Newsletter—December 2006

Asset Audits—Use Current Resources to Improve Audits and Save Money

bigWebApps' Asset Auditor is being designed to minimize the “man-hours” that are required by cumbersome room by room audits. Currently, most organizations are forced to either dispatch internal employees or hire outside contractors to handle this time consuming task.

Click here to learn more about Asset Audit

Location Upgrades for bigWebDesk

The next publish will contain a complete overhaul of how Locations are handled in the application. This is probably the single largest change made to bigWebDesk since the inception of the product 7 years ago. We had originally scheduled this publish for October 14 but have pushed the date back one week for further testing.

The overall concept of the new Location structure compared to the old is that currently the Locations feature of bigWebDesk has only one type and level. The application is moving to a tree system which will increase the overall functionality presently and for future enhancements tremendously.

You will be able to build your overall Location structure to fit exactly how you want to track your tickets. The current “locations” in the system will be converted to the Location Type, Building. These Location Types can be renamed as you see fit. Any of you who are using Rooms will also have your Room/Office data converted over. These Rooms will be pre-built into your department of bigWebDesk.

This brings up a major point as to why we had to change the structure to a tree system. Currently, some of you have thousands (yes, thousands) of rubbish rooms in your system due to the way bigWebDesk has used a plain text field for Room numbers instead of a hard coded choice.

For example, 3 different tickets created for the same room could have listed the Room as “103”, “#103”, “Room #103”, and “Room 103”.

With the new Location system, these “rooms” will be merged into one, thus cleaning up your database and helping you track your work requests more effectively.

In next week's newsletter, we will provide screenshots and help documents, so you can better understand the changes.

New Features and Upgrades — What's new in bigWebDesk?

5/26/06 —
Working with our customer's input and feedback, bigWebApps is constantly introducing software upgrades and enhancements. These upgrades are automatically provided to our hosted customers at no additional charge.

Click here to learn more about the Upgrades

Remote Assistance for bigWebDesk

Remote Desktop is an instant remote support solution enabling you to see your customer's desktop over the internet and gain secure remote contro. It isis easy to use and integrates directly with bigWebDesk. No installation, configuration or maintenance is required to use a firewall friendly ASP Subscription mode.

  • Online chat: When the connection is established, desk and client can chat online.
  • View/show desktop: Desk can either view the client's desktop or show its desktop.
  • Remote desktop control: Either desk or client can take control over the remote PC.
  • File transfer: Drag and drop from the desk's PC to the client and vice versa.
  • Whiteboard: Whiteboard starts automatically with the desktop sharing.

Click here to learn more about Remote Assistance

Inventory and Asset Management from bigWebApps

bigWebApps is looking to enhance its application suite by integrating an inventory management and control module. This new application will work as a stand-alone service as well as function within both the bigWebDesk and bigFleetSystem solutions.

The inventory module will be a tool designed for the following areas:

  • Learn and predict your inventory associations on supported equipment
  • Allow for easy location of parts
  • Set minimum and maximum units amounts for stocking
  • Report on inventory values
  • Report on dead stock and under stock items
  • Better control on which parts are ordered and from which vendor
  • Additional functionality to be determined based on client feedback

The asset audit feature will be a tool designed for the following areas:

  • Execute regular audits on bulk and tagged assets
  • Appointment of users to be assigned to designated locations
  • Easily locate and identify missing or stolen items
  • Run scheduled reports detailing age, value, and quantity of all items