Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Upcoming EMEA events that we’ll be at

August 30th, 2010

We have a slew of upcoming events in Europe and Russia that we’ll be attending, so we thought it was worth posting up the details in case you’re thinking of attending one of the events and news that we’ll be there will sway you. Hopefully it will sway you towards attending and not the other way around, but you never know…

1. HP Software Forum, Russia
Radisson Hotel, Moscow, 16th September

Our very own Bens van Altena will be presenting and we are hoping to meet with distributors and prospects.

2. Rubik Synergy
Kasteel van Brasschaat, Brasschaat, Belgium, 16th September

Marc Kuijpers and David van Heusden will be presenting and meeting with customers and prospects. The presentation will about SMI Suite and will include an ITSM roundtable discussion.

3. Netherlands Customer Day
Location TBD, 1st week of November

In conjunction with Rubik, we’ll be hosting a customer event in the Netherlands. Details will follow soon.

4. HP Software Universe
Barcelona, 30th November to 2nd December

We’ll be exhibiting at HPSU in Barcelona. You can learn more about the event here: http://h41112.www4.hp.com/events/software-universe-2010/index.php

Tom

Vivit Special Interest Group update

August 27th, 2010

As you may be aware, Westbury is very closely involved with Vivit, the HP user group, and in particular with the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group. Here’s a round-up of new from the SIG:


Latest news from the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group.


HP Service Manager 9.2

For those who attended the recent VIVIT sponsored webinar entitled “What’s New with HP Service Manager 9.2“, we hope you found it useful. Thank you to those who answered the follow up survey. For those who may have missed this event, the session was recorded for your viewing. Please click here to access.


HP Service Manager Survey

As the Vivit SIG for HP Service Management, we’re very interested in your opinion on various topics around HP Service Manager. We’ve created a very short survey, the responses to which will determine our focus for future webinars, and shape the agenda for Local Interest Group events. We’d appreciate a few moments of your time to take a look and complete the survey, which you can find here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/STR9TVK


Upcoming events of interest

There are several local events coming up that are fully focused on HP Service Management. We definitely recommend attending one of these sessions if you’re in the area. Please also let us have feedback about the value of these events.

1. User Group Minnesota – August HP ITSM User Group Meeting

August 20th

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/761103481


2. New York / New Jersey LIG event – What’s new with HP Service Manager 9.2

August 26th

https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=111&chaptereventid=574


3. Chicago LIG event – ITSM User Group

September 8th

https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=4&chaptereventid=576


Mark your calendars! HP Software Universe 2010 Barcelona

http://h41112.www4.hp.com/events/software-universe-2010/index.php


Tom

Our partners talk ITSM reporting

June 24th, 2010

While we were at the HP Software Universe conference last week, we took a moment to talk to some of our partners.

In particular we wanted to know what challenges they were seeing among their customers when it came to ITSM reporting, and their answers were pretty illuminating, especially when you bear in mind that we didn’t even buy them a beer by way of thank-you for waxing lyrical on camera.

Many thanks to the participants:

Steven Kiss of Achievo

Emily McMullin of Techport Thirteen

Ken Herold of Melillo Consulting

Tom

HP Software Universe 2010 excitment reaches fever pitch!

June 8th, 2010

Well, we’re now only a week away until the HP Software Universe 2010 show kicks off at the Gaylord National Convention Center in Washington DC, and the excitement at Westbury Towers is palpable.

For anyone not in the know, HPSU is an annual conference organized by HP for users of its software, featuring a slew of interesting keynote speakers, seminars, training workshops and an exhibition space where HP partner vendors – like Westbury – can interact with attendees, show off our solutions and do as much networking as possible.

If you’re headed down to the show, you can find us at booth number 409. Here’s the official HPSU map, which has in no way been doctored or altered by us:


I guess they’re just really excited to have us there….

In all seriousness, there are going to be some other really interesting vendors there, and you should definitely check out all the stands as soon as you’ve finished visiting booth 409.

For users of HP Service Manager, there are a lot of interesting sessions taking place throughout the conference:

Tuesday, June 15             3:30 PM                4:30 PM                National Harbor 4
Core Media Technologies: becoming a service-driven provider to meet the dynamic needs of an advertising conglomerate

Tuesday, June 15             5:00 PM                6:00 PM                National Harbor 3
Volkswagen Credit:  moving from HP ServiceCenter to HP Service Manager with a shiny new Service Catalog

Wednesday, June 16      9:00 AM               10:00 AM             National Harbor 12
Release synergy: automating release management with HP Service Manager,  Release Control  and Server Automation

Wednesday, June 16      10:30 AM             11:30 AM             National Harbor 10
Sprint and beyond: tips on integrating HP IT service management and business service management software

Wednesday, June 16      3:30 PM                4:30 PM                Potomac 3-4
BCBS improves audit compliance and minimizes risk by implementing an ITIL-based change management solution

Wednesday, June 16      5:00 PM                6:00 PM                National Harbor 11
HP Enterprise Services (formerly EDS): HP ServiceCenter to HP Service Manager data migration in a massive multi-tenant environment

Thursday, June 17            9:00 AM               10:00 AM             National Harbor 11
UnitedHealth Group: lessons learned from a very large-scale HP Service Manager migration and implementation

Thursday, June 17            10:30 AM             11:30 AM             National Harbor 2
Case study: building a solid configuration management foundation through HP Universal CDMB federation with HP Service Manager,  Release Control and Server Automation

Thursday, June 17            1:30 PM                2:30 PM                National Harbor 3
America First Credit Union: HP Universal CMDB and Service Manager providing a 360 degree view of IT

Thursday, June 17            3:00 PM                4:00 PM                National Harbor 5
Playtech: how this company minimized costs and risks in a hosted HP Service Manager implementation

Thursday, June 17            4:30 PM                5:30 PM                National Harbor 2
The rubber meets the road: HP Service Manager and ITIL best practices converge in real-world implementations

Friday, June 18  9:00 AM               10:00 AM             National Harbor 12
HP Service Manager new release details,  roadmap and demo

Friday, June 18  10:30 AM             11:30 AM             National Harbor 3
Meet the Service Manager developers

And last, but by no means least, Westbury’s own Richard Verburg and David van Heusden are going to run a workshop in association with Vivit, the official HP user group, entitled ‘A Practical Approach to Operational Reporting from HP Service Manager / HP Service Center’, on Monday 14th at 1:00pm in Chesapeake 4.

If you haven’t already signed up for the show, we strongly recommend it. If you are planning to go, let us know in the comments here, or tweet us @westbury_it. We’ll be actively blogging and tweeting throughout the show (using official hashtag #HPSWU), and we hope to see you there.

Tom

Upgrade Business Objects to SP2… a few guidelines

April 14th, 2010

When upgrading Business Objects to the latest service pack, SP2, you need to have a lot of patience. At several customers we’ve performed an upgrade and if you wait long enough it will come around.

At our most recent upgrade the install started fine but while the installer was “Validating Install” we had time enough to get coffee, lunch, coffee, dinner, a good night sleep another coffee and so on..  a total no go.  After struggling with this I started to search the internet for similar stories.

I found some pretty interesting articles like: http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/XI3.1+SP2+Installation+on+Windows and http://neverknewthat.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/xi31sp2-slowinstall/. Both indicating that there is a silent install functionality.

Using the silent install the install was finished before my coffee was finished! However creating the .ini file can still be a pain because the cancel of the installation can take up a few minutes. Below a guideline:

(Assumption that the installer is already unzipped).
1. Create an empty response.ini file
Create a empty response.ini file on a location that’s easy to reach. You can use any name you like, but to keep it easy I used response. For this example I created it on the c:\ root.

2. Start the setup with the -w option
Open a command prompt and navigate to the install directory. Start the setup.exe with the -w option followed by the location of the response file.
E.g.: setup.exe -w c:\response.ini

3. Follow all the steps until the installation validation process starts.
Choose CANCEL here and abort the installation. The response.ini file will be updated with the options you selected during the setup.  (Please post your response.ini file below (without password), this way people reading this blog don’t need to do the -w part of the setup but can use your template)

4. Start the setup with the -r option
Open a command prompt and navigate to the install directory. Start the setup.exe with the -r option followed by the location of the response.ini file.
E.g.: setup.exe -r c:\response.ini

At this point the setup will start on the background, you don’t get any message if the setup is completed or executed successfully. Navigate to the Business Objects home directory (e.g. c:\program files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0) and open the Logging directory. There you find an install file that holds all the install information, one of the last lines will show either a success or failure.

As final check you can go to the Central Management Console and log in. Navigate to the Servers and select the CentralManagementServer. Go to Metrics and the product/resource version should show 12.2.*.

Hope it helps.. it sure did for me!

Richard

Video killed the boring, plain-text with a little CSS star

August 13th, 2009

bugglesAny seasoned Westbury-spotters amongst you will have noticed somewhat of a trend in the last 6 – 12 months: namely that we have bought into video in a big way. Obviously it helps that we have such a well-spoken, charismatic and – let’s face it – beautiful public face in one Thomas Danforth St. John Dowler, Esq, but there’s a little more to it than just my face.

For all that Twitter, Facebook or even Pandora and Lala could be considered the poster-children for web 2.0 (are we even still on v2.0 or have we moved to 3.0? Does any patching happen? Will we ever see web 2.31.4.567?) the real internet revelations of 2009 have been sites like hulu – which has brought a huge amount of TV content to the web in a way that is legal, good for the networks and satisfying for viewers – and sites like viddler, vimeo, et al which have begun to challenge youtube for control of the corporate video hosting sector.

Video is vital, and more and more companies are discovering the benefits of visual presentation. Since November of 2008 we have launched a raft of product demo videos for SMI Suite and Change Calendar, along with a 60-second “commercial” for SMI Suite. Coming soon will be more product demo videos, an explanation of the architecture of Service Manager and a piece on using Business Objects Live Office.

The rationale is simple enough. If we tell you that SMI Suite is awesome, we expect that you’ll take that assertion with a pinch of salt. If we show you it being awesome, well… maybe you’ll start to believe us.

Ultimately this is a case of us finally taking a dose of our own medicine. We’ve been prattling on for years about important reporting is because it allows you to show what’s really happening in your IT department, demonstrate IT’s value to the business, etc. We’ve decided to take a leaf out of our own book and so now we’re showing you how cool our product is.

There are going to be lots of cool new videos coming soon – we’ve built a brand-new, state of the art studio and we’re chomping at the bit to show it off, so stay tuned.

Oh, and if my choice of title for this entry has inspired a sudden urge to listen to The Buggles, here’s a really cool video…

Tom