ChangeGear-SharePoint Integration

Meritide’s PointPath solution is a real-time integration between SharePoint and ChangeGear. It provides a self-service portal for business users to manage their IT tickets and utilize the ChangeGear knowledge base within the familiar SharePoint interface.

Increase SharePoint’s value to the organization by driving greater adoption, while better utilizing your ChangeGear Service Desk solution within IT.

Contact us now to find out how Meritide’s integration consultants can help you implement ChangeGear and SharePoint integration.

    Integrating ChangeGear and SharePoint has big benefits

    Real-Time Visibility

    Having integrated SharePoint web parts for users – such as My Active Incidents, My Closed Incidents – is an easy way to cut down on status request phone calls and emails to your ChangeGear service desk technicians. Reducing calls and emails has a real return-on-investment when you consider the cost of an average IT request. It can also change the perception of IT – moving it from the “black hole” into a highly communicative, friendly ally. Not only will users will feel more satisfied with their level of service, but your service desk technicians will be able to spend more time resolving tickets.

    Higher Ticket Capture

    Because SharePoint is a friendly interface for business users, it provides an easy and intuitive way to create ChangeGear tickets – rather than send an email or call the service desk. Knowing the benefit of real-time visibility into the status provides an extra incentive to submit tickets, and users can do so at their convenience. The service desk, then, will be not only be capturing a higher percentage of tickets – but also will have greater standardization of information collected that can be easily reported on within ChangeGear by managers and executives.

    Fast User Acceptance

    Rolling out a new service desk solution for the business is often a challenge, particularly when it comes to the self-service portal. It takes significant time to prepare communication, training materials, and make it easy for people to use. With PointPath, since business users are already accustomed to working in SharePoint with lists, implementation and training time is greatly reduced BECAUSE the solution uses the same SharePoint functionality they already know.

    Better System Utilization

    With business users realizing the benefits of real-time visibility and having an incentive to submit tickets, SharePoint becomes more central to their daily work – THE place where they go to conduct business. This creates higher utilization of SharePoint as a productivity tool and extension of the Office suite. Service desk technicians, because they receive more tickets through the SharePoint interface, then spend more time using ChangeGear. This increases the value of ChangeGear to IT and the rest of the organization.

    Business Users Work in SharePoint

    Your ChangeGear Service Desk ticket data is displayed in SharePoint real-time for business users, such as “My Active Incidents.” Business users can also create or update tickets from within SharePoint that get pushed into ChangeGear in real-time, preserving data integrity between systems.

    The business user only has to go to one system – SharePoint – to manage their IT tickets. This increases SharePoint’s value to your organization as the “one stop shop” for conducting business.

      ChangeGear-SharePoint Integration Capabilities

      Incident Management

      Business users can view ChangeGear Incident information in standard SharePoint web parts, lists, and view. They can also create incidents in ChangeGear using SharePoint forms and workflows. Update capabilities provide limited actions to modify or update ChangeGear incidents from SharePoint.

      Knowledge Management

      Business users can access ChangeGear knowledge right within SharePoint. They can browse all Knowledge articles, and see views for Most Popular (based on user ratings), New Articles, and Recently Updated articles. All of these capabilities aim to deflect tickets before they occur and reduce cost.

      Self-Service Portal

      The out-of-box ChangeGear-SharePoint integration package comes with a Self-Service portal dashboard page. This page allows users to quickly search knowledge, see quick ticket statuses, create tickets, and see their most recently created tickets. From the Dashboard page, users can launch into standard SharePoint list views of their incidents and enjoy SharePoint out-of-box functionality.

      Additional ITIL Processes

      Some enterprise organizations go beyond ITIL Incident Management and utilize ChangeGear for Service Request Management or Change Request Management. Because of our solution architecture, we can easily incorporate these additional ITIL processes into your SharePoint portal. Plus, we can take advantage of SharePoint to create additional custom actions, workflows, and forms for a truly tailored solution.

      IT Staff Work in ChangeGear

      Your IT staff continues to work and resolve tickets from within your ChangeGear Service Desk application. When a business user creates a ticket in SharePoint, it appears like any ticket created directly in ChangeGear. Then, as your technicians resolve the tickets any status changes are communicated real-time into the business user’s SharePoint self-service portal.

      Your technicians only need to use one system – ChangeGear Service Desk – to manage their work. This enhances your service desk’s value both to the IT and entire organization.

        Let's get a little technical: how the integration works

        External Content Type

        The ChangeGear Service Desk item data, provided through the external content type and external list, can be used in standard SharePoint list views — including being filtered, sorted, and personalized. The BCS data is also compatible with standard SharePoint integrations for Outlook items and mobile applications.

        Business Connecivity Services

        For on-premises SharePoint applications, a PointPath solution gets loaded to SharePoint that adds a Business Connectivity Services (BCS) application and configuration. This BCS application is configured to communicate via web services with the ITSM system application. For Office 365, a proxy service utilizes OData to translate between SharePoint Online and ChangeGear.

        Consumable Data

        The ChangeGear item data can also be consumed by SharePoint out-of-box Business Data web parts, third party-purchased web parts that support External Lists or External Content Types, or custom web parts developed by each client. Item data can be used as a data source for Reporting Services reports and KPIs, or indexed with the SharePoint search to be part of a search scope.

        Create and Update

        The External Content Type supports creation (and limited updates) of item data through standard SharePoint list forms, custom forms, or InfoPath forms. If an external list is used, the creation (or lookup) of items can be executed within SharePoint workflows. This ability allows clients to have multiple and specific customized Intake forms for different purposes or services that can all create incidents in ChangeGear.

        What Inspired Meritide's PointPath Solution?

        PointPath was launched by the founders of Meritide on the principle of first maximizing a company’s existing systems and processes before considering replacement.

        In the recent past, SharePoint has been adopted by an overwhelming majority of enterprises and is continuing to expand its footprint as part of the corporate infrastructure. Despite this dramatic growth there was still a gap between what has been delivered and what can be achieved within SharePoint.

        Time and again, we heard the same needs being articulated without any solution on the market to solve them:

        • Organizational goals to make SharePoint THE enterprise portal for business users
        • Desire to avoid “rip and replacing” the service desk primarily for self-service purposes
        • Increasing IT service levels to the business with an easy way for users to interact with IT
        • Reduce latency of status communications to service customers
        • Cut new solution training time by using tools familiar to most business users

        To reduce the development time and improve the user experience with SharePoint applications, many organizations are turning to third-party solution firms to integrate internal enterprise applications, such as ChangeGear Service Desk, into the SharePoint portal vision. The goal is to use SharePoint as a platform and the vision is to enhance the user experience with out-of-the-box specific applications tailored closely to the needs of the user.