Access IT Automation Blog

In a world of Digital Transformation where "King Customer" rules, we can all agree that the experience a user has with a product is instrumental. In other words, today, success is about providing the best possible End User Experience (EUX).

End user experience isn't limited to an organization's customers. It also needs to include its employees and other stakeholders. Internal departments such as HR, finance, marketing, and IT need to learn to tune into and better anticipate the needs of employees as well — especially the IT department!

There's no denying it: If you are a Microsoft shop, it is very likely that your organization is going to migrate to Office 365 sooner rather than later. The SaaS version of the Office Suite has so much more to offer than the on-premise version, i.e., newer features, enhanced security, stability fixes, etc.

Whether your enterprise is updating because your on-premise version (Office 2010) goes end-of-life next year in October, or you want to take advantage of features that your version (Office 2016 & 2019) doesn't have, you can run into roadblocks that will bring your migration to a halt.

Digital technology has opened whole new vistas of success, profit, and agility in organizations across the globe. From the smallest startup to the vastest enterprise, Digital Transformation has forever changed the way we do business.

According to Gartner, Digital Transformation is one of THE hottest topics right now.

In a recent Gartner survey, 62% of CEOs said they have an initiative in place to make their organizations more “digital.” To support their customer engagement, businesses need to primarily solve three issues:

• How to handle suddenly spiking demands and demand volatility cost-effectively,
• How to support a much greater variety of product and services reliably, and
• How to quickly adapt to changes in customer tastes and demands when it comes to product features and/or channel.

The possibilities of automation are endless — and that scares many employees. And while enterprises today need to have a short- and long-term plan in place to retrain and reassign their resources whose jobs are now done through automation, IT Automation is aiming to make IT processes faster, more efficient, and ultimately more agile to provide the organizations with higher productivity, healthier and more stable IT environments, and faster turnaround times.

One of the biggest concerns enterprise IT teams voice when they see Access Capture, our application packaging and testing automation solution, in action for the first time is the amount of work that needs to be done as a prerequisite.

In reality, however, Access Capture supports multiple deployment possibilities and can utilize most, if not all, of your existing infrastructure. In this article, I want to walk you through the technical prerequisites from an infrastructure point of view. I will tackle application readiness and management prerequisites in another article.

In the past 12 months, pressure to drive Digital Transformation has reached a new milestone. Alongside with growth, becoming a digital business is now one of the top priorities for CIOs. In fact, our clients and prospects are telling us that one of the biggest concerns right now is figuring out how to increase business agility and drive Digital Transformation to create a sustainable, long-term competitive advantage.

This means companies must figure out how to increase the number, scope, and variety of digital transactions while boosting their ability to react to today's fast changing customer demands. And time is ticking: 33% of organizations already claim they have reached digital scale (significantly more compared to the 17% in 2018), according to Gartner's CIO's Agenda 2019 Report.

For most developers, Java is somewhat the definition of Open Source. Although the story of Java licensing is a long and complicated one, Oracle has certainly now written a new chapter as it will now start charging all non-personal users for the usage and support of its Java SE platform. While Oracle had announced this move a few months back, there has been some updates since.

Starting on April 16th, 2019, Oracle's website informed all non-personal users and developers: "The new Oracle Technology Network License Agreement for Oracle Java SE is substantially different from prior Oracle Java licenses. The new license permits certain uses, such as personal use and development use, at no cost -- but other uses authorized under prior Oracle Java licenses may no longer be available. Please review the terms carefully before downloading and using this product."

Do you rely on a series of repetitive, tedious, and labor-intensive tasks that could easily be automated? Do you need to figure out how to free up resources to drive innovation and Digital Transformation? Are you trying to dig yourself out from under a mountain of compounding IT debt? Or are you moving to an Evergreen IT management approach to increase your organizational agility? Are you trying to figure out how to continuously update your IT landscape?

Whatever your reasons are for starting to implement a new IT automation project, there are a few questions that you should always ask ahead of time to ensure you design it as efficiently as possible — and to avoid going back repeatedly to re-engineer it and patch it up. Here are the ten questions we find the most useful to ask when implementing our IT automation solutions for our clients:

On July 9th, 2019, Microsoft's iconic device management solution, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 — officially known as Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) or affectionately referred to as SCCM within most IT departments — will be retired after 12 long years of support.

To avoid running unsupported (and therefore unsafe) versions of your device management infrastructure, Microsoft recommends a migration to the Current Branch model of SCCM as soon as possible. But there are a few things you should know before migrating.