Numara FootPrints Features and Benefits

Numara FootPrints enables you to:

• Work with a well-defined and easy to navigate 100% web architecture—Access to Numara FootPrints is via a web browser, without any additional software or plug-ins to the browser.
• Begin production within days—Because Numara FootPrints is easy to install and configure, you can be in production within days of receiving Numara FootPrints.
• Customize the user interface—The Numara FootPrints user interface can be modified in a variety of ways, including changing the logo, foreground colors, background colors, and fonts, allowing you to put your own organization’s branding on the interface.  If customers are allowed to access Numara FootPrints, it can be your organization’s “look and feel” that greets them.
• Implement Change Management processes—Implement change management processes to manage and control your software changes and other corporate processes by providing oversight of activities as well as an audit trail for changes.
• Implement Configuration Management—Implement configuration management to manage and control your Configuration Items. Define and view CI relationships, automatically update asset data, and much more.
• Implement a Services Catalog—Service Catalog is a document that provides a brief overview, in business terms, of all the business and infrastructure services offered by the IT provider, which may also include service charges. Numara FootPrints Service Catalog (SC) enables IT organizations to offer a menu of services customized to their business customers; this allows IT to demonstrate its value to the business, and provide transparency of service costs . Items in the Service Catalog might include new equipment (laptop, Blackberry, etc.), critical business services such as email, or services required for a new hire. An entry in the SC would include a description of service, costs, service level agreement, etc. in a customer-friendly interface.
• Perform follow-the-sun escalations—Provide global, 24/7 support with “follow-the-sun” escalations to escalate Issues to different teams at different times based on availability.
• Create parent/child relationships between Issues—Create parent/child relationships between related Issues, allowing you to separate tasks into subtasks for complex processes.
• Dynamically access data—Dynamically access records stored in your existing LDAP-based address books and SQL-based databases with Numara FootPrints’ integrated, add-on modules.  By leaving your data in their current location and accessing the data dynamically, you need only maintain the one resource.
• Create Quick Issue templates—Pre-fill the data for repetitive Issues like “password reset” with Quick Issue templates.
• Manage all support email—Send automatic email alerts, create Issues through email, and track email conversations.
• Work from email—Receive email notifications and reminders, update Issues from email, and even close Issues.
• Track time spent on each Issue—Work on multiple Issues at one time while Numara FootPrints automatically tracks the time spent on each Issue.
• Centrally manage requests, regardless of their source—Whether requests come in from email, the telephone, the web, live chat, or wireless devices, manage them all from one centralized resource.
• Create customized business rules to automatically assign and update Issues.
• Manage change—Track feature requests, change requests, and defect reports for development.  Quality Assurance teams can track testing cycles with customized workflow functions.
• Apply service levels—Create service levels based on the problem or incident type, or based on the customer’s department, organization, or ID, and generate reports that provide service level metrics.
• Build a knowledge repository—Create a Knowledge Base of solutions, questions and answers, and procedures.
• Allow customer self-service—Configure Numara FootPrints to allow customers to submit and track their own Issues, check status via the web or email, and access a Knowledge Base.
• Track trends with customizable, graphical reports and metrics—Get real-time, customizable metrics and graphical reports, schedule automatic reports to be emailed, and much more.

Benefits of Numara FootPrints

Numara FootPrints offers many significant benefits, including:

• 100% web-based service desk software for internal and external support operations
• Rapid deployment without programming, consulting, or training
• Low cost of acquisition, implementation, and maintenance
• Easy customization and flexibility, allowing usage in multiple business areas by creating multiple, simultaneous Projects for any function
• LDAP and Dynamic SQL Link support, simplifying integration with Microsoft® Active Directory™, Lotus Notes®, Microsoft SQL Server™, Oracle®, Sybase®, and Postgres, and other contact databases
• High scalability, with support for Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL™, and Oracle databases providing large volume capacity.

Different Uses for Numara FootPrints

While many people purchase FootPrints to solve one specific functional need, such as tracking internal help desk activities, documenting the external support center and CRM, or development/bug tracking, it can actually be used for a large variety of business functions and departments, supporting both internal and external customers.

Some of the departments or business functions that can benefit from using FootPrints for Issue management include:

• Corporate help desk
• Numara FootPrints for Customer Service
• Issue tracking
• Incident management
• Problem management
• Asset requisitioning
• Change and Release Management
• Customer survey
• SOX financial control management
• SOX IT change management
• IT outsourcing
• HIPAA management
• Facilities management
• Human resources management
• Resource management
• Sales tracking
• Software change management
• Training management

The primary feature that makes FootPrints so flexible is that it is Project-based.  Each Project is a separate sub-database within the system that can have its own fields, forms, users, and settings.  It is this feature that enables you to create different areas within the system for different departments to use.

Feature Highlights

These are just some of the features of Numara FootPrints that are described in this manual:

• Customizable forms and fields
• Customer self-service
• Extensive email management and integration
• Customizable, searchable Knowledge Base
• Real-time graphical reports and metrics
• Calendar for scheduling appointments and jobs
• Customizable Address Book, with optional dynamic link to Active Directory and other LDAP and SQL-based sources
• Customizable business rules for auto-routing, escalation, and processing
• Many workflow options, including subtasks, Quick Issue templates, Global Issues for pervasive problems, and multi-level field dependencies
• Customizable permission roles and assignment teams
• Service level management
• Relational database with support for SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres and DB2