Tomorrow (March 18, 2008) AJAXWorld kicks off in New York. The conference will feature 80+ technical sessions, Keynotes, Power Panels and General Session Demos on the Rich Internet Technology and how to build front-end applications for users. What does it mean for IT Services? AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, has really had a few years to mature since Jesse James Garrett made it popular back in 2005. Now, more than ever, enterprises are taking advantage of building AJAX applications to meet business critical situations.
An interesting technical session that will be available at AJAXWorld this year is Mission Critical AJAX: Making Test Ordering Easier and Faster at Quest Diagnostics by David Rapperport and Rob Tweed. The session will detail how Quest Diagnostics needed to create a mission critical service catalog for it’s lab techs to order new lab equipment and diagnostic supplies. Quest used the technology of AJAX to build a custom internal interface that would be reliable, stable, and achieve it’s mission critical service levels.
Not only Service Catalogs can take advantage of AJAX for IT Service Management applications. IT Service Desk applications such as HP Service Manager takes advantage of the web tier delivering a Change Management Calendar and Employee Self Service (ESS) Tier for an enterprise’s end-users to quickly get help when they do not want to wait on the phone for a Help Desk Analyst. LiveTime Service Manager, a Service Desk product for Small to Medium Businesses, is built completely out of Web 2.0 and AJAX technologies. Every year Pink Elephant gives out an Innovation of the Year award to the most innovative idea in ITIL. Maybe this is the year that someone integrates ITIL Strategies that effectively utilize the iPhone? I recently downloaded my copy of the SDK to start on a few little side projects. Imagine what the world would be like if your Desktop Engineers didn’t have to walk back to their desk to update an Incident Ticket? What if they could do it straight from their iPhone? Now that’s what I call Service!