The Oomnitza Summer ‘22 release includes a significant range of new enhancements that are designed to bring the power of Enterprise Technology Management to a wider audience and give our customers more insight and control over their IT asset inventory and workflow automation. This blog will cover a summary of the primary capabilities delivered with this release, broken into three sections; platform features, software asset management features, and accessories management features. If you’re interested in learning some of the technical details, there is a link at the end of this blog to our Zendesk instance (customers only).
Platform Enhancements
Platform enhancements align to our broader themes of providing immediate and fully integrated visibility across the entirety of your IT estate, addressing challenges with Risk and Security, Compliance and Audit, and Infrastructure and Operations. For the Summer ‘22 release, we are focusing on simplification and ease of use. Specific platform enhancements include:
Ease of configuration and management
This release includes several improvements to the user's interaction with the system. We have made the right side of the screen easier to manage and scale by providing a user interface with more flexible configuration options, which allows the user to hide, display or modify column formats to suit their requirements. We have also added search persistence, which allows search criteria on the left side of the screen to remain in place if the user needs to work across various system modules without losing their search filters.
Integration health monitor
We continue to expand the range and type of integrations we support, and with this release, we have added enhancements to make the integration process more intuitive and holistic. The Summer ‘22 release includes a new dashboard designed to show the health of specific integrations to ensure more robust data integrity; this includes details on sync start and stops, the status at any given moment, the number of records added, updated, and/or skipped, as well as the overall status of the integration. An improved display enables the user to see which integrations require attention.
Copy workflows
Workflows are the backbone of managing IT assets at scale. With this release, we’ve added a simple but critical enhancement to enable our customers to scale their workflows. Rather than requiring workflows to be created from scratch each time a new one is needed, we’ve added a “one-click copy” function that allows a user to develop a base or template workflow that can be reused for similar use cases.
Integration credential simplification
We’ve included new capabilities to simplify and streamline the experience of adding new integrations between Oomnitza and our customer's IT infrastructure. Adding credentials for integrations can be complex (defining naming conventions, types of authorizations required, token key details, etc.). In order to streamline this process, we are making available a catalog of presets (specific integration points with an external application) where the user is able to select from a list and enter their relevant information. This means users are now able to quickly and easily add their credentials without having to know all the details of the credential setup. For those who still wish to work with the more detailed view, the current setup will continue to be available in advanced mode.
We have also introduced improvements to the creation of integrations for extended connectors. This release includes a navigation wizard that allows the user to go directly to the integration details screen to enter the connection information, update or create credentials and view integration schedules from a single screen. This provides all the relevant data in a single view and allows the users to create and manage integrations without having to click through multiple screens.
Software Asset Management
Software asset module enhancements include new support for multiple currencies, improvements over how contracts are managed, the addition of easily embedded analytics to provide enhanced SaaS usage insights, and improvements in SaaS and SSO synchronization. This includes:
Support for multiple currencies
Due to the need to manage software on a global basis, we are adding enhancements that enable our customers to define and perform conversions across system currency fields, including calculated fields, reporting, and dashboards. This allows better alignment between how currencies are defined in contracts and how they are tracked within the system.
Contract simplification
We are moving from a single software license key to a multiple key contract type (e.g. items like budgeted costs, usage tracking, etc.). This prevents customers from creating an incorrect contract and forcing them to restart the process while delivering a more intuitive solution based on contract type. This can be used to track license keys and deliver a consistent set of capabilities across contract types.
Enhanced SaaS analytics
This release includes out-of-the-box analytics that enables our customers to analyze SaaS software licenses. This includes top SaaS applications based on unique logins, as well as top SaaS applications based on available and used licenses. This provides a quick and intuitive way to track SaaS metrics on any dashboard by selecting “add widget”. Furthermore, the data from the analysis can be used to generate automated workflows to address specific issues that can lead to improved business outcomes at scale.
SaaS and SSO Sync improvements
We are adding an enhancement that allows our customers to edit the software name when a SaaS record is linked to a software catalog record. This capability allows the user to edit the name directly after it's been linked, and delivers more flexibility while avoiding the need to delete and recreate the record if it had already been linked with an incorrect name. This will simplify and streamline the naming of software records. We have also added support for multiple SSO applications ( single sign-on), which allows our customers to support all their users regardless of which SSO they are using.
In addition, we have added the option to configure SaaS on an initial SSO lookback - when a customer first establishes an SSO connection, the lookback period pulls the last six months of activity logs, which depending on the specifics of the query could include hundreds of thousands or even millions of records. This enhancement allows customers to define how far back they want to review activity logs, which allows them to control the timeframe and reduce the sync time.
Accessories Module
Accessories are often an afterthought for most IT departments, but can often make the difference between a happy and productive employee, and one that is stuck waiting for a new mouse or keyboard. We continue to expand our support for this critical resource, which in this release includes:
Improved assignment of kits to stockrooms
Prior to this release, kits and stockrooms were separate entities, requiring the user to navigate between stockrooms to assign a kit, which meant from a stockroom it was not possible to see stockroom assignments. This release includes the addition of a Stockroom tab to the Kits page and a Kits tab to the Stockroom page, which will clarify the relation between stockrooms and kits from either perspective and deliver a far more intuitive navigation and assignment experience.
Conclusion
Nearly every feature in this release was created in response to customer feedback; Oomnitza has always been a very customer-centric organization, and the specifics of what is included in this release are a testament to that. We encourage our customers to continue to provide us with feedback and requirements, and will be holding a release webinar that walks through the features in more detail and provides demos of each one.