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Presenters:
- Scott Baker, Director of Development
- Rob Blech, Technical Support Manager
- Jeff Boenig, Senior Programmer
- Fred Brachman of Brachman Associates
- Jeff Chancellor, of Crescent Software
- Dan Colby, of Procom
- Jim Goldfinger, Senior VP of Sales
- Rob Hayami, of Databeacon
- John Lockhart, Product Manager
Presentation Summaries:
What's New in Visual Intercept 3.5 - General Tips & Tricks with Visual Intercept
John Lockhart demonstrated a number of new features in 3.5. Highlights included integration to Microsoft Visual SourceSafe over the web utilizing a .Net plug-in with the web application. This now allows for distributed developers to benefit from the same tight integration with their development environment that has always been available in the desktop application. More importantly, to assist our customers in deploying Visual Intercept more broadly throughout the enterprise, we have added more than 300 additional custom fields that can now be partitioned out for multiple user communities in a shared environment.
Best Practices for Status Promotions and Email Notifications
Rob Blech demonstrated the ability to create multiple workflows using the status promotion editor, once again to allow the application to be applied in multiple ways within the same environment.
Visual Intercept Issue Management "Increasing Stakeholder Value"
Management Consultant Fred Brachman shared some of his experiences dealing with executive issues for a number of Fortune 500 companies over the last 20 years. Fred described how executives could use the Visual Intercept platform to manage top-of-mind issues affecting shareholder value.
Visual Intercept Beyond Software Defect Tracking
Jim Goldfinger moderated a discussion of the many ways that Visual Intercept is being used both by Elsinore as well as our customers in areas well beyond it's initial direction which is often software development defect tracking. Examples included: IT Help Desk, Customer Service, ISO9001, General Management Issues, Project Management Issues, Financial Issues and even Sales Force Automation.
Compliance Management and Visual Intercept
Elsinore Partner Crescent Software President Jeff Chancellor demonstrated how Visual Intercept is an ideal platform for managing work resulting from regulatory compliance issues. In Jeff's example, he demonstrated his survey generation utility that allows companies to map their adherence to particular regulations and then "spin off" an issue in Visual Intercept when adherence is not met.
Business Intelligence and Visual Intercept
Rob Hayami from DataBeacon demonstrated their Business Intelligence Engine that will be integrated in a future release of Visual Intercept this year. Through this integration, users of Visual Intercept will have the ability to create real time intelligent cubes of their data providing more graphical visibility into the "hot spots" of their operation and, once again increasing stakeholder value in the executive ranks.
Functional Project Management and Visual Intercept - Issue Management
Dan Colby from Procom, an Elsinore partner, gave a very useful overview of successful project management techniques. Included in that discussion was the significant value that can be derived by integrating Visual Intercept with Microsoft Project to help mitigate risks and manage issues in real time as they occur.
Use of SDK and VBA with examples
Scott Baker demonstrated examples of how Visual Intercept can be extended to add additional functionality and then tightly embed that functionality into 3rd party applications. For example, Scott demonstrated how an error report from one application could automatically be electronically transmitted into Visual Intercept for immediate follow-up.
Customizing Style Sheets and ASP Pages
It what was the highlight of the conference for many of the attendees, Scott provided an in-depth explanation of how the underpinnings of the Web application work in terms of views and screens. In Scott's example, he demonstrated how screens can be tailored for look and feel as well as attribute use based either on a user's profile or project orientation.
Use of Visual Intercept Web Relay
Jim Goldfinger presented some of the new features of Visual Intercept Web Relay as a response to input from existing customers. Highlights include the users ability to specify the priority, severity and category as well as the ability to give final signoff for the issue once it has been resolved. For companies with a relatively large user base wishing to provide very specific and tightly controlled access to its users, Visual Intercept 3.5 Relay provides an option to attach the contact directly to the issue created and then automatically filter all searches against those issues that apply to that filter.
Integrations with Microsoft Project/Visual Intercept in a Help Desk Environment
John Lockhart demonstrated the integration between Visual Intercept and Microsoft Project, giving examples as to how VI can be used to effectively be a proper task management system sitting below Project. A number of attendees were very impressed and felt that this could be an excellent way to keep the project more current and the appropriate stakeholders more involved with the progress in a real time mode. For users looking to use Visual Intercept as an internal or external help desk tool, we demonstrated the example of setting up a project structure by customer or customer groupings, using the search capabilities against accounts and contacts as well as the add-on module for auto escalation which ensures that the appropriate resources are notified when issues stay dormant beyond the allowable threshold for each status.
Elsinore IMF Overview - "The Product of the Future"
Jeff Boenig gave us an early look at the new .Net based technology platform which will continue to build on the idea of utilizing Visual Intercept for far more than IT issue management. In this future release, users will have unlimited capabilities in terms of the data model and applications that can be easily configured. Additionally, practically everything about an implementation in terms of customizations will be stored in the database as metadata which will allow for far more portability of the code.
Elsinore Special Interest Groups
Elsinore has identified a few key areas of enhancement to the product and solicited attendees to join one of more of these "special interest groups" in order to be far more interactive with the direction of the product. Most attendees signed up for at least one of the following areas:
- Enhancing Stakeholder Value with Visual Intercept
- Project Management Issue Management with Visual Intercept
- Compliance Management with Visual Intercept
- Business Intelligence with Visual Intercept
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