Micro Focus Service Management Automation Suite 2020.11 has been released

Recommended Software Update

Micro Focus is announcing the release of

Product: Service Management Automation Suite
Version: 2020.11

Languages: English

SMAX Features and Benefits:

This SMAX release features the delivery of more than 10+ key customer enhancement requests (ref: Idea Exchange) as well as additional value to customers through new Service Catalog, Asset Management, and Software Asset Management functionality.
 
New Service Catalog Management Features 

• Service Catalog package management allows customers to easily move catalog data between SMAX tenants, for example between a development and a production tenant or ‘golden catalog’ scenarios, for seamless operations.
• Customers choose the method that works for them:
• Entire system – moving as one minimizes dependency testing.
• Module based – most flexible, also used for user-defined studio apps.
• Service Catalog Content – initial population or periodic updates.

Service Portal Improvements 

• The display of configurable help text for Service and Cloud offering user options provides better guidance during the request process.  
• User options can be organized into sections and groups for easier consumption and improved layout of catalog offerings.
• User option pricing displayed in the service portal for better cost control for requesters.   

New Asset Management Features 

• SMAX’s support for Consolidated Hardware, Software and Fixed Asset Management adds Expense lines in this release to provide transparency into costs and budgets related to assets and contracts, infrastructure and peripherals, subscription, actual service, and users to optimize spend and resources. Capabilities include:
• Forecast expenses over a period to manage current budget and plan future budgets. 
• Automated, scheduled or manual processes for expense lines creation.  
• In-tool reporting includes chargeback and expense allocation rules provide full control of asset cost, and actual spend per cost type.

New Software Asset Management Features 

• Centralized reporting with SMAX’s reporting engine allows customers to customize consumption reports, deep dive into deep dive into consumption and spend to optimize license usage.
• SAM content adds integration with IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) to get IBM hardware, software and product consumption information. 

New Codeless Configuration (Studio) Features 

• The number of available user defined fields in Studio has been increased for many field types.
• The number of elements in Lists in Studio has been increased.
• Workflows can have multiple transitions in Studio. 

ITOM Marketplace  

• Easily extend SMAX with Studio and other apps on ITOM Marketplace.
• New this release, including winners from the recent SMAX App Challenge: 
• Quality Audit Management provides the functionality to identify the key areas for Continual Service Improvement. 
• Change Risk Assessment perform a risk assessment during the execution of a change request. 
• Learning Activity Management provide capability to manage training, certification and or enablement activities.  
• Enhanced in this release   
• SMA Update Patch Manager app provides capability to apply fixes during an SMA suite version update, in order to ensure a smooth version update process. 
• SMA Support Assistant provides capabilities to help administrators manage and maintain their SMA deployment through a web browser UI. New Features in this release include new script Performance Health checks and User login with license allocation report.

Other New Features 

• Domain segmentation for Native SACM to support MSP use cases.
• Support for external authentication providers with Oauth2 offers more flexibility for the end-user access to the SMAX portal through the use of OpenID Connect, Public eIDs, Google authentication, and Office365, for example. 

Watch SMAX release readiness webinar

SMA-SM Features and Benefits:
 
The SMA Service Portal works with existing instances of Service Manager, enabling customers to take advantage of the modern SMA Service Portal and mobile app without requiring changes to Service Manager. The Service Portal can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. Enhancements in this release include:
 
Service Catalog and Portal (Mixed Mode):
Improve the User Experience 

• Ability to list and search service catalog in multi-language
• Support lookup of external data source to populate user options
• Support HTML format in user option label and help text
• Ability to configure date format for languages in Service Portal
• Additional configuration supported in Service Portal

Watch SMA-SM release readiness webinar

For more information, please check the Release Notes for this version (available from MySupport).    

If you have an active support subscription for these products, please plan for downloading this version from the Software Licenses and Downloads Portal. To access these products in the Software Licenses and Downloads Portal, you will need to sign in with your Micro Focus credentials.

Our goal is to provide you with clear visibility into the support time-line of software products, enabling you to use this information to plan, test, and deploy new product versions. For more information, check our MySupport Software Product Lifecycle pages. Please take note of the end of support dates for the latest available version of this product:

Please note that all Service Management Automation Suite customers with active support subscriptions are eligible to update to Service Management Automation Suite 2020.11