Introducing Self Service

[momusau]

Hey Everyone,

Just a quick question, how did you introduce self service to your users who are not used to serving themselves? Do you send out an email explaining what Self Service is?

We are almost done with our pilot testing and are just about ready to fully roll out Casper to our environment, so we just want to get some ideas of how others have introduced Self Service?

Thanks

[AVmcclint · Accepted solution]

I usually put a small app (CoconutBattery) in Self Service that I purposely exclude from imaging that they can install themselves. When I onboard new hires, I give them a tour of Self Service and show them how easy it is to use. I walk them through finding the app and installing it. Luckily, I don't have hundreds of users I need to show this to at the same time. If that's your situation, then sending an email pointing users to a video tour posted on your intranet would be a good way to handle it. Way to go @davidhiggs making the rest of us look bad with our lack of imagination and talent. :-)

[Look]

By far the easiest way to build visibility is to find a couple of really good halo tasks to put in there so that users have a reason to visit often, people very quickly get used to going there and they notice the changes as you add stuff especially if your featuring things on the home screen.

[BOBW]

With the event of DEP, we don't add anything to the machine except for Tier1 apps such as antivirus, so a user has to go to self service for every app they want.

Even now with a re-image staff will go directly to Self Service for apps.

It took a few months to flow down but eventually people started to understand. With the help of phone support guys pushing staff to access software it made it pretty easy.

Previously all staff would email / call support to get apps, this has drastically reduced the calls to support for Macs and reduced the amount of time it takes to get the apps to a machine.

[davidhiggs]

We also let it grow organically, making it opt in for users. We made a short video to introduce the service, along with a competition to win an Apple Watch if users enrolled and updated their software.

Same experience as @BOBW, we trained our support staff to introduce users to this new concept of self service and it was well received.

[AVmcclint · Accepted solution]

I usually put a small app (CoconutBattery) in Self Service that I purposely exclude from imaging that they can install themselves. When I onboard new hires, I give them a tour of Self Service and show them how easy it is to use. I walk them through finding the app and installing it. Luckily, I don't have hundreds of users I need to show this to at the same time. If that's your situation, then sending an email pointing users to a video tour posted on your intranet would be a good way to handle it. Way to go @davidhiggs making the rest of us look bad with our lack of imagination and talent. :-)

[momusau]

@davidhiggs Yeah that's a really cool way of introducing Self Service, thanks for sharing! And also to the rest of you, those are all great ideas!

[adamcodega · Accepted solution]

@AVmcclint that's a great idea to have something to actually do in Self Service when you show them it the first time.

Here's something I've designed for Self Service that might be a nice demo item. They say to make Self Service items out of tickets. Well a frequent question we get is when is a person's laptop being replaced, which we do every two years. Since we can't check Apple via script for a device's warranty expiration, we use @chilcote's estimator script which is on GitHub.

The script uses CocoaDialog to display the information on screen. You'll need CocoaDialog installed as well as the warranty script. You'll see the $deathdate variable has "2y", that's the time you want to customize which is added to the estimated birth date.

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script will show to the user when their laptop is due for replacement
# by estimating its estimated manufacturer date and adding two years to that date.
#
# We'll display the info to the user using cocoaDialog.
#
# Warranty estimator via https://github.com/chilcote/warranty
#
# Update lines 15 and 16 for your organization
#
# Adam Codega, Upserve
#

coDi="/Applications/Utilities/cocoaDialog.app/Contents/MacOS/CocoaDialog"
borndate=`/Library/Application Support/Upserve/warranty-check/warranty | awk '/Manufactured/ {print $3}'`
deathdate=`date -j -f %Y-%m-%d -v+2y $borndate +"%b %d, %Y"`

$coDi ok-msgbox --no-cancel --title "Laptop Replacement Check" --text "Your laptop warranty expires on or around $deathdate" --informative-text "Your laptop replacement will be scheduled near that date" --icon computer &> /dev/null

exit 0

Here's what it looks like in Self Service:

(Yep, I'm due for a replacement.. just waiting for that new 13" MacBook Pro to come in..)

[cwaldrip]

We've done something similar to @AVmcclint, but more visible apps. We were opting NOT to put 3rd party browsers on our images, and we'd tell people to go to Self Service to get Firefox or Chrome if they want it. And we push them to check Self Service when they call for something that can easily be done there. Etc.

It's a combination of things. We still have users who don't use it though. It's a learning curve. I'd like to use DEP to only put basic stuff on their machine and have them go to SS for everything else.

[anickless]

@davidhiggs What software did you use to make your video? It looks really good!

[tlarkin]

A very long time ago at a previous job we had some software that had to connect to a network share to read/write data to some flat file database. So, I created a Self Service item that would do all the network mounting, ensure the network mount was there, then launch the app with some scripts. Then anytime a user had to use that app they could launch the app in self service and it did all the work.

I know this specifically is a pretty bad example since most software isn't designed that way anymore (or at least I hope not, it is a bad design), but my point is find something that is very useful to your end users and then make an easy button in Self Service so they can just click a button and it is done.

You can also limit policy scope in Self Service by LDAP group. So why not build some tools for your help desk? Maybe a log grabber, or a diagnostic script, or a common fix to a common problem the help desk has?

Licensed Software is a big one too. You only have (X) amount of say Adobe Photoshop licenses so not everyone can have the app. Put it into Self Service, restrict it by LDAP group (or by other scoping mechanisms) and then all your creatives can login and install Photoshop themselves. You can do this with any licensed software. The great thing is that if they get a new Mac for whatever reason (hardware refresh, hardware repair, hardware failure so it is swapped, etc), when they get their new Mac they can just log into Self Service and get the software at any time.

The web plugins is another great feature. On the left hand side you can basically put links to web apps in the Self Service app. So start putting all the company web portal links in self service. Links to password reset portals, HR systems, vacation systems, and any common web portal you might use for you job, and even link the help desk ticketing system. So they can file a help desk ticket from self service.

There are many ways to do this, these are just things that have worked for me in the past at previous jobs.

-Tom

[davidhiggs]

@anickless we used a couple of freelancers on fiverr.com, i would also check out powtoon.com do get the animation done yourself, it's easy to use!

[momusau]

@tlarkin Yeah I'm seeing that making an easy button for users is the ticket here. But also, that's a great idea for the help desk guys too.

[Chris_Hafner]

These are all really good ideas. We use printer installs as our carrot. For various reasons, the world keeps telling me that it needs to print so that's one of the things we've chosen not to automate, specifically to get users into Self-Service.