Shopping 5.0 represents an enormous shift in enterprise IT delivery, blending, for the first time ever, the traditional rich functionality of an enterprise request portal, with the experience expected of a modern consumer app store.
London and New York, February 3, 2014: 1E, the global leader in IT efficiency software, today announced the release of 1E Shopping version 5.0, the app store for the enterprise. It delivers a simple, modern interface which enables users to find and obtain the software and services that they need, when they need them within their corporate IT environment in a way they now expect. Shopping provides a web portal that gives users the modern app store UI experience they are used to when obtaining new apps or services on their consumer devices like smartphones and tablets.
“Consumerization of IT covers a number of topics, but one thing is clear: end users want enterprise IT to work in the same way that their consumer products do. Shopping makes that a reality today while also ensuring cost-savings for IT managers,” Says Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E. “It is simply the best way of making software and services available within an organization.”
With Shopping, from a standard web browser within their corporate desktop environment, users can browse or search for software or services that they might need, including desktop applications, web-apps, virtualized apps (e.g. using App-V or Citrix), group privileges, and even hardware items. Approval workflows can be configured within Shopping to allow business managers to make decisions via actionable email notifications.
Once any approval is complete, the requested software or services are delivered within minutes. Shopping does this through close integration with enterprise IT systems, including deep out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007/ 2012 and ActiveDirectory. An open integration framework also allows for integration to any third-party provisioning or service-desk system.
The re-designed UI in Shopping Version 5.0 provides the experience that end-users have come to expect from modern consumer app stores. This includes banners on the front page to show highlighted and featured apps or services. IT administrators are able to promote and advertise new software and service capabilities to their end users avoiding both user disruption from forced mass-deployments and the lack of user adoption from relying purely on requests.
This new version of Shopping also provides individual pages for each application or service, with the ability for administrators to build in contextual information, images, and other materials that may be of interest to a user determining if they require the item – again replicating the capabilities of modern consumer app stores.
Furthermore it provides greater granularity than ever to the end user about the status of their requests. Whether waiting for approval, or in the process of being delivered by an enterprise systems management tool, the status is updated and visible to the end user as well as being communicated through email notifications.
