Nexoid History

Welcome to the Nexoid Virtual Tour! In this video series, we'll take you on a deep dive into Nexoid - uncovering its essence, operational mechanics, and why it stands as the optimal solution for your organisation.

Originating in the UK as a forward-thinking software company, Nexoid's inception dates back to 2014, starting its journey as a digital business consultancy. Our early days were marked by partnerships with large-scale clients, honing our expertise in crafting, integrating, and overseeing business systems.

Amid collaborations with ERP industry giants, we encountered critical hurdles: prohibitive costs, scalability issues, and exorbitant development expenses. It was this realisation that spotlighted a void in the market - a demand for business workflow software that was not only affordable and scalable but also manageable with ease.

2018 heralded the launch of our bold endeavour to fill this gap through the creation of our proprietary ERP technology, aimed at providing cost-efficient development options. By 2020, we proudly unveiled the first iteration of our platform, a landmark achievement in our narrative.

2021 saw the rollout of our initial set of off-the-shelf modules, crafted to offer plug-and-play solutions designed to tackle specific operational challenges head-on. Among these, our ITSM solution emerged as the crown jewel, offering a robust and highly automated IT service desk solution. By 2023, the integration of Large Language Model AI technology into our system represented a monumental leap in enhancing our capabilities.

Today, Nexoid is poised as your all-encompassing ally in elevating and refining your business workflows. As we embark on this exploration of Nexoid and its ITSM module, we invite you to journey through the platform at your leisure, utilising the menu for navigation. Should questions arise or support be needed, our 'Contact Us' page stands ready for your outreach. We're committed to assisting you through every phase of your journey.

Service Desk Dashboard

Nexoid dashboards sit at the heart of the Nexoid ITSM solution, offering a snapshot of key ITSM activities as soon as you log in.

With the option to switch between dashboards effortlessly—thanks to the search button in the top right corner—you can tailor your view to suit your role, choosing between a manager-focused or service desk engineer-focused layout. To make a dashboard your go-to view, just pick it and hit the favourite button.

The ITSM dashboard splits into four main sections: Overview, Incidents, Problems, and Changes.

Starting with the Overview, this section gives you a quick snapshot of the IT department's performance. The incidents graph, for instance, compares the number of opened versus closed incidents throughout the day, using a simple red versus blue line graph. A higher red line suggests a growing backlog, while a dominant blue line means more tickets are being resolved than created.

The 'Week Resolved' area highlights the service desk engineers and the count of incidents they've settled over the week, whereas the 'Assigned to Me' part shows your own tasks, sorted by urgency.

The Problems section lists ongoing and recently resolved issues, while the Changes section details recent change requests, whether they're in progress or approved, providing clear insights into the department's latest undertakings.

The 'Open Incidents' part shows each team member's workload, aiming to keep individual assignments under 100 for manageable efficiency.

In the Incidents section, you get a personalised rundown: incidents assigned to and owned by you, a priority matrix for the team's incidents, and a catalogue of incidents by age, along with a repeat of the 'Week Resolved' and 'Open Incidents' stats from the overview. The 'Status' area displays the progression of tickets in Open, Hold, Wait, and Resolved phases. The 'Top Clients' card helps identify users with frequent issues, potentially streamlining efforts by grouping their incidents.

The Problems tab gives you an overview of problems you're handling or own, plus a department-wide view of all open issues, illustrated with a donut graph for a quick status check and a list of recently solved problems.

Lastly, the Changes section outlines change requests you're managing or own and provides a department-wide status breakdown into categories like Waiting/Needing Approval, Done, Approved, and Rejected.

This detailed dashboard setup ensures you have a clear understanding of ongoing ITSM operations, helping you prioritise tasks efficiently. And, like everything in the Nexoid ecosystem, dashboards are customizable to fit your specific requirements, allowing for tweaks or entirely new setups as needed.

Incident Management

Handling incidents efficiently is key to any top-notch IT service desk, and Nexoid makes it super simple. Whether it's through an email, the user portal, MS Teams, a chatbot, or our Open API, users have a variety of ways to get their issues in front of us. And if someone prefers to give us a call or drop by in person, our service desk engineers can easily log those incidents manually.

Each incident is tagged with details like its status, where it came from, who it's about, who's handling it, its priority level, what it's called, any related problems, key terms, and a description. When AI incident analysis is switched on, you'll also get an AI summary, suggestions for solving it, and a special tab for AI insights. We'll dive deeper into Incident AI Analysis in our next video.

Nexoid isn't just about logging incidents. With our Context Hub feature, service desk engineers get a helping hand. As they fill out a ticket, the Context Hub is on the lookout, pulling up any related issues, recent changes, or helpful articles from the knowledge base. Just a click lets you peek at these records, giving you the right info exactly when you need it.

If you're keen to learn more about how we handle incidents and problems, our problem management video is your next stop.

Incidents can be marked as open, on hold, done, or in "wait" - a status for when an incident is waiting on something, like the kickoff of a related process or connection to a bigger issue. For the nitty-gritty on problem management, check out our dedicated video on the topic.

Nexoid's Incident Management is built for the real world, supporting notes, file attachments, and even quick ways to get in touch with clients or engineers, making sure communication is always smooth. If your email system is linked up with ours, sending an email to a user will automatically update the incident with your message and any files you've attached.

Once an incident is wrapped up, Nexoid's got smart workflows that take over. By default, we'll shoot an email to the user to let them know all is well again, and ask them to rate their experience. But that's just the beginning. These workflows can be tweaked to do pretty much anything you need, from updating other systems to even sorting out internal billing.

With Nexoid, it's all about making sure our system works for you, not the other way around.

Incident Management AI Analysis

Ever wonder about all the important details hidden in IT support tickets that just slip through the cracks?

We've thought about that a lot at Nexoid.

Our ITSM Incident Management AI analysis stands out as a game-changer in the field. Every time an incident is reported, whether by a user or one of our service desk engineers, it doesn't just sit there. Instead, it's lined up for a deep dive with our AI. In about 15 minutes, the ticket gets an update thanks to our AI Analysis workflow. This smart system looks at the ticket's title, details, and any notes added to it to pull together a full picture of what's going on.

First up, the AI figures out what language the ticket's in, then gets to work summarising it. It doesn't stop there—it also offers advice and digs into the root cause of the issue.

Next, it sorts the ticket based on the ITIL framework, figuring out if it's a problem, an incident, or just a service request, and determines whether it came from inside or outside the company.

Then it's onto evaluating the ticket's priority, how tough it is, and its security and compliance risks, ranking each from high to low. This step is key because it shines a light on potential security or compliance issues that might have otherwise been missed.

It also gives an estimated time to resolution, which is super helpful for spotting if certain service desk engineers might be picking the easy fixes over the tricky ones. Remember, the number of tickets someone clears isn't the best way to measure their work.

Whenever it can, the AI also points out any specific hardware, suppliers, or software mentioned in the ticket.

On the actions side, the AI suggests what steps to take next, like whether it's time to loop in management, the security team, offer more training to end-users, or tweak IT maintenance to prevent future issues.

It even takes a look at the overall tone and quality of the ticket.

Good IT management and security start with having the right info, and that's where Nexoid's AI analysis truly shines. It opens up new paths for insights, workflows, and crucial management intelligence.

Problem Management

Problem Management is a crucial, yet sometimes overlooked, part of the ITIL framework, playing a vital role in managing incidents. It's common for issues reported by customers or end users, such as "I can't print," to actually be signs of a larger issue, like a problem with the print server. While an incident might affect just one person, a problem usually affects many.

The essence of Problem Management is to gather these individual incidents to pinpoint and tackle a bigger, underlying issue. This strategy not only makes the service desk's job easier by reducing repeated work but also sheds light on larger problems and potential outages.

Within Nexoid ITSM, incidents can be elevated to a new problem or linked to an already identified one, then marked as 'Wait'. This status, akin to 'Hold', signals to service desk agents that the incident is being addressed as part of a broader problem.

Nexoid ITSM's smart setup ensures that when a problem is solved, all related incidents, or 'child' incidents, are automatically closed, and the resolution is communicated to the end users by email. This efficiency significantly cuts down on the time service desk agents spend on closing tickets.

For every problem logged in Nexoid ITSM, there's an owner and an assignee – the owner oversees the problem, while the assignee works on fixing it. Problems are tagged as Open, Hold, or Done and can be set to public to allow company-wide visibility through the user portal or external systems via API. Additionally, each problem comes with an anticipated resolution date to keep everyone in the loop.

Key elements like the problem's name, keywords, and a clear description help in making each issue easily identifiable and searchable within the Context Hub. This hub pulls up related recent changes and knowledge base articles and features an 'Incident' tab for tracking associated incidents, which are also resolved once the main problem is addressed.

Change Control

Change and its management are crucial elements in any IT department, serving not just to track alterations but also as a bridge for communication within the broader organisation.

It's become clear that many end users don't fully grasp the scope of what IT departments do. Interestingly, they are generally understanding of planned outages, especially when informed ahead of time.

Leveraging Nexoid’s Change Management approach to announce upcoming changes can mitigate end user frustration by enabling them to prepare for outages. Furthermore, it highlights the diligent efforts of your department.

Nexoid's Change Management, a key feature of our ITSM Service Desk module, aims to efficiently communicate, oversee, and implement changes to your IT services. It includes detailed records of changes, featuring status indicators (pending, approved, rejected, complete), dates, ownership, assignment, priority levels, descriptions, risks, and rollback plans, with the option to make these records public.

Public changes are directly conveyed to the end user portal and can be accessed via a public API, facilitating easy sharing on your intranet or other external platforms.

Effective change management transcends mere approval and monitoring of changes; it involves swiftly informing the front-line service desk team about these updates.

Take this scenario, for example:
Alex, a sales representative working remotely, awaits an important email confirming a big deal. Frustrated by email issues on his iPhone, he contacts the IT service desk for help.

Sean, a service desk engineer, fields his call and logs a ticket. With Nexoid's system, Sean instantly finds related changes just by entering the ticket name in the context hub. This preempts the need for a drawn-out diagnostic session; Sean quickly identifies a recent update to the email servers as the probable cause.

Reviewing the change details, Sean notes that Tim, his colleague, is overseeing this change and has already flagged potential mobile device disruptions.

In this instance, Sean efficiently cuts down on resolution time for both himself and Alex, directly consulting Tim for insight into the issue and its impending fix.

This example illustrates how the right system can streamline information access, alleviate frustrations, and enhance the overall experience for end users.

Knowledge Base

A top-notch knowledge base means users find answers quickly and effortlessly, instead of sifting through endless, unhelpful articles. Traditional setups often add unnecessary steps, requiring users to struggle with inadequate search tools, leading to wasted time, money, and, crucially, mounting frustration that can make users give up on the knowledge base entirely.

Nexoid's ITSM knowledge base streamlines the search process by proactively providing service desk engineers with the information they need.

Consider this scenario:
Linda sends an email to the IT service desk because her Windows 11 licence isn't activated. Nexoid automatically turns her email into a ticket and assigns it to Sean, a service desk engineer. As soon as Sean opens Linda's ticket, he sees the relevant knowledge base article in the context hub.

This context hub, which updates in real-time, utilises Nexoid's advanced fuzzy language search technology to swiftly pinpoint and display pertinent articles, saving both time and resources.

When Sean views the article, a pop-up window offers a concise explanation of the issue and its resolution. For more details, he can hit the "go to" button to access the full article.

Each article includes a title, keywords, a description of the problem, and its solution. By default, articles are private to the IT team but can be made public with a simple click.

The knowledge base features a 5-star rating system for feedback, aiding in identifying the most helpful articles and those in need of enhancement. It supports attachments like videos or PDFs and includes a notes section for internal use and quality checks.

Publicly available articles can be accessed through the service desk portal and an API, facilitating integration and sharing across various platforms, such as the organisation's intranet, Microsoft Teams, or even a public website.

User Portal

The Nexoid ITSM portal is a ready-to-use workflow integrated with Nexoid's IT service desk. It's designed so that end users don't need a separate Nexoid licence to access it, making it cost effective.

When users first visit the portal, they're greeted with a simple sign-in page asking for a username and password. This portal doesn't just stop there; it offers customization options to mirror your company's brand identity. You can add your logo, switch up the background image, tweak the colours of the buttons, and personalise menus, pages, and forms to your liking.

Nexoid's pricing structure is straightforward and budget-friendly, charging only for the users who are actively enabled in the Nexoid application. If you integrate Nexoid with Azure Active Directory, AD user accounts get automatically imported into Nexoid as disabled. This means they won't be able to log into the Nexoid application but will still have access to the self-service portal.

After logging in, users are typically taken to the home menu page, which, like the rest of the portal, can be customised to fit your needs. A popular customization is setting the default page to display IT outages, keeping users informed about any current or upcoming issues, as well as planned changes.

The portal also includes a "my tickets" page, where users can see their recent help desk tickets, complete with status updates, assignee details, descriptions, and public notes. It's easy for users to add more information by creating a new note.

Creating a ticket is straightforward. Administrators have the capability to design custom forms tailored to various workflows. These forms can range from new starter paperwork to hardware requests and permission changes, significantly improving the service desk's efficiency and reliability. By ensuring all necessary information is captured right from the start, the service desk can save both time and resources.

In essence, the Nexoid portal offers a secure, user-friendly, and highly customizable interface, emphasising that software should adapt to your business needs, not the other way around.