Part 6 of the series "10 Things VMware Server Admins Should Know About Self-Service Catalogs and Lifecycle Management" that I'll be publishing over the next couple of weeks.
6.There's a lot more to self-service than a web form.
I'm shocked by what some people call self-service. A 1996 style web form painted against someone's workflow API's with all the appeal of a lipsticked pig without a date on a Saturday night. No offense to pigs.
There's a heck of lot more to self-service than that. We need to think about the customer experience and what we want to achieve rather than the technology. Some useful concepts to consider are:
Navigation categories that guide a user to find a particular server or configuration. For example, some users will think from the point of view of the use they'll give it (say, Intranet or App Server), others will think in terms of performance (High, Medium), yet others may think in terms of cost. The same server should be available from multiple categories.
Consider using a catalog to deliver pre-packaged environments into appliances so it's not a server that's requested, but an Oracle App Test environment or MS SQL development system. This a growing trend and many good tools are out there from the likes of VMware and rPath.
Comparison guides that help answer the question "am I making the right choice from what's available?" These guides need to have different vectors of comparison so the user can see the 2-5 most important differences in a configuration
Good content needs to be developed. Feature, benefit and functions. With good pictures. Not the "Win2kSrvrx86FullImg" This include links to other documents, FAQ's, or videos.
Good search. Many young application people are well, young. They are used to Google. So this means they want to search and click. So really need to work up keywords and mis-spellings so you get that hint of "Did you mean....? Try it on Google or Amazon. Search for Adobee. It's really simple to do and trust me it'll bring a smile to your user's face.
More advanced but even more important for server administration are Configuration Wizards . So after I've picked up my my general server or environment, a wizard will guide to a final recommendation; it will also let the user tweak their choices so they can make adjustments her and there.
These type of wizard needs to also be present in the forms to allow finer grain control. For example, one of our forms asks about data privacy requirements, if you select yes, it switches from a cloud environment to an internal environment.
A self-service wizard can help the user do some rough calculations about capacity, availability and security. It doesn't need to be exact, but it provides Rough Order of Magnitude estimates that help that user make a better choice. The wizard should also prevent users from mixing things that can't go together.
Provide self-service control over lifecycle processes such as start, stop, snapshot, and configure. Recently, I attended a Morgan Stanley CTO symposium where the topic of self-service came up. An interesting quote was: "Use self-service. Don't worry about the users getting it wrong. They always do, no matter how much we work with them, except they always blamed us before. Just make sure they can correct it on their own." Smart.
Your service catalog should let a user see all the items they have ordered, the status of service delivery and ... the lifecycle requests that can be made against them. For example, a server request could be pending approval, and another operational. The operational server would have requests for termination, reboot or reconfiguration as options that can be requested. This is lifecycle management.
Don't skip on the graphics. Have a graphic strategy so the colors, fonts and pictures are all in the same family.
Use service bundles to communicate value. This allows a form to be simpler because it reuses other services.
I could go on, but I'll stop here.
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