Switch-On

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Here at Hornbill we believe that our customers should be able to realize immediate value from the technology and service that we provide. We strongly believe that when deploying any business application (like Hornbill), any essential technical support, help and services that are required to get the baseline system up and running in to a production-ready-to-use state, should be provided as part of the service without charge to the customer.

The expectations of users of business applications has changed significantly; its those consumer applications that define the standard for ease of deployment and accessibility today. We believe that our customers should be able to test drive and experience our technology before they make *any* financial or contractual commitment to the service we provide. We have defined what we call our Switch-On service to facilitate this.

Switch-On is our definition of the work we will carry out when provisioning and setting up a Hornbill instance for our customers in order that they may evaluate our service with their own data and plugged into their own environment. We have developed technology and a support methodology that makes switching on simple, and includes delivering essential Enterprise Integrations, which are simple to delivery and non-intrusive to your business.

Hornbill Switch-On

In order to facilitate a quick and simple enablement of Hornbill, the Switch-On service is provided to all new Customers by Hornbill's Product Specialists and is provided free of any charge.

The objective of the Switch-on Service is to establish a working system for our customers which forms the foundation of everything else moving forwards. We expect to be able to achieve the following during this process: -

Identify the primary account contact as well as the primary and secondary technical contacts within your organisation
Identify company information, chosen URL name/prefix etc
Provision a dedicated Hornbill instance and provide you with access details
Establish key enterprise integrations (see list below)
Get customer-specific data into your instance
Transfer knowledge to you on key areas of Hornbill and your chosen application(s)
Identify if you need any Expert Services after Switch-on in order to move into a production operating state and advise accordingly.
Provide a high-touch support platform to help get you up and running.

What is included?

There are the things you need to get the system up and running with meaningful data and connectivity. Because we believe these integrations are essential to every deployment we have put a lot of effort into simplifying the process of establishing these integration points. We also believe that because these integration needs are pretty much universally required by our customers, we carry out the work with you to establish these integration points totally free of any charge as part of the Switch-On service we provide. We will generally carry out this work during your evaluation/trial period before you have to make any financial or contractual commitment to us our or service giving you an opportunity to properly evaluate the capabilities of our solution - the essential integration points are categorised as follows: -

Integration to your Corporate Email System

The setup of 1 shared mailbox for use with Service Manager (servicedesk@acme.com for example) is included along with the creation of the appropriate role to administer that mailbox and email service. Once created, this will allow for the logging and updating of tickets from email as well as the capability to send outbound emails as updates. Secure variants of SMTP, POP3 or IMAP4 open standards in your environment are required to be accessible to us.

AD Integration using Federated Services (SAML 2.0)

All of your Co-worker and Service Manager Analyst information will be imported into Service Manager. No physical import is required if SAML is available as users are self-provisioned automatically with SAML. Hornbill will provide the necessary metadata files required to configure the appropriate entries in your ADFS server; this assumes ADFS is already running in your environment as no assistance for ADFS setup will be provided.

Alternatively users may be imported into Hornbill via a data dump from AD, this is less elegant and much harder to maintain but its possible in the cases where using SAML Federated Services is not an option.

Service Manager Only - IT Asset Import using the Hornbill Asset Discovery Tool

Computer/Asset Discovery - for organisations using Hornbill Service Manager for internal IT we will work with you to deploy our site integration server and agent-less computer and software discovery tool which will scan you network and populate the CMDB within Hornbill will hardware, operating system and installed software found on computers within your network(s).

Computer/Asset View - if you already have a browser based asset management/discovery tool deployed, our discovery agent will work alongside that tool. We will configure your Hornbill instance to include custom buttons/links to launch the asset-specific views of your deployed tool from within the appropriate asset views within Hornbill.

End User Portal setup

The Hornbill Guest Portal will be setup and made available with simple corporate branding for external users if applicable.

The Hornbill Self Service will be setup and made available for internal users if applicable. This will include Single Sign On and Progressive Capture.

Configuration/set up of:

Co Workers
Service Manager Analysts
Self Service Users
Contacts
Teams/Groups/Organisation
Roles
SLA's/Escalation Points
Call Categories
Email Templates
Basic Email Call Logging
Log request from an inbound email
Update requests from an inbound email

Service Desk Services

Hornbill's Product Specialists will deliver a 30 minute session to provide Knowledge transfer and advice in respect to the creation of Services. This will include defining service categories, working with portfolio lifecycle and associating business fulfilment processes to support requests, Incidents, Problems and Changes raised against the services.

Reporting and Default System Reports

Hornbill's Product Specialists will deliver two 30 minute sessions to provide Knowledge transfer and advice in respect to the Default System Reports and the Reporting Engine.

Dashboards and Default Measures and Widgets

Hornbill's Product Specialists will deliver two 30 minute sessions to provide Knowledge transfer and advice in respect to Default System Measures, Widgets and Dashboards.

Default System Business Processes

Hornbill's Product Specialists will deliver two 60 minute sessions to provide Knowledge transfer and advice in respect to the operation of the Hornbill Business Process Manager and the Default System processes. Additionally Hornbill shall review, advise and guide you in the configuration of your own Incident Management process.

NB. This is limited to one process and must be well documented and provided to our Product Specialists in advance for review.

Clear Down of System Data

Each Customer will have specific requirements regarding what constitutes a data clear down; accordingly the content will be agreed on a Customer by Customer basis according to these requirements.

Do you really provide all of that free of charge?

Yes we do, we are leading the industry in this regard. We have designed a solution that is easy to deploy and connect and our ability to provide this level of service free of change reflects the innovation we have put into our service. We recognise that customers can only get value from our solution when these basic integrations and a baseline of knowledge transfer has been established so providing this to you free of charge has been designed into our support and cost model. The only thing we do ask is in exchange for our commitment to deliver this service, that our customers put the effort and commitment in their end in order that we can deliver in a reasonable timeframe, we expect the Switch-on to be completed within 30 days, we make that commitment to you and in exchange for providing this high value service at no charge, all we ask is that you are able to make the same commitment to us.

What is not included?

We have tried to set out in detail what is included as part of the free Switch On service which aims to provide you everything you need to get up and running easily and at no cost to you. However, to avoid any doubt, it is also sensible to describe the type of activities that are specifically not provided as part of the free switch-on service.

This is not an exhaustive list but are examples of the type of activities that we would reasonably expect to charge for our time to undertake. As a general rule these activities fall into the category of services that are very customer-specific or beyond what is needed to get a system up and running and ready for use out of the box. Expert Services can only be provided after the basic Switch-on is complete, not before or during the Switch-on. There are a number of reasons for this but the obvious ones you might want to think about are set out here: -

The Switch-on is a combination of configuration, data setup and knowledge transfer to you. We believe It is entirely impractical to try and define a project scope beyond the basic setup of the system without you having some exposure to the system and understanding of its capabilities.
Expert Services can only be delivered when there is a configured instance in place, this is a simple practical issue because your instance is unique to your organisation. By way of a simple example, suppose we have to create a process for you which includes authorisations, we need to configure your organisational structure, groups, membership etc in order to configure the process to know who the authorisations need to go to, and this requires a configured and operational instance
You the customer and the consultant has to be able to speak a common language that may well be unique to your organisation, establishing a functional baselined system makes this possible.

While the Switch-on service is provided by Hornbill's product specialists who provide support to our customers and the entire Switch-on service is provided to you at no cost, Expert Services are delivered by professional services team, the engagement model is project oriented and entirely different from the Switch-on activities. While the services delivered within the Switch-on are well defined and understood, additional services or setup beyond what is defined will generally require scoping along with time/effort estimation and fixed price budget agreed before any work is undertaken.

We refer to these services as Expert Services which are only scoped and delivered once you have an active subscription and a working instance where Switch-on has been completed. everything we have to do to get you up and running with our default configuration, including basic integration points are carried out as part of the Switch-on, we view the Expert Services as something we deliver to each customer to "Add Value".

Expert Services are offered by Hornbill's own professional services organisation but are also offered by a variety of Hornbill Implementation partners, you can choose to work with a provider that best suits your needs.

Switch-On Exclusions

The Importing of Asset Data from 3rd Party sources such as SQL Databases, Excel, MS SCCM, Altiris, LANDesk or any other proprietary discovery tools.

The creation of bespoke reports outside of those provided as standard in the Hornbill application(s).

Importing of historic call/request/ticket data from any other system or data source.

We can provide a site deployable Data Import tool that will perform ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) operations, pulling data from various local sources such as AD/LDAP, SQL Databases and Flat Files, transform the data and merge into your Hornbill instance. Once configured these data imports can be scheduled to run on a regular basis to keep your data up to date. Although we can provide our ETL tool as part of your subscription, it is a complex tool and configuring/using it falls outside the scope of our SwitchOn service

Assistance with integrations with other applications in respect to the use of Hornbill APIs and Web Hooks.

Web Services API - the Hornbill platform exposes all functionality through a single unified and fully documented web services API. The API is an XML RPC-style request/response messaging scheme, with all inputs and outputs fully described by XML Schema and on-line documentation. We also provide simplified language bindings allowing developers to easily integrate within projects built using JavaScript, PHP, C#.NET, Java and C++

Web Hooks - the opposite to an API call, a web hook is a call from Hornbill to a web endpoint of your choosing. Most application actions on a Hornbill instance can trigger an action-specific event when an action is performed. Hornbill can be configured to call to a web end point passing the action-specific data to the web service. This is a very powerful mechanism that enables true, near real-time integration with other business systems.

The creation of customer-specific Business Processes beyond those that are provided as standard in the application.

The creation of specific Services in Service Manager in addition to those provided as standard in the application.

The creation of complex email routing rules and additional email template in addition to those provided as standard in the application.

What if I need more than the Switch-On service provides before I can go live?

It is perfectly feasible that some organisations may need to define a broader scope beyond what we provide as part of the Switch-on service before the customer can go-live or even make a time commitment, and we understand that need and if that is the case, this would be considered on a case by case basis and a different commercial structure and approach to deliver and project would be adopted and delivered through our Expert Services team.

Best Time To Value Implementation Process

For new customers that want the most efficient and highest time-to-value solution, we have a process that is fast, works well and is very cost efficient, the new customer implementation process we follow is set out here: -

NOTE 1: If you need more services before you go live you only need to subscribe to the minimum subscription for your application - you can easily increase your subscription later on as part of your go-live planning. Hornbill is a cloud service so you only need to pay for what you need when you need it
NOTE 2: you can choose to work with Hornbill directly of one of its global implementation partners

Switch-on Services vs. Expert Services

Unlike the switch-on service which is provided free of change and remotely via telephone and online video meeting sessions, Expert Services are delivered like traditional scoped professional services/consultancy. Expert Services provide more bespoke delivery that can meet the specific needs of each customer and as a result these services are generally charged for. The switch-on service is always provided by Hornbill's product specialists, we provide this service globally, facilitated by on-line meeting technologies and collaborative tools. Expert Services are offered with more diverse options, they can be delivered either remotely or locally face-to-face in a more traditional consulting engagement approach. Each provider (Hornbill and its Implementation Partners) will provide a diverse range of services, service packages and offerings, you should discuss your needs with your Hornbill sales person, account manager or one of Hornbill's global implementation partners.