Have you seen CLM 4.5 and BSA 8.7? If you haven’t, you owe yourself to look at the new releases now available (GA). Here are some eye candy on a recent implementation we did for our favorite customer who is implementing BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management in a big way.
Where to start: First, CLM User interface is something we have all been asking for improvements. Now in CLM 4.5, there is a new Cloud End User Portal, which is focused on increasing efficiency of Service Request Management for Cloud Services.
From my use so far, it is an outstanding UI. It is a separate deployable tomcat stack you can placeanywhere. Now, before you rejoice forgoing the “old” CLM Portal, this does not replace the Cloud Administrative portal for creation of Service Offerings, Service blueprints, etc. You still have to use the good old AR Mid Tier for that. But this is a great start, and addresses the user base who has the most vocal opinion about the CLM UI.
Now, some of the cool new additions to the portfolio is the CLM Health Self Checker. This providesyou a single portal to determine the health of the CLM ecosystem, plus automatically notifies you via email if you wish to know. Yes!
Last but not least, our old friend Bladelogic has new additions. If you haven’t read up on the new Bladelogic Server Automation Dashboard, Portal, or Compliance enhancements – you should. I won’t cover all of them here, but want to leave you with one last eye candy.
Now, one big improvement is how much effort is put into deploying these components. Having done over 14 individual CLM Install Planner
installations from ground up (and anywhere in between such as staged and in-place migrations, both simple and complex) – I do have to admit the CLM Install Planner for 4.5 has big improvements over 3.x and 2.x. It is not yet perfect, specially if you are deploying on Linux. But I suspect with this revamp and re-investment from BMC into CLM, consecutive versions of CLMwill be much better at making deployments, upgrades, and changes easier. It made realizing the “green” checkbox below much easier 🙂
Now, talking about making your life easier, the BSA Unified Installer is another monumental improvement in the deployment and upgrade process. I plan on cover this enhancement in more detail later on.
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