iSupport Software Releases iSupport® 9.5 Help Desk Software

iSupport Software today announced the release of iSupport Version 9.5, a robust, adaptable help desk software solution essential in delivering superior service and support.

Enhancements Focus on Ease of Use and Efficiency
In response to customer feedback, the 9.5 release provides many new enhancements to streamline the way support technicians and end users interact with the help desk software, optimizing the user experience. New features include:

• New service catalog and request interface with more configuration options
• View designer enhancements including preview, new fields and filters, and view actions
• Historical timeline display for incidents, problems, and changes
• Related Companies feature for creating a customizable structure of companies
• Additional email addresses for customer profiles
• Asset count tracking and integration
• Enhanced image handling
• Custom fields and usefulness tracking for knowledge entries
• Approval reminders and customizable alert, maintenance, and warranty notifications

"Our 9.5 release was focused entirely on customer feedback. With the guidance of our clients we have added depth and efficiency throughout iSupport," commented Daren Nelson, Founder and CEO of GWI Software. "We’ve prided ourselves on having one of the highest value upgrade programs in the industry and this release will be an obvious reflection of that. I’ve always felt a strong loyalty to my vendors who have valued and acted on my input and I know my customers feel the same way."

About iSupport Software
iSupport Software (www.iSupport.com) is a leader in providing powerful yet flexible support solutions for IT help desks. With 3,000 installations in organizations worldwide, iSupport’s highly customizable service automation solutions are used by companies such as Panasonic, State of Missouri, SAIC, Check Free, and Telesat Canada. The company is privately held and based in Vancouver, Washington.

Pricing and Availability
iSupport 9.5 is available in two editions; licensing starts at under $1,000. Both will be commercially available to new customers as well as existing customers on active maintenance. For further information please call iSupport Software at 1-888-494-7638 or email sales@iSupport.com.

GWI Software announces the release of iSupport® 9, an integrated, ITIL v3-compliant help desk/service desk solution essential in enabling organizations to deliver superior service and support.

Exciting New Functionality and ITIL v3 Support
Building on an existing robust feature set, iSupport 9.0 delivers a new Configuration Management Database (CMDB) module, Service Catalog functionality, Service Contract capabilities, multi-browser support, graphical and ad-hoc approval enhancements, SNMP asset scanning, and much more.

Configuration Management Database - iSupport’s CMDB functionality is used to track the assets, services, and other resources that are crucial to your organization’s operation. The key goal is to help your company understand the relationships between these components and track their configuration. Minimize risk and increase visibility with this exciting new feature.

Service Catalog – List the services your company provides to customers and/or employees. Service Catalog functionality enables customer requests of services, products, policies/procedures, etc. utilizing configured Change and Purchase templates. Requests can be made by support representatives via the Desktop and by customers via the End User Desktop.

Service Contracts - iSupport 9.0 enables you to create and manage service contracts for your customers. You can track and restrict incidents and changes for customers, companies, and/or assets. Set up contracts based on work item count, hourly count, duration, or a combination. Enhance your company’s service levels with this great new feature.

Multi Browser Support - iSupport 9.0 runs on the world’s most popular browsers including Microsoft® Internet Explorer®, Mozilla® Firefox®, Google™ Chrome, and Apple® Safari®.

Graphical/Ad-hoc Approval Enhancements - iSupport 9.0 graphically displays the approvers and status of each approval in the process. iSupport 9.0 also enables users to initiate an ad-hoc approval cycle and modify approvers on the fly.

SNMP Asset Scanning - iSupport 9.0 enables you to automate the inclusion of non-WMI assets through SNMP asset scanning. Users can include various network pieces like printers and routers, and include that information in their asset management activities.

"While many companies have tightened their R&D budgets significantly during these turbulent times, our 18 years in business have taught us that cost-cutting should never come at the expense of your product," commented Daren Nelson, Founder and CEO of GWI Software. "While this year has been slower than recent years for GWI, we have learned from the past that economic downturns are the best time to add even more value to our solutions than we might in busier times. We believe that adding 45 new features in iSupport 9.0 has put us in an excellent position to capture more market share as we see the first signs of an economic recovery in 2010. We are proud that we have controlled costs and remained profitable without cutting any employees or outsourcing any part of our business. I don’t know of any other company that has consistently delivered the amount of new product, year after year, like GWI Software."

The Evolution of a Trusted Brand
iSupport 9.0 is the much anticipated follow-up to the immensely popular c.Support 8.0, released on April 1, 2009. Moving forward GWI Software will use the iSupport product name for its line of support solutions.

Availability
iSupport 9.0 is available in two editions. Both will be commercially available to new customers, as well as existing customers on active maintenance and already using c.Support 8.0, before December 31st, 2009. For further information please call GWI Software at 1-888-494-7638 or email sales@gwi.com.

On its 17^th anniversary, GWI Software announces the release of c.Support Version 8.0, a web-based help desk software solution powerful and flexible enough to accommodate service desks of varying size and process requirements.

A Fundamentally New Help Desk Software Package
Incorporating numerous user interface and “under the hood” enhancements, c.Support 8.0 provides significant performance improvements and additional management tools to make support centers more proactive and cost effective.  “In a time when many companies have reduced or even suspended R&D on their products, we have committed to our customers to make an even larger investment in our product,” commented Jill Roberts, VP of Development at GWI Software.  “Having survived a few of these economic downturns in our 17-year history, we have learned that it is more important than ever to keep our product moving forward.  This release is one of our largest development efforts since the inception of c.Support and lays groundwork for a new round of significant product enhancements in the next 18 to 24 months.”

New View Methodology
The evolution of c.Support 8.0’s enhancements center around a complete redesign of the solution’s data view methodology, which now enables better performance in scalable enterprise deployments.  Statistics show that average page loads are five times faster and node selections are twice as fast.  ”As we see larger and larger support organizations purchasing our solution, speed becomes a factor,” said Ryan Terrell, VP of Sales for GWI Software.  “Increasing the volumes of data we can handle makes our application more valuable to our existing customers, and it opens up opportunities to compete for larger deals in the future.”

View Designer
Populating Desktop tabs with custom content is simple through a new View Designer, which enables users to pull information from practically any record in the system, apply filters and sorting selections, and order/display columns to individual requirements.  c.Support users with the need to modify a data view to meet any requirement will now have the freedom to design ad hoc, tailored views in a snap.

Chart Designer
Managers require the ability to distill lots of information quickly and c.Support 8.0’s new Chart Designer is a great enhancement to bolster this capability.  The Chart Designer leverages existing views and graphically represents information in a wide variety of chart and gauge types, including gauges that dynamically change color as thresholds are approached and exceeded.  c.Support 8.0 introduces the use of Microsoft^® Silverlight^TM as an option to further enhance charting capabilities.

Enhanced User Interface
Additions to the user interface include the ability to create custom desktop tabs such as a user would find in Internet Explorer^® or Firefox^®.  Allowing users to customize the data they see is critical to enhancing the usability of the application.  Tab sets can be created globally or individually as dictated by configuration settings.  Desktop tabs can contain either data views that have been created with the new View Designer or any number of custom charts or gauges created with the new Chart Designer.  An administrator making the same data available to everyone can set specific views or charts globally or on a user-by-user basis.

Alerts
c.Support 8.0’s Alert feature is a powerful new way to enhance accountability and awareness in your service desk.  When a predetermined threshold is exceeded, display an alert on c.Support 8.0’s tab views or send an email or page.  “The implications of this new feature are far-reaching,” said Andrew Stevens, Network Services Manager for the State of Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents.  “I could be in a management meeting and be alerted that a critical threshold is about to be exceeded.”

Customers Love the Changes
“The user interface and speed enhancements are significant to our continued success with GWI Software’s c.Support,” commented Jarod Johnson, IT Project Manager for Atlas Energy Resources.  “GWI’s attention to ‘under the hood’ work shows they have a vested interest in moving the product forward and meeting the needs of companies like ours as our support needs evolve and grow.”

In related news, GWI Software also announced record revenues for 2008 with new license sales increasing over 30% from previous years.  In 2008 GWI took occupancy of its new 16,000 sq. foot corporate headquarters in the Uptown Village area of Vancouver, Washington and increased headcount to its highest levels since the dot com boom of the late 1990s.  “After 17 years we continue to remain very relevant in the support industry,” commented Daren Nelson, founder and CEO of GWI Software.  “I am proud of the track record we have established and proud that we continue to keep 100% of our employment in the United States.”

Availability
c.Support 8.0 is available in Incident Management and Service Desk editions.  A scheduled upgrade program for existing GWI Software users under a current maintenance contract will begin on April 6, 2009, with general availability of the upgrade download available on July 1, 2009.   For further information please call GWI Software at 1-888-494-7638 or email sales@gwi.com.

We recently sat down with some of our top Implementation Specialists to talk about some of the missteps they've seen companies make in their help desks or while implementing a new help desk application.  This whitepaper covers a dozen of the top blunders and gives suggestions on how to avoid making them in your company. 

To download the whitepaper simply click on the "attachment" text link at the very bottom of this post.  Enjoy!

The GWI Software Team