s i o n : 7 . 0D o c u m e n t R e v i s i o n : 1 . 2

D a t e : F e b r u a r y 1 3 , 2 0 1 5

Alloy Software Incorporated88 Park Avenue, Unit 2B, Nutley, NJ 07110

phone: +1 (973) 661-9700fax: +1 (973) 661-9777email: [email protected]: www.alloy-software.com

Alloy Navigator 7Integrated Service Desk & Asset Management Solution

PRODUCT EVALUATION GUIDE

Copyright © 2015 Alloy Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Alloy Software, Alloy Navigator, Alloy Navigator Express, and Alloy Discovery logos are registered trademarks owned by Alloy Software, Inc. All other trademarks and brand names are the property of their respective owners. This manual, as well as the software described in it, is furnished under license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license. The content of this manual is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Alloy Software, Inc. Alloy Software, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this book. This manual is protected by United States and foreign copyright. This manual shall not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Alloy Software, Inc.

Portions of the software described in this manual may utilize or include third party software and other copyrighted material. For details, see the acknowledgments.txt file located in the Documentation folder under your Alloy Navigator installation folder (typically, C:\Program Files\Alloy Software\Alloy Navigator 7\Documentation).

Alloy Navigator 7 Product Evaluation Guide

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IntroductionThe purpose of this paper is to give you a quick guided tour of Alloy Navigator 7 (AN7) and show you a few examples of how the product can address some of the challenges IT departments face daily. Chances are, you will immediately recognize these challenges as something you need to overcome on a regular basis, and that is probably why you chose to take AN7 for a spin.

AN7 is a comprehensive IT Infrastructure Management solution aimed at streamlining many aspects of your company — from Asset Management to Help Desk or Service Desk operations. It also provides additional features that support other related areas like Configuration Management, Contact Management, Knowledge Management, and Contract Management.

This guide is focused primarily on Configuration Management and Service Management. The main reason we did this was to keep it relatively short and easy for you to follow, but most importantly, we believe these two areas are where you'd want to begin. It’s here you will achieve the most significant improvements in your company's handling of IT through taking control over your various hardware and software and applying a structured, well defined approach to running your help desk (or service desk) operations.

If you would like to explore other features of AN7 on your own — feel free to do so. But when you find yourself in an unfamiliar area and start feeling confused or lost — don’t be. Because you are not on your own! Help is here, only one phone call away. Or one e-mail away. One way or the other, get in touch with our technical team! Our engineers are seasoned specialists who know AN7 like the back of their hands. They can competently demonstrate product features, answer your questions, or give you invaluable advice. It may be hard to believe, but this is not a marketing ploy. We actually want you to contact us because we care. We care about our product and about you, our customer, to get the most out of this evaluation and what we believe will be your eventual investment.

About examples provided in this guide

When you installed the product in evaluation mode, your database was populated with sample data to help you follow along with the examples provided in this guide. This sample data was created for illustrative purposes and the people, companies or related information were meant only for demonstration as they are all fictional.

About screenshots

The screenshots in this guide have been optimized for printing. If you are reading this PDF on your computer screen, we recommend increasing magnification level to 150% or above to see a legible image.


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Configuration ManagementAs we mentioned earlier, Configuration Management is one of the product’s areas you’d want to tap first. The focal point of Configuration Management in AN7 is Computer Management. Why do we believe this is so important? This may sound shocking, but we find that many organizations don't employ a systematic approach to managing their computers. In turn, they don’t know what computer equipment they own, which computers require an upgrade, how many more licenses for MS Office are available, or where that new fancy laptop could be hiding. And even if a system is in place, the information can often be scattered and disorganized across various systems and needs to be constantly kept in sync with other systems, such as their help desk's ticketing software, or a CRM system.

With AN7, all related information is kept in a single central repository and organized for easy access. For example, with a click of a button you can find out how many issues were reported last month relating to the mail server or what the expiration date of its warranty contract is.

With this data being centralized, you can make informed decisions about equipment purchases, hardware and software upgrades, licensing, logistics, and more. Alloy Navigator is designed to handle the critical challenges facing IT specialists including:

• Keeping configuration data in one centralized location• Knowing the whereabouts of assets• Tracking equipment life cycle from purchase to retirement• Knowing the current value of assets• Keeping track of related contracts such as support, maintenance and leasing agreements• Knowing computer configurations• Staying informed about important events• Monitoring installed software and staying compliant with software licensing

Knowing computer configurations

One of AN7’s strengths is its ability to gather detailed information about a computer's hardware configuration and software installations. This detailed information, gathered in the form of audit snapshots, is automatically uploaded into AN7 repository on a regular basis to capture all recent configuration changes. This can be especially important when those changes are unexpected software installations or unapproved modifications to hardware configurations.

Take a look at the following screenshot to see the wealth of configuration information collected from computers during the audit.


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The information in the audit snapshot is broken down into familiar categories, ranging from low-level hardware information obtained from the system BIOS, to detailed information about the operating system including the video system, network configuration, installed and connected devices, installed software products, and patches.

If you would like to follow along:

1. In the Side Bar, expand the Computers node from the Configuration Management section.

2. Click Active.3. Double-click the record for computer LT00069.4. From the Configuration tab of the computer record, click Show Audit

Information.

This will bring up the Audit Data Viewer with the audit snapshot from that computer. Feel free to click around and review information in various sections.

Similarly, you can open other computer records and review their audit snapshots. Close the Audit Data Viewer dialog box when you are done.


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Knowing the current value of computers

AN7 makes it simple to keep track a computer’s financial information from purchase to retirement by providing calculations such as depreciation using a variety of standard methods.

Since computers are linked directly to their corresponding asset information you have immediate access to originating purchase orders, warranty, lease and other related financial information.


1. Open the computer record LT00069.2. Click the Finance tab.

This is where all of the financial details of the asset are maintained.


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Managing Related Contracts

As we mentioned earlier, AN7 does a pretty good job of keeping related information, well, related. This way you can keep track of various relationships and dependencies between various objects. It is important to note that you can easily define your own types of object relationships. Why are we talking about object relationships? That’s because through this paradigm AN7 allows you to manage contracts such as support, maintenance and leasing agreements by relating them directly to your computers and other various equipment. This is as simple as creating a contract record and then linking it with applicable records. The relationships becomes bidirectional — when you look at a particular computer record, you can see what contracts that computer is covered by. Similarly, when you look at a contract record, the Related Objects tab will show you all computers it applies to.

To make things clear, let’s take a look at the following example:

In this example, the computer that the selected workstation has replaced is covered by a warranty contract and a maintenance contact. You can easily drill down into either of these contracts from the computer record’s Related Objects tab and see the relationship of that contract with other equipment it covers, or simply access its additional details.


1. From the computer record for PC00072, click the Related Objects tab.2. Click to expand the Replacing node, and then click the C00011,

PC00006 computer node. Under Covered Under you will see two contract records listed.


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Double-clicking the row for the Maintenance contract in the related objects list will launch the record. The following screenshot shows the details screen for the maintenance contract for computer PC00006.

Staying informed about important events

Under the hood of AN7 resides a powerful workflow automation engine which can perform various operations based on conditions in your system. These operations can be as simple as sending out e-mail notifications, or as complex as recalculating field values and modifying object records in the system.

Through the use of workflow, AN7 can also help you stay up to date with your contracts, among other important events. For example, automatically get notified via e-mail when a contract is overdue or about to expire to make sure you're always covered, or on the contrary — to make sure you notify the vendor to avoid auto-renewals of unwanted contracts. This is just one quick example to show the strength of AN7’s workflow automation engine.


1. From the Related Objects tab for computer PC00006, double-click the Computer Maintenance record.

Here you can review additional details of that maintenance contract.


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We feel this feature was important to mention because its power and flexibility may not be immediately apparent. While your evaluation installation has default workflow already configured for you, creating additional workflow may require a learning curve. This is another reason why you may want to contact our technical team as we can help you over the hurdles with swift professional assistance and friendly advice.

Monitoring installed software and staying compliant with software licensing

Unless you want to play the odds against software giants who can send a pack of hungry bounty hunters down your way to look for illegally installed copies of their software and potentially slap your organization with huge fees, you'd want to stay within the boundaries of software licensing agreements. However, with continuous hardware upgrades, replacements, and employee rotation it is practically impossible to do so without having a system in place for detecting software installations and tracking software licenses. Managing software licenses also helps uncover unused licenses, which becomes a huge money saver when you hire new employees and need to figure out where you have to purchase yet another bundle of Microsoft Windows, MS Office 2010, Adobe Acrobat, and Half-Life 2 (actually, scratch the latter), or simply can reuse the licenses that were freed up retiring a computer.

AN7 helps you ensure continuous software licensing compliance across your company by automatically discovering and tracking installed software and checking detected installations against established license limits.

In the following example, the Tracked Software grid shows for each software product you want to track the compliance status, which is auto-calculated based on policies of its licenses, and available entitlements of these software licenses.

After analyzing the data further it becomes apparent that there are currently problems with Windows 8 Professional, QuickBooks Payroll 2014 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, for which discovered installations were unreconciled, i.e. not matched with existing software licenses. However, there are no available entitlements of software licenses for these products anyway, so you probably need to increase the amount of purchased licenses.


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Knowing the whereabouts of your assets

To be honest, unless you secretly insert GPS trackers in every asset, no software in the world would be able to help you pinpoint their precise location. However, in AN7 you can associate assets with an owner and/or organization who is responsible for them. Similarly, you can specify a location for every asset to know where the asset is supposed to be. You can decide for yourself what a location represents — it can be an entire office building, a floor, an office, a room, etc.

On the screenshot below you will find the Owner, Organization, and Location fields in the Ownership Information section on the left hand side of the computer record.


1. In the Side Bar, proceed to the Software Asset Management section.2. Expand the Tracked Software node.3. Click List.

From here you can drill down into individual license records to see additional license details.


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You have probably noticed that the captions for Owner, Organization, and Location fields have a light blue color, and they are underlined. Just like hyperlinks in a web browser. These blue underlined captions work very similarly. They indicate that the respective field is actually a link to another record. Click on an underlined field caption and AN7 will bring up the details of the associated record. For example, clicking on the word Owner will bring up the person record where you will find the contact information for the owner of that asset.

If you need to see what other assets this person owns, just click on the Configuration Items tab of the person record.


You can simply open the computer record for PC00091 and review the contents of the Ownership Information section. Drill down into related record Owner, Organization and Location and review their details as well.


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Service ManagementJust as with Configuration Management, Service Management is not without its challenges. Keeping track of customer issues, requests, outages and changes to your environment can be a daunting and sometimes overwhelming task without a proper way to manage it all. Can you prioritize a mail merge issue with a mail server down issue? Can you easily communicate with your customer and give them an easy way to connect with you? Can you quickly leverage asset information for troubleshooting hardware and software issues as they come up? Can you easily delegate work for several tasks related to a request without having to make several phone calls? Whether your company’s services are internal or external facing, you need a solution to help you juggle all of the day to day tasks and cut through the clutter of the sticky notes on your monitor. It’s either that or the alternative of pitch forks and flaming torches at your office door, and that is just not an option. Alloy Navigator is designed to handle the critical challenges facing IT specialists including:

• Providing customers with easy options for contacting support and tracking their issues• Tracking service call history for your software and hardware• Keeping running logs of customer – technician interaction• Scheduling multiple tasks to multiple people per situation• Leveraging configuration data to help with service solutions• Auto-assign work and manage workflows based on company procedure and policy• Easily escalate issues for an number of reasons you define

Providing customers with easy options for contacting support and tracking their issues

Let’s face it, these days many organizations are shielding themselves from customers. Why? Because customers are annoying, they call up with silly issues and they take the precious time away from support engineers who are already overwhelmed with making the world a better place.

We hope you realize that we were being acidly sarcastic just now, and only because we’ve been burned so many times by poor customer service from some of our vendors. But, unfortunately, the alienation often happens within companies as well, when internal users — regular employees — need technical assistance from the internal help desk.

Of course, the quality and the perception of customer service cannot be changed overnight. But the first step is relatively simple — provide your customers with options to submit their issues, via channels other than phone, and, surprisingly enough, they will stop calling. Well, not completely, but the reduction in the number of phone calls will be substantial.

AN7 does just that with the ability to submit issues via e-mail and from the web. Submitted data ends up in a single repository, so all tickets, no matter how they were entered into the system fall under the same structured process. The benefits are obvious — customers can choose at their free will how to submit their issues, nothing gets lost in the shuffle, all tickets get properly prioritized and uniformly processed. As a result, the levels of customer satisfaction and their trust in your IT department grow dramatically, and your technical team gets more time to actually make the world a better place. Figuratively speaking, that is.


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Let’s review the process of submitting a ticket using the Self-Service Portal provided by Alloy Navigator. We will also touch on related topics, including assigning the ticket to a technician for handling.

For the purpose of this guide we’ll take a look at an already entered ticket as it appears in the Self Service Portal.


1. Click the Self-Service Portal shortcut created on your desktop during the installation.

2. Sign in using Alloy Navigator administrator’s password provided to you during the installation.

3. Click Submit a Ticket in the Tools section of the Home page.4. Enter ticket summary and description, then click OK.

The ticket will be submitted and will be stored in Alloy Navigator’s repository. In the next steps we are going to review what happens next.


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Auto-assign work and manage workflows based on company procedure and policy

What happens next with the ticket depends on the approach you choose. You have many options, from periodically reviewing the Incidents list for new unassigned tickets and assigning them manually, to auto-assigning tickets to appropriate technicians.

Before we start talking about next steps let’s take a few very important notes in relation to the Self Service Portal:

Earlier in the Configuration Management section of this guide we talked about workflow as the means to automatically handle various events in the system. This is another example where the workflow can be used to define a specific behavior in response to the event of creating a new ticket in the system, specifically, to auto-assign tickets to individual technicians or groups of technicians. This eliminates the task of having someone assign tickets manually.

Tickets can be automatically assigned based on whatever criteria you like. For example, all incident tickets originating from a particular company could be auto-assigned to a specific technician. Or, depending on the nature of the issue, tickets can be routed to the respective “expert” groups of technicians. For instance, a network related issue would be auto-assigned to the network group, but requests for software or office supplies may go to other groups.

Another vitally important use of the workflow engine is automatic escalations. It is nice to be able to notify technicians when a ticket is assigned to them, or notify the requester when the ticket is updated with a proposed resolution, but what happens if a ticket just sits there? What happens when a ticket is taking too long to resolve? The workflow engine has you covered there as well. Workflow can automatically e-mail technicians when a ticket is idle, or it can notify a support team manager when a runaway ticket is approaching its due date. These notifications can help make sure customer requests are never misplaced and that your company retains its expected level of customer service.

Points of interest: • The Self Service Portal not only allows customers to submit tickets, but to update and track their tickets as well as browse knowledge base articles for solutions to their issues.

• There is also a corresponding Technician Web Portal which provides Technicians with all the abilities they need when away from their desk. In addition to the Technician Web Portal, Alloy Navigator includes the Mobile Portal that allows technicians to receive announcements and to work on their tickets via mobile devices -- smartphones and tablets.

• When submitting tickets via the Self Service Portal, users have the ability to add attachments. This way they can attach screenshots or log files, which is often a crucial point in troubleshooting software related issues.

• Customers can submit tickets through the Self Service Web portal, but also via e-mail. AN7’s Mail Connector can monitor a mailbox for new e-mail for creating and updating tickets.


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Tracking service call historyand leveraging configuration data to help with service solutions

Let’s review the ticket from the previous example. In the hopes of pointing out some additional features of AN7, notice the technician has associated the ticket with the customer's computer through the use of the Related CI field.


1. In the Main Console, open the Service Support section of the Side Bar.

2. Expand the Incidents node3. Click List.4. Double-click the record for Incident T000004.

You will notice that the Assignee field of the ticket contains the name of the technician assigned to handle the ticket. The Related CI field shows the name of the computer related to this incident.


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In case you were wondering, CI stands for Configuration Item.Why did we bring in the Related CI field into this example? Since this field is a link to the configuration item (computer, hardware, software, etc.) that caused the incident (in our example it’s the customer’s computer), the technician can launch the detailed computer record associated with this ticket simply by clicking on the Related CI link.

Relating the customer's computer to a ticket also allows you to track the ticket history of that computer. This becomes important for evaluating the cost of support for that computer, making informed decisions about allocating support resources, fixing or replacing unstable equipment, or to simply know what actions were last done on it.

The following screenshot shows the Ticket History tab of the computer record related to our incident.

As you can see, the customer has submitted several tickets about the same issue. This is why the technician made the decision to reimage and finally replace the computer.


1. On the General tab of the T000004 Incident record, click the caption of the Related CI field, which is displayed as a link.

2. In the opened PC00015 Computer record, click the Ticket History tab.


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Keeping running logs of customer – technician interaction

The Activity tab in AN7 acts as a historical log of everything that’s been done on a ticket. This log contains records of troubleshooting, communication to and from the customer, entries created by the workflow engine surrounding important events, etc. These activities can be entered by technicians or customers as a result of performing actions such as 'Log Work' or 'Add Comment', but can also be used in conjunction with similar communication related actions such as 'Notify Requester' or 'Notify Assignee'.

In our example, the activity (#2 on the following screenshot) is created to alert the customer that the technician is going to have someone schedule a time with them to replace the machine. The preceding activity (#1) stores the results of research made by the technician and the time spent on it. Some of the activities in the list are added by the workflow engine automatically, to track important actions with the ticket.

It's important to note that you can choose which activities are visible to the customer. Not all entries may be relevant.


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Scheduling multiple tasks to multiple people per situation

As you correctly guessed, just making a note that someone is going to replace the machine isn’t going to get any work done. To handle task assignments Alloy Navigator uses a special class of tickets — Work Orders.

So what is a Work Order anyway? It's sort of what it sounds like. The Work Order is an order for work, but more specifically, it's a request to perform a task. These tasks can sometimes be centered around issues or requests, but they can also be isolated. In this case, replacing the machine is a task which needs to be completed to solve the performance issue the customer is having with his desktop.

What's nice about Work Orders is that you can easily associate them with any of the other ticket classes in AN7. This means you can have several technicians work on supporting tasks at the same time. Sound like a Project? Well, every ticket is like a tiny project isn't it? Before Work Orders, technicians might have tossed one ticket back and forth like a hot potato, but with AN7, Work Orders give each group the ability to work simultaneously with their own deadlines, so there's never a worry of having a ticket assigned to a team just before the Due Date is up. This translates into a happy customer.

One of the best examples of this is when your company hires a new employee. You've got several tasks to be handled and every one of them most likely needs to be handled by a completely different group. This makes things difficult because you have only one ticket! With AN7 all you have to do is create one Work Order for the computer setup for the desktop team, one for account creations for the network team and one for the phone setup for the telecom group. If you have new furniture to be setup you can even have a Work Order requesting facilities to assemble it. Need new equipment to be ordered? Send a Work Order to procurement. Regardless of how many tasks you have, every group can work on their own tasks at the same time with their own deadlines to make the entire process much more efficient.


1. Open the record for Incident T0000042. Click the Activity tab.

Here you can review various activity records. You can also double-click individual activity records to drill-down into their details.

Points of interest: Aside from the Work Order, AN7 has 4 other ticket classes called Incidents, Problems, Change Requests and Service Requests. We've already seen what Incidents can do which are used to manage customer reported issues and requests. Problem tickets are typically for escalating issues to higher levels of support or for managing large groups of Incidents in cases such as a network outage. Change Requests and Service Requests are used to make sure service impacting changes go through an approval process and are always managed with care. An example of this might be an upgrade of your company's production mail server. This change has a high impact to your ability to provide e-mail service to your customers. You'll need to know when something like that is happening and you might even need approval to make the change.


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Okay, back to our example. The Work Order was created to assign the task of replacing the computer to a technician:

As you can see from the screenshot, the work order is linked to the original ticket (see the Parent Ticket field). The screenshot below shows the content of the Work Orders tab of our incident.


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Once the customer's desktop is reimaged, the technician can mark the work order as Completed and mark the computer as being In Repair while it is being re-imaged. The Assignee of the Incident can then be notified of the completion of the work order and he can follow up with the customer to make sure everything is now improved. Once it’s been confirmed that everything is working well for the customer, the incident ticket can be marked as Resolved.


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Additional FeaturesIt's near impossible to cover all of Alloy Navigator's functionality in a single guide, especially when we're trying to keep it reasonably short and easy to read. However, there are a couple of features that deserve extra special attention, so hopefully you don't need a nap just yet. The features we're going to cover in this section are sometimes overlooked, but can make a big difference in your day to day. We want to make sure we bring them to light.

Data Views

The ability to collect information in Alloy Navigator would be of little use if there was no way to view, find, and manipulate it. Lucky for you, Alloy Navigator excels at letting you conveniently organize your data with the abilities to filter, sort, group, and even colorize data records based on your criteria. Let’s say you have a few thousand tickets in the database, but you want to see only the ones that are set to the status “In Progress”. Pretty realistic, but this doesn’t sound too impressive. How about seeing only tickets in progress, grouped by due date, sorted by priority within each group, and color-coded so that high priority tickets are displayed in red? That kind of data view would not only give an easy way to show the tickets you need to work on, but it also provides effective visual cues to the areas that require your attention and probably, an immediate action on your part.

Data views can often be used in lieu of reports, as a quick on-the-fly drill-down form of reporting. Don't get us wrong, Alloy Navigator’s integration with SAP Crystal Reports offers some truly advanced reporting features, but, depending on your needs, creating a full blown report may be a bit overkill for a quick task. Along with that, reporting engines typically don’t allow you to work with the data you find after you specified output layout for it. Data views, on the other hand, allow you to quickly manipulate your data and are far simpler to work with. You can easily select existing views you've created from the drop-down list or quickly organize the data the way you want to see it using a collection of simple filtering options. What’s even better is that you can easily export the contents of any view to MS Excel for use in a chart or pivot table, or use the Quick Report feature to generate a printed copy of the data view.

Let’s go through a few examples of creating and using data views in Alloy Navigator.

You’ve been given a directive to upgrade all of your company’s computers to the latest version of Windows by the end of the year and your initial concern is that many existing computers require upgrades or replacement. To minimize costs and effort, you decide it’s best to first identify machines requiring only a simple RAM upgrade and to make your life easier, you’re going to focus on laptops first.

Points of interest: Aside from Excel, data views can be exported in other formats including HTML, plain text (CSV), or XML.


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So why reinvent the wheel? The application already contains an existing view called “RAM < 4GB” and you can easily select it in the Side Bar or from the view drop-down in the upper right. You’ll notice all computers with less than 4GB of RAM are shown automatically because anything with more RAM is filtered out. This is due to an existing Advanced Filter set in the view which we’ll cover later on.


1. In the Main Console, open the Configuration Management section of the Side Bar.

2. Expand the Computers node.3. Click RAM < 4GB.

Alternatively, you can select RAM < 4GB from the View menu (located in the upper corner) when you are on any other view of the Computers grid.


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Now that we have our view showing computers with the RAM we’re looking for, let’s narrow the results even more using Quick Filtering. Quick Filtering allows you to include and exclude values from your grid with ease and really makes pinpointing data fast. Since we wanted to focus on laptops only, let’s filter out everything else by right-clicking a cell containing the word laptop in the Category column and then selecting Filter > Filter by Selected Field. Just like that our view shows us laptops with less than 4GB of RAM as you can see below.


1. In the Category column, right-click a cell containing the word ‘Laptop’.2. Select Filter > Filter by Selected Field.

Points of interest: Notice that when you apply a quick filter, you have a new bar shown at the bottom of your view which allows you to cancel, toggle or customize the applied Quick Filters.


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So, maybe RAM is our first priority, but we also want to be alerted about laptops with less than 50GB of available hard drive space. We can easily do this by configuring the highlighting feature to color any row relating to a computer meeting those conditions. For instance, in this case all we have to do is set a simple condition saying that if hard drive free space is less than 50GB, make that row pink.

After saving the highlighting settings, our view looks like this:


1. Right-click anywhere in the grid and select Customize View.2. Click on the Highlighting tab.3. Click Add.4. Enter Name: HDD < 50GB.5. Click on Filter > Add Condition.6. Change 'Activity Count' to 'HDD Free', 'equals' to 'is less than', and enter

'50000' for the value.7. Set your background color and click OK.8. Click OK.


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As it stands we have some good information here. We know which laptops have under 4GB of RAM and less than 50GB of available hard drive space, but being able to see the laptops grouped by their owner’s departments would really help us out. The Organization column contains this information, but it is not displayed. However, you can easily customize the columns shown in your view:

Once you add the Organization column to your view, you can easily group your data by that field simply by dragging the column header into the gray bar above the view. After you’re done your view will look like the one below:


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So, now the first step towards the migration of your computers to the latest version of Windows is done — you have displayed all laptops with less than 4GB of RAM, grouped by their Organization and highlighted, if their hard drive free space is less than 50GB.

And that’s not all. Let’s save our customization of the view now, to be able to come back to it at any time or share it with others later. This can be done simply:

After saving the created view will appear in the Computers node of the Side Bar and within the View drop-down, always on your fingertips.

Now that you have your view, you can do all sorts of things. For example, you can quickly export your view to MS Excel, share it with others, or stare aimlessly at the pretty pink colored rows. Unfortunately however, Alloy Navigator cannot upgrade the RAM in these computers for you. Sorry.


1. Right-click anywhere in the grid and select Customize View.2. The Fields tab should be active.3. In the Available Field list select Organization and click Add ->.4. Click OK.5. Back in your view, click and drag the column header cell for

Organization to the gray bar above.6. Right-click anywhere in the grid and select Group > Expand All.


1. Open the View drop-down in the upper right corner of the view.2. Select Save View As from the drop-down.3. Specify name of the view in the appearing Save View As dialog.4. Click OK.

Point of interest: To export this view to MS Excel go to File > Analyze with MS Excel.


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Oh, one more thing: as promised earlier, it’s important to mention the Advanced Filter feature that started off our view’s foundation. This feature is extremely powerful as it allows you to push past the Quick Filter abilities with far more complex condition configurations, but even allows you to enter in Microsoft SQL queries if you somehow hit the limitations of the flexible interface.

As you can see below, the Advanced Filter of the newly created view has been inherited from the initial “RAM < 4GB” view that you have used as a basis and is configured to show not retired computers where the RAM field is less than 4GB:

We have just practiced in saving your views for later use, but what's even more important is that you can also share views across teams, departments or your entire company. You can even assign views to individuals or groups of individuals based on their role ensuring everyone has access to the views they need to perform their daily duties, but not to unnecessary views they don't need.


1. Right-click anywhere in the grid of the created view and select Customize View.

2. Select the Advanced Filter tab.


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With a uniformed display of data, members of your team share the same vision and speak the same language, figuratively speaking, that is. Additionally, time spent training your engineers is greatly reduced by ensuring the same methods for viewing and accessing help desk tickets, computer records, or other data. With shared views, just give them instructions to use a particular data view in certain scenarios, and your job is done!

To sum up, data views are a powerful and flexible facility, which help you find, visualize and quickly report on your data while making sure you and your team are all on the same page.

Point of interest: As if views weren't powerful enough, consider the power of combining workflow with views.

Imagine you had a Workflow Action that changed the status to 'Pending Requester' when you requested more information from the Requester of a ticket. With a second piece of workflow changing the status back to 'In Progress' when a customer responded to you, why bother looking at tickets in 'Pending Requester' status? Simply create a view that filters the 'Pending Requester' status out, but shows 'In Progress' tickets.

Ask a customer for more information and the ticket is removed from the view and when the customer replies to your e-mail, the ticket will automatically appear in your view. Just another way to save you time by allowing you to focus on what's important.


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ConclusionWe feel better now that you've given us the opportunity to show you some of the power behind Alloy Navigator and we appreciate the time you've set aside to evaluate our product. We hope we've not only made the evaluation process easier, but that we've made it somewhat enjoyable.

In this short guide, we've demonstrated only a handful of the product's features. Of course Alloy Navigator is a much more comprehensive product, and it provides a wealth of other features and additional tools that simply would be too much to even briefly mention in one guide.

Please keep in mind that our technical team is always available to give you a detailed overview of essential product features, and help you plan your implementation and talk to you about best practices. This complimentary program, called the JumpStart, will be invaluable resource for you! We encourage you to contact us for scheduling one at your earliest convenience.

If you have any questions regarding Alloy Navigator, please don’t hesitate e-mailing us or giving us a call. Below is our contact information:

Product features, technical information, implementation:

e-mail: [email protected]

phone: 800-810-9020, option 2 (US Toll Free) or +1-973-661-9700, option 2

Product pricing, licensing, purchasing:

e-mail: [email protected]

phone: 800-810-9020, option 1 (US Toll Free) or +1-973-661-9700, option 1

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