For many organizations, the ServiceNow Service Portal is the primary way that approvers interact with the records they approve. It is also often a major way that managers, directors and VPs interact with the system when introducing ServiceNow’s functionality to other departments. First impressions matter; providing an optimal user experience right off the bat can go a long way toward long-term adoption within an organization. Here are a few things you may want to do to improve the Portal experience for your approvers.

We at CDW pride ourselves on developing automation tools to make our collaboration deployment engineers’ jobs easier. We have created tools to automate just about everything there is to automate with Cisco on-premises products: Communications Manager, Unity Connections, Contact Center Express/Enterprise and Voice Gateways, to name a few. With the migration to more cloud-based solutions in the collaboration space, and coinciding with our new service of deploying the cloud voice platform RingCentral, it made sense to create an automation tool to quickly provision users and phones.

As countless organizations have raced to shift their employees to a remote work model using solutions such as videoconferencing tools, many have learned an unfortunate lesson about their user devices: throttled by their hard drives, they often struggle to keep up with the demands of latency-sensitive workloads. Fortunately, there’s a simple — and relatively inexpensive — fix. Solid-state drives (SSDs) can not only provide drastic improvements to performance, but also offer a boost to security and durability.

The last time we blogged about this topic, we went into detail about that “one weird trick” for bringing Telepresence into your Webex Event Center meetings and events. While effective, that “trick” involved a complex setup to get there. Fun for geeking out — not as much fun when trying to simplify your virtual event workflow. Event Center now supports joining directly via Cisco Video devices.

Before this spring, many organizations were already set up to accommodate some portion of their employees working remotely. But very few businesses were equipped to handle all of their employees working from home. As a result, many employees saw performance problems and reduced functionality in the very applications they relied on to do their jobs.

It’s been said that we’re living through what is effectively the world’s largest business continuity exercise. Here are three lessons that business and IT leaders should take away from it.

Any manufacturer with a complex production line understands the importance of having a connected factory. By deploying machines that can communicate and share data with a central system, a manufacturer can adapt to operational needs in real time to drive efficiencies and improve the bottom line. But connected factories also face challenges that can hamper success if left unaddressed.