Aldon(R) Delivers Enhanced IT Service Management and Compliance With Powerful New Service Desk Functionality

Market Wire, May, 2008

Aldon®, the leading provider of process-driven application change management, today announced Aldon® Community Manager™ 8, the latest release of the company's comprehensive service desk management solution for best practice in IT Services Management and compliance. The newest addition to the Aldon application lifecycle management (ALM) solution, Aldon Community Manager 8 introduces significant project management features such as sub-task sequencing, an ITIL v3-compatible service desk, ITIL templates, enhanced workflow templates, a completely redesigned user interface, and AJAX-enabled web features, resulting in improved processes and precise management of the application lifecycle.

The latest ALM additions support Aldon's goal in delivering continuous improvement and process management across every facet of the IT operation for business success. Fort Lauderdale-based Republic Services, Inc., a leading provider of solid waste collection, transfer, and disposal services with 135 collection companies in 21 states, is one satisfied customer.

Business Systems Analyst TJ Sharpe said, "Aldon Community Manager has been a huge organizational bonus for our company. The software has standardized and formalized our change request and approval process across various software systems and allowed us to focus on the phases of software development. Aldon Community Manager has significantly cut down on our manual time required to enter and navigate through different development requests. The change request process takes a fraction of the time it used to take."

In essence, Aldon Community Manager brings value to organizations by streamlining processes, automating support operations, and integrating existing IT systems, resulting in operational efficiencies, reduced costs, and adherence to industry best practices and compliance standards.

"As businesses and their IT organizations grow, we see IT infrastructures become more fragmented. Efficiency declines, optimization diminishes, and overall control of IT resources suffers," said Aldon CEO Matt Scholl. "Aldon's release of Community Manager 8 offers the power and sophistication necessary for today's enterprises to meet best practice recommendations such as ITIL's service management requirements. Our service desk allows a company to bring their business processes under a single robust management system to improve the reliability, performance, and predictability of IT service provisioning."

Aldon Community Manager 8

ITIL v3-Compatible Service Desk

Aldon Community Manager 8 is a fully compatible ITIL v3 service desk which now offers an array of features to help enterprises meet IT Service Management requirements. Fully integrated with key ITIL processes like incident, problem, and change management, Aldon Community Manager 8 streamlines an organization's business processes into a single centralized tracking system. Aldon Community Manager 8 features:

--  Customizable Configuration Item (CI) types and relationships make it
    possible to visualize the relationships between and among IT assets that
    make up a service, with a dynamic graphical display for impact analysis. An
    advanced query builder easily configures built-in and custom reports on CIs
    and their relationships.
--  Powerful change and project management grant IT and business managers
    visibility and control. A system-wide user interface makes it easy to
    manage user permissions, project membership, preferences, and data. Sub-
    task sequencing enhances project management by automatically moving sub-
    tasks from "Inactive" to "Open" status and waiting for both to close before
    moving on, keeping the process orderly.
--  Enhanced relative approver features offer the ability to select
    relative values such as submitter's supervisor, team leader, assignee team
    members, assignee, or submitter instead of having to define individuals,
    eliminating the need to set up endless approval processes to account for
    each possible submitter or assignee and resulting in significant savings in
    time and effort.
--  An impressive new dashboard comes equipped with controls for
    customizing the dashboard content and layout.  Also, granular controls for
    defining multiple dashboards and managing who receives what dashboard offer
    users welcome flexibility.  A mash-up capability allows the dashboard to
    pull in external data such as news headlines or RSS feeds.
--  AJAX-enabled technology simplifies and speeds up the Aldon Community
    Manager 8 interface. AJAX works by exchanging small amounts of data with
    the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page need not be
    reloaded each time the user requests a change. The technology also makes a
    call to a script or database without leaving the page, meaning that for
    CMDB administration, changes are committed to the database as they are
    made.
--  Additional workflow automation features included in Aldon Community
    Manager 8 aid project tracking capabilities. For example, it is possible to
    combine multiple fields to determine the value of another field,
    streamlining business processes and scaling them as needed.