Aldon Gives Community Manager SLA Teeth

Published: October 3, 2006

by Alex Woodie

CIOs will be better equipped to detect and deal with IT projects run amok with the new release of Aldon's Community Manager that was announced at the COMMON conference two weeks ago. The Web-based incident tracking and requirements management product, which hooks into Aldon's OS/400 change management software, is being updated with service level agreement (SLA) reporting capabilities, as well as new e-mail, mobility, and compliance functionality.

Within the overarching Aldon Suite, Community Manager is the common hub that connects non-technical users and executives with the technologically savvy development team. While Aldon's Lifecycle Manager keeps a close watch on the evolution of source code and provides the "check-in, check-out" functionality that prevent developers from stepping on each others' toes, Community Manager provides structure into how the rest of the business communicates with the IT department.

Under this general banner, Community Manager does several things, including providing pre-built pathways for users to submit change requests and requirements, and workflow functionality that keeps projects and requests moving along. The software is particularly useful for management, as it provides a top-down view of projects through a series of reports and real-time dashboards delivered over the Web and through e-mail.

With Community Manager version 7.5, Aldon has introduced several new features designed to help steer companies' IT departments into being more responsive and entrepreneurial, and to keep outsourced IT functions on track. Taken together, these new features make 7.5 a "milestone release," according to Dan Magid, president and CEO of Aldon.

At the top of the list of new features are the SLA tracking capabilities. With version 7.5, the product enables managers to set up a series of workflows and rules to help enforce deadlines. If a given development goal has not been met by a certain time, the workflow function of Community Manager kicks in and alerts the manager of the tardiness. If the problem is not dealt with in a timely manner, the product automatically escalates the alert to the next manager listed on the workflow, and so on. Much of the work of tracking progress was done manually in previous releases, according to Aldon.

New reports and graphical dashboards also bolster the product's capability to track projects against SLAs. With version 7.5, these reports can be included in the body of an e-mail, as opposed to requiring the manager or project leader to log into the Windows-based client to view them.

Community Manager 7.5 also introduces pre-built, compliance project tracking templates for Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. These templates, which enable the generation of reports documenting a company's progress in complying with these specific mandates, join an existing template that Aldon offered for IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices.

The new release also gains usability in the mobility department. With version 7.5, users can now synchronize their Community Manager-related information--such as due dates, tasks, appointments, and contact information--with handheld devices such as Palm Pilots, Blackberries, and other Personal Information Manager (PIM) devices.

Community Manager version 7.5 becomes available this fall. For more information, check out www.aldon.com.

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