Boca Raton, FL – February 4, 2008 – ScriptLogic® Corporation (www.scriptlogic.com), a worldwide provider of systems lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft® Windows®-based networks, announced the availability of the ScriptLogic Incident Management Solution, a bundled solution that combines the previously released Desktop Authority Remote Management Gateway™ and ScriptLogic BridgeTrak® with Desktop Authority® Password Self Service to provide IT administrators with a comprehensive strategy for incident prevention, management and response. Desktop Authority Password Self Service, which is generally available, allows end users to solve their own password problems, including password reset requests, thereby reducing the number of calls and trouble ticket requests to the help desk.

“IT administrators, especially those in small-to-medium sized businesses, note that a significant amount of their day is spent correcting end user IT problems, decreasing the time available for strategic IT projects,” said Nick Cavalancia, vice president of Windows management at ScriptLogic. “As we aim to address our customers’ daily challenges, ScriptLogic now offers a full range of help desk tools to increase incident management efficiency and enhance end user productivity by as much as 40 percent. The ScriptLogic Incident Management Solution is designed to reduce the influx of help desk calls, and lower support costs.”

Desktop Authority Password Self Service includes a number of features that mitigate help desk challenges and increase IT efficiency including easy password resets, seamless Windows integration, flexible password policies, user identification and e-mail integration. Desktop Authority Password Self Service also provides stronger user authentication by defining challenge questions and the number of questions users must answer based on personal profiles.

While ScriptLogic’s help desk tools exist as standalone products for an IT administrator’s specific needs, ScriptLogic has bundled the tools to provide cost savings and offer customers a comprehensive solution for incident management.

• Prevent: ScriptLogic customers can prevent incidents using Desktop Authority Password Self Service, allowing end users to independently correct password problems, the most common reason for help desk calls. When paired with ScriptLogic’s Desktop Authority, Desktop Authority Password Self Service allows the proactive creation of managed user environments and eliminates a bulk of incidents before they happen.
• Manage: With ScriptLogic BridgeTrak 7.0, a comprehensive help desk software offering seamless trouble ticket tracking to reduce the entire lifecycle of a desktop issue, administrators capture, prioritize and process incidents.
• Respond: IT administrators may respond to incidents with Desktop Authority Remote Management Gateway, which features Desktop Authority’s award-winning remote management client for remote computer control, extending its reach to users across both the local area network (LAN) and the Internet. Further, using Desktop Authority, IT administrators can update the user environment to prevent a similar incident from happening again.

“Addressing our staff’s help desk issues had become a daunting task with administrators spending up to half of their days correcting standard problems,” said Sebastian Motta, project manager, Connecticut Physicians’ Services. “Following the deployment of ScriptLogic BridgeTrak, we noticed a significant decrease in the amount of time it takes to correct a problem, allowing us to focus on other business objectives.”

Pricing and Availability

The ScriptLogic Incident Management Solution, which includes Desktop Authority Remote Management Gateway, ScriptLogic BridgeTrak and Desktop Authority Password Self Service, is available immediately. A free 30-day evaluation of these products and all software solutions from ScriptLogic is available at ScriptLogic.com.

Join ScriptLogic’s Incident Management Webinar

ScriptLogic invites you to attend a Webinar hosted by ScriptLogic Director of Support Services JoAnne Ravielli. A help desk expert and member of leading IT support and service organization HDI, Ravielli will discuss strategies companies can employ to increase department productivity while retaining high incident remediation times. The Webinar, taking place Friday, February 15, at 2:00 p.m. ET, will explain how ScriptLogic’s Incident Management Solution can lower support costs while increasing enterprise efficiency. For more information, please visit http://www.scriptlogic.com/im-webinar .

From the official Windows Vista Blog:

Hi, Mike Nash here from the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft.  Today we are excited to announce that we have released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing (RTM) for our first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese).

Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program.  With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility.  One of the great things about my job is that I get to play with the latest builds of our products — I’ve personally been running Windows Vista SP1 pretty exclusively for a few months and I’ve noticed that my systems run faster and more reliably than they did with the “Gold” release of Windows Vista.

When we first released Windows Vista last year, there were lots of customers who had great experiences, but some had issues finding applications that worked well on Windows Vista; others had problems finding the right device drivers for some of the hardware devices that they used.  The reason for these issues is that in order to improve the reliability and security of Windows Vista, we made some important architectural changes to the system.  While this caused some issues in the short term, in the long term we know that these investments will improve both the reliability and security of the customer experience on Windows.  Check out this blog post about the first year of Windows Vista security to see how some of these changes are paying off.

The good news is that this last year has been a great year of progress for Windows Vista in terms of improving application and device compatibility.  For example, 98 out of the top-selling 100 applications have versions available for Windows Vista.  And through the great work of our hardware partners, we now have 78,000 devices and components supported by Windows Update, up from about 34,000 in November 2006.  As a result, we have licensed over 100 million copies of Windows Vista to date.

Service Pack 1 brings new improvements that are based on feedback we heard from our customers.  It further improves the reliability and performance of Windows Vista.  The information we collect thanks to tools like the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Online Crash Analysis, and Windows Error Reporting help us learn about where and when customers are having issues with Windows Vista and the applications that run on it.  Since these issues have a direct impact on our customers’ experiences, we’ve invested time and energy to make this better.  While Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is an important milestone, we will continue to invest in the continuous improvement process.

SP1 also includes changes focused on improving the performance of Windows Vista in areas that impact the customer experience the most.  For instance, with SP1, copying or moving files around your PC, your home network or your corporate network should now be much faster — up to 50% faster in some scenarios (according to our internal tests).  In addition, on many kinds of hardware, resuming a Windows Vista-based PC from sleep is faster on Service Pack 1.

The key learning over the last year is that when we change the operating system, it takes time to let the ecosystem make sure that the hardware and software that they build works well with Windows Vista.  So as we release Windows Vista SP1 to manufacturing, we are going to be thoughtful about when and how it gets distributed.

With today’s RTM of SP1, a number of processes kick off as we deliver the update to customers.  Our OEM partners will get SP1 and start producing new PCs running Windows Vista with SP1 pre-installed.  We will also start the manufacturing process for retail product of Windows Vista with SP1.  Both will be available in stores for new Windows Vista customers in the coming months.  Today we also start the process to manufacture DVDs for our enterprise customers who get our software via our Volume Licensing program.

As we update our customers to SP1, we want everyone to have a great install experience.  We are going to stage our rollout of SP1 for current Windows Vista users to be approximately concurrent with the availability of Windows Vista SP1 on new PCs and in stores.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers.  These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices.  Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers.  While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available.

While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers.  To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers.  As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don’t have any of the affected device drivers installed.  We’re taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible.

Here’s the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista users:

In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com.  Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1.  If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1.  Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.

In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically.  That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically.  As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1.  The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.

The remaining languages will RTM in April.

New customers should feel great about buying Windows Vista today, knowing that when everything is ready, SP1 will be available to them via Windows Update.  In the meantime, remember that you can take advantage of the benefits of Windows Vista (including many improvements delivered via Windows Update) even without Service Pack 1.

This is an important milestone for our current and future Windows Vista customers around the world.  I want to take a minute to thank our customers for their feedback on Windows Vista and the beta of Service Pack 1.  I also want to thank our hardware and software partners for their continued efforts to deliver the best experiences on Windows Vista.

Congratulations!!! Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing according to Windows Server Division WebLog:

As I write this,  I’m in the room where it all happens; in building 26, better known as the ship room.  Ten minutes ago Windows Server 2008 officially RTM’d.  Also in here with me are my colleagues who have been working on Windows Vista SP1, also RTM’ing today.  We’ve all been working towards this day for the past 3 years and over 5,000 people have contributed to this release.

It’s an exciting day for us and an exciting day for our partners, and customers.   As one of the guys responsible for getting Windows Server 2008 out the door, I thought I’d pull back the curtain a bit and let everyone know what it’s like to be here as we ship Windows Server 2008.    

In the final days leading up to RTM, the tone in the war room meetings was calm, almost too calm because there were minimal bugs to resolve and final testing went very smoothly.  We focused on testing of the code changes made in Nov/Dec to make sure nothing regressed. Hundreds of system component teams across the Windows division and Microsoft performed their escrow test passes and signed off.  The last important step was to ensure our deployment customers, OEMs, and Microsoft IT were satisfied and had no major issues. 

For the past two years we have run performance benchmarks against Windows Server 2003, the Lone Server, and saw significant performance benefits with IIS7, File transfer using SMB2, and across multiple networking scenarios.  I expect that customers will see significant improvements running Windows Server 2008 because we only install the binaries and services required for the specific role they deploy.  This means a small server footprint, easier management, and less servicing.  With server core, you can even install a GUI-free server. 

I am extremely proud of the Windows Server development team who worked hard to ensure that Windows Server 2008 is a world-class operating system.   Every day I get to come to work with such smart and dedicated people, and we will remember this moment for the rest of our lives.  For the development team, the celebration begins today. But we’ll continue to celebrate and look forward to seeing a lot of our customers and partners at the Heroes Happen Here Launch event in LA, on February 27!