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Alcor, a leading global provider of cloud solutions, security, implementation services and helping organizations with digital transformation has extended their product, AccessFlow for bringing complete visibility to all accesses on a unified platform. AccessFlow is an automated, self-service access management product built on the ServiceNow® platform that now offers seamless integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environments – Oracle EBS and SAP S/4HANA.

Built to improve visibility and simplify access management to ERP environments, AccessFlow enables businesses to:

• Centralize Access Management: Seamless integration with major ERP environments ensures true governance and offers a single source of information with consolidated reporting and dashboards. This enhances visibility to all ERP accesses in one single place and assists stakeholders in faster and better decision making.
  
  
• Enhance business productivity and save cost: The secure, user-friendly, and self-service portal of AccessFlow eliminates manual intervention, significantly enhances process efficiencies, and substantially reduces cost. In addition, AccessFlow’s extensible and efficient architecture allows easy modifications and upgrades, making the process more agile and scalable.
  
  
• Stay Compliant: Automation of the entire access management process assist in maintaining data integrity and extends audit support. In addition, the e-signature feature of AccessFlow provides an additional authentication mechanism and helps businesses comply with 21 CFR part 11 regulation.
   
• Deliver Superior User Experiences: Customized and intuitive workflows that require little to no specialized skills for managing ERP access offer an always-on user experience. Seamless mobile support offered by AccessFlow enhances employee satisfaction and empowers them to stay connected anytime, anywhere.

“The new release of AccessFlow takes access provisioning to a new level by offering seamless integration with SAP and Oracle. It is better and sharper with cutting edge UI, efficient search, brand-new e-signature feature, and improved on-the-go mobile features.” says Padmapriya Ravishekhar, Senior Architect at Alcor Solutions, Inc.

Rajashekar Rao Kambla, ERP Practice Director at Alcor Solutions, Inc. adds on the AccessFlow integrated with ERP launch: “We bring the newest AccessFlow version with a real-time plug and play interface with the top ERP providers. This unified integration with Oracle and SAP will reduce time, effort, and cost up to 90 percent.”

Alcor is hosting a webinar “AccessFlow – Gain visibility to end-to-end ERP environment access provisioning and compliance.” on April 29 at 11 am PDT.

To join the webinar and discover how AccessFlow can reduce cost, increase business productivity, and improve overall user experience, please register here: http://www.alcortech.com/webinars/accessflow-gain-visibility-end-end-erp-access-provisioning-compliance/

For more information on Alcor Solutions, please visit our website at www.alcortech.com, follow us on  LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Alcor Solutions, Inc. is a San Francisco, California based company that provides global cloud advisory and implementation services to clients in multiple geographies. Their clients include global Fortune 500 as well as leading organizations in multiple industry verticals. Founded in 2008, Alcor Solutions Inc.’s focus has been building strong competency on cutting edge technologies and advising clients in implementing them. They are passionate about their thought leadership and believe that successful IT implementations result equally from good strategy and technology excellence. Alcor is Elite ServiceNow® Partner, AWS Consulting Partner, Oracle® Gold Partner, and also works with several other technologies including Microsoft, Salesforce, FireEye and more. Alcor Enabling Cloud™ is a registered trademark of Alcor.

Employee recognition has long been a cornerstone of an effective management. It not only amplifies corporate culture but also improves employee productivity and reduces turnover.

“As per a recent survey, 63% of employees who feel appreciated and recognized said they are very unlikely to switch job in the next 6 months.”

So, the question is – why restrict it to only certain occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, employee appreciation day, and annual reviews? Why only March 5 and not every day can be celebrated as an employee appreciation day? Why not build and promote a culture of appreciation where managers can appreciate their team members and employees can praise their colleagues every time they want?

At Alcor, we understand that these small gestures of appreciation from managers or teammates goes a long way! It helps in building and promoting a culture of recognition, happiness, and motivation across the organization. Most significantly, employee experience is elevated far beyond and they truly feel valued! That is why, we believe in choosing the right recognition strategy, the one that aligns with our business goals.

We empower our teams to create an appreciative workplace culture by using an amazing employee appreciation platform. It is a modern solution and provides a user friendly platform to amplify connections and build great work ethics among employees.

It allows presenting and receiving points to and from peers with the flexibility to choose gift cards or cash redemptions. More than just a “Thank You” note, it offers the excitement that employees look up to! With this solution, personal milestone celebrations such as birthdays and work anniversaries have become a lot easier. Employees can offer a desired number of reward points to the relevant employee on single click of a button. Not only this, employees can also share how they feel.

This platform binds employees from different user groups and has a direct impact on the most crucial aspects of our day-to-day business including productivity, morale, and purpose. It is always good to have your employees feel fun and motivated at the same time.

If you would like to learn how Alcor’s home-grown solution, High5 – a solution built on the ServiceNow platform can be a game-changer in elevating your employee recognition and appreciation policy, contact us today at information@alcortech.com

In business terms, a playbook is defined as- A plan which consists of process workflows, standard operating procedures that outline a consistent response. It reflects an approach defining predetermined responses to a given business process well ahead in time.

Imagine a scenario, an HR professional from the onboarding team (using HR Agent workspace) is performing the daily activities of onboarding new hires into the organization. HRSD dictates onboarding process will have multiple activity sets like Preboarding, Day 1, Day 30, Day 90 “milestones” and corresponding activities to complete these milestones. Putting this time-consuming activity into just 3 lines in a blog is really undermining the time, cost, and business value sensitivity of doing things correctly and at the correct time.

Elaborating the same example, a little further consider the major milestones in onboarding a new hire:

Infographic 1: Example of onboarding steps in an organization

Challenges:

• Prioritize your teams’ work
• View progress of activities across different departments
• Having a central repository of all SoPs and forms
• View all completed activities
• Next activities in scope

Wouldn’t it be great to have a single pane solution that an employee can use to see the workflow of associated tasks and steps to resolve/complete it? Here, I would like to introduce “PLAYBOOKS” from ServiceNow. A playbook takes a workflow and breaks it into multiple stages. Each stage includes:

• A list of activities or steps that the agent needs to perform.
• Status indicators that display the current state of each activity or step.
• Check-boxes and counters that indicate where an agent is in the workflow.

As an HRSD consultant, you would think this concept is familiar, taking a workflow and then breaking it down into activity and activity set… This is a LIFECYCLE EVENT!! And you would be spot on! Playbooks can be created using the Process Automation Designer platform feature, a similar feature available in HRSD under Lifecycle events. The only catch here is to integrate this playbook into the HR Agent workspace so that we get a single pane, one-stop solution, I was talking about earlier. The playbook can have multiple activity sets in a lifecycle event case that also contains multiple activities, being able to view all aspects. Using an accordion button, the HR agent can expand, or collapse activity sets to view the activities within. Within an activity set, tasks are displayed with details like state, owners, and can act.

The below screenshot looks at the basic structure of a playbook. It resides in the HR Agent Workspace as a TAB on the Life Cycle Event case. This TAB is visible only once the LE case is Ready or WIP. It gives detailed insights on the Lifecycle Event, Activity Set and Activities:

Screenshot 1: Playbook screen (Source: ServiceNow Product Documentation)

Features of Playbook are:

1. The Assigned agents can log their comments and work logs into the playbook activities
2. Check and work on the HR case/task on the same windowpane
3. Manage and/or Refer to the help aids, training videos, and catalog items in the same playbook activity stream
4. Cancel and revert work done in a lifecycle event case

By the way! Do not like the Out of box (OOB) default playbook experience? NO PROBLEM! Service now is here with its customized HR Playbook Experiences. This is a really great feature to tweak and customize these documents based on your organization’s needs! These are as simple as changing a few configurations and setting up activity overrides so that the final playbook will look different from what OOB pre-configured playbooks.

Infographic 2: Components of HR Playbook Experience

To conclude, playbook is a powerful feature introduced by Service Now to apply their motto “WORKFLOW IT”! It aids the users to complete complex multi-team, multi-process tasks by providing step by step guidance and integrates it with HR Lifecycle event cases to manage the life cycle of specific customer process requirements.

P.S: I mentioned HR Agent workspace a lot in this blog. This is also a great feature introduced for the HRSD module in the Paris release, but discussion on that is for another day! 😊

About The Author:

Manas Chafekar is a Senior Consultant at Alcor Solutions, Inc. with 9 years of IT experience. He has extensive knowledge of ITSM, HRSD, FSM, ITIL- Service Operations and Continuous Service improvements.

How many times have you heard “We need a tool to fix “X”? This happens very often, and we, IT professionals are the worst offenders – we are all enamored with the bright and shiny tool. We listen to the sales executive pitching the tool and promising that all our issues will go away and it will offer us an experience of rainbows and unicorns.

But the story changes after implementation!
It’s not exactly fixing what was promised, but the challenges now start creeping in.
What happens rather relates to the quote “putting lipstick on a pig”.

So, it’s not a tool that can fix the broken processes. Instead we, IT professionals need to take the time to understand our processes.

You cannot do this in a silo

Wondering where to start from? You must have people who are closely involved in the process – They clearly understand how it works. Connect with them and map out the process to identify where does the breaking points lie. There are probably more than one. This can take time and investing in that time is well worth the cost.

The next important thing to have is a Process Map. I have heard many times “We have it mapped out. It is in some drawer or SharePoint site”. That is great, but does everyone follow it? How many people know it exists? I would guess probably no on both counts. Creating a process map is backed by good intentions, but what happens next? – people adjust the process to fit different issues. Soon after, the map is out of date. If the process is not followed and measured in time, then it is as good as not having one.

You may ask, how do you keep people from deviating from the process and keeping documentation up to date? One way is to create Standard Work Sheets. These sheets explain the steps necessary to do the work and should be followed. The sheet should also explain why each step is important so that new employees understand why the steps are important. If a change is necessary to the Standard Worksheet, a change process for updating is necessary so that the owner of the process is aware of the change. This is very important to keep things up to date.

Now speaking of analysis, how can you improve your process if you are not measuring it?
Without tracking metrics is like driving your car blindfolded, you have no idea if you’re on the right road. You don’t know if you’re improving the process or causing it to be worse. Thus, it’s important to understand Metrics – whether you’re winning or failing during the process. So, spend some time and figure out what metrics are important for your project.

Saying it again!

The problems that follow poor process management gradually impacts efficiency, user experience, productivity, and business revenue. So, the process is more important than the tool. Take the time to invest in it, document it, and create a change process to keep it up to date. In the long run, it will save you both money and time.

About The Author:

Clay Johnson is a Senior Consultant at Alcor Solutions, Inc. with more than 35 years of IT experience. He has extensive knowledge of ITSM, ServiceNow, Lean and Process Improvement leadership.

Alcor’s Cloud Catapult is a set of Tools to automate your cloud migration from Oracle EBusiness Suite (EBS) to cloud. It is a low cost, rapid and an accurate Cloud Migration tool. It is built for Oracle’s E Business Suite ERP, HCM and CRM Cloud Migration.

Alcor’s Cloud Catapult consists of: Assessor, Configurator and Auto Data Migrator

• Assessor:

Automated Assessment tools help evaluate your current E Business Suite instance. Alcor’s Assessment tool will retrieve existing Set ups, Profiles, Flex field structures, Ledger structure, Organization structure , Reports, Customizations and Personalization so that assessment is done quickly and cloud migration Impact analysis is seamless.

• Configurator:

This tool help in EBS to Cloud process mapping. Process to Process mapping is done from EBS to cloud, so that process configurations can be moved to cloud using auto Configurator, thereby saving time and efforts for configuration.

• Auto Data Migrator:

Automated Data Migration tool migrates EBS Data to Cloud. It encompasses pre-built scripts to Extract, Transform and Load using Auto Data Migrator. Alcor’s Data Extraction and Migration Scripts extracts data from EBS Covering Masters, Transaction Data and Set Up Details. This would significantly reduce time for data migration ensuring accuracy and enhanced efficiency.  Alcor’s Automated Reconciliation Scripts will reconcile migrated data with source data ensuring precision.

Cloud Catapult Effectivity

The use of Cloud Catapult will reduce the Cloud Migration cost by 30 % – resulting in significant savings of time and money. Alcor tool makes Cloud Migration possible in just 14 weeks.

Structure Change advisory

If you would need to change Multi Org access control and Key structures while migrating to cloud, Alcor would provide advisory services on the impact of either Multi Org access Control Change or Key Structure Changes so that appropriate decisions could be made.

Contact us at information@alcortech.com to leverage automated tools and accelerate your journey to cloud migration.

About The Author:

Rajashekar Rao Kambla, Oracle – Director at Alcor Solutions, Inc. has more than 21+ years of experience on Oracle Applications on both E-Business suite and Oracle Fusion cloud Applications and Oracle Analytics (EPM).

ESM Migration – Moving Custom Content Guidance

Getting ready to transition legacy solutions, including current ServiceNow instances – ServiceNow Paris, Quebec, Rome, San Diego and Tokyo? You’re not alone. Enterprises that are looking to drive digital transformation across business applications often realize it’s the best way to improve agility, performance and save cost and effort.

However, migration to ServiceNow can be tedious due to lack of implementation expertise or knowledge gaps within the current staff and service providers. This series of blogs will share global transition experience from platform owners, outsourcing transition experts and architects across technical, solution and platform to help Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Platform owners, sourcing advisors and contract negotiators gain practical insights to simplify the migration process. There is a lot to cover, so this post is divided into six parts.

Lets’ Start

This is part 1 and will provide considerations for migrating legacy code and data into out-of-the-box (OOTB) ServiceNow tables. Current licensing for ServiceNow restricts the number of custom tables that can be created.  Custom tables lead to more testing and possible impact when upgrading ServiceNow.  New capabilities are added twice a year – each release may allow custom work to be replaced by out-of-box capabilities. Alcor has experience assessing legacy systems and in the ServiceNow data schema including the Common Service Data Model now at version 3.0

Alcor has migrated legacy transaction and foundation (user, company, groups) data into ServiceNow many times. However, Alcor does not recommended this approach. It is difficult to retain legacy relationships i.e. CI records, group records, user records, and previously submitted incidents from inactive employees.  A strong consideration should be given to a Greenfield implementation where only active data is brought into the ServiceNow instance (such as that discovered by tools or that is loaded as new records for only open transactions)

Consider the following to 1) minimize the effort and 2) maximize the business value of moving any code or data from a legacy system into a new fresh installation on the latest version (major release) of ServiceNow.

The actual effort will depend on the amount of customization and technical debt in current tables; client production ServiceNow instance field name changes, choice list modifications, new fields, field data type changes, and field format. The full effort will include exporting the data and then configuring the import into ServiceNow. Most often the System Import utility will be used which may require pre- and post- import scripts in addition to a transform map along with small sample tests to assure success. See “Import Sets” in docs.servicenow.com to learn more.

If all data is migrated this may include importing data that has no business use such as records

1) past the data retention period

2) closed tickets

3) configuration items (CIs) no longer being used

If OOTB tables are loaded with transaction records from other systems this may require addressing systemIDs to assure they are unique and using legacy data types which may differ from the previous system. Global Unique Identifier (GUID) often must be retained or synchronized with ServiceNow identifiers making the import data mapping a larger effort.

Migrating to OOTB tables will require about 75% more effort than migrating the data to custom tables.  This is based on actual experience migrating the following tables of data from existing ServiceNow legacy production instance into tables in a new out-of-the-box (OOTB) ServiceNow production instance.

• Incident
• Problem
• Change
• Request Item
• Approval

If all records including users, groups, CIs, categories and choice lists in the client instances are brought into the new ServiceNow production instance this effort will increase. Finally, the assumption is made that CI relationships will not be migrated but rather discovered by tools integrated with the new ServiceNow instance.

Greenfield Definition – A project that lacks constraints imposed by prior work. The analogy is to construction on new land where there is no need to work within the constraints of existing buildings or infrastructure. In software development, a greenfield project is started on a new fresh install of the latest software on the latest infrastructure and the SDLC is progress by cloning up from Dev to UAT to Production only until the first Go Live.  All integrations are established new to this greenfield SDLC set.

It’s Time to Get Going!

In this blog, we determined what to do with the solution design and data in legacy tools especially when the desired state is to migrating into a new ServiceNow production instance.

Next in this series, we will consider:

Part 2 – Migrating into an existing ServiceNow instance
Part 3 – Migrating record history including comments
Part 4 – Migrating legacy system date to an external data source
Part 5 – Impact of Moving Data from One Table to a Different Table
Part 6 – Audit considerations

Contact Alcor Solutions, Inc. at information@alcortech.com for Managed Services for your ServiceNow-centric Platform, Multi-Vendor Management, Service Reliability or more targeted advisory services, implementation, and operational support. Alcor can accelerate or augment your efforts to fully utilize ServiceNow as the center of a powerful corporate platform. How are you progressing? Provide us your own experience, questions and comments below.

About The Author:

Brent J Knipfer is a Chief Architect at Alcor Solutions, Inc.
ServiceNow Platform Architect since 2009
Remedy Solution Architect since 1998
Global Service Transition Manager
Global Service Desk, CMDB and Service Catalog Product Manager
20+ Years of Solution Design and Outsource Migration Experience

Priyanka is Alcor’s Featured Employee for June 2020! Priyanka Kumari, Project Coordinator at Alcor Solutions, Inc. is passionate about staying on top of industry trends by accelerating her learning curve and implementing the knowledge gained to solve complex business problems. Priyanka is a mom of a 6 year old and her family is her lifeline. She loves doing experimental cooking, watching horror movies and surfing the internet in her spare time.

James Turner, Director – Managed Services – Alcor Solutions, Inc and Priyankas’s manager says, “Priyanka (aka PV) has been focused on the Project Record & Resource Plan maintenance, Invoicing (for several Practices) and recently assuming the BSA role for our production instance. Her diligence and push forward attitude bring many pieces together in finance, resourcing and project components seamlessly. She is always upbeat and willing to go the extra mile for any person or team. She is a great asset to Alcor, and we look forward to her continued efforts, meeting presence and laugh! Glad to have her on the team!”

Priyanka Agrawal, Service Delivery Manager – Managed Services, adds “PV (as we all address her)  is a key resource  in handling and coordinating   most of the project management activities related to Resource Plans, Project records, invoicing and billing for all projects across Alcor.”

Here is an insightful tete-a-tete with Priyanka:

1. What has been your experience at work here at Alcor – please elaborate on self-motivation, team dynamics, people strengths etc.

Alcor is a fantastic place to work, comprising of transparent leadership and incredible company culture. The focus on work-life balance is remarkable here and I can’t imagine myself working anywhere else. People at Alcor are great – willing to help, passionate and really caring about what they are doing. It is so much fun to work with people who are committed to accomplishing business objectives and aligned to achieve the company’s vision. Each day here brings a new and exciting challenge – a journey worth treading!

Senior leadership team at Alcor always puts employees first and care about their overall wellbeing. The managers are always willing to help and take time out of their busy schedule to motivate teams and offer a helping hand as and when needed. I’m a big fan of detailed training processes at Alcor, I feel this is what help employees excel at jobs and be confident of what they’re doing.

The positive workplace culture at Alcor is a great driving force and motivation for me to stay productive. I love my job so much so that I look forward to coming to office every single day.

2. Why do you feel proud to be an Alcorian? Alcor feels more like a family than just a bunch of employees. We’re friends at work and outside of work, irrespective of the regions we are working in. I just love being surrounded by enthusiastic and skilled people. I feel like this is a great workplace to boost your career path and personal development.

Leaders are easily approachable, they treat every employee equally, and stay true to their word. After completing two years at Alcor, I still feel that the message conveyed to me on the very first day of my joining holds true to this date – be it respecting your feedback, offering opportunities to work on exciting projects and travel for work, or expanding learning horizon.

Every employee here is heard and respected for what they have to say. Active and open communication channel between employees, teams, and superiors is what helps Alcor stand out.

3. What’s been that one defining moment for you at Alcor where you felt happy, successful and motivated?

My journey with Alcor began two years back and since then there have been countless such moments. Getting great opportunities to prove myself at work and enhance my learning is truly motivating for me. I am happy to explore my strengths and capabilities.

Initially involved with only the MSP team, I now support three teams  – MSP, ITOM and team responsible for one of our premier clients. I was elated when I was given an opportunity to work as a consultant for ITSM and I loved being part of those projects.

Getting constant encouragement from leadership to complete relevant certifications is very rarely seen in our industry. I still cherish the day when I was appreciated to clear my very first ServiceNow Service Admin Certification (CSA Snow). That was the day when my passion to get relevant certifications really got pumped.

4. Who is Priyanka? How can you best describe yourself? What motivates you? What do you do for fun? What are your hobbies?

I would describe myself as a confident and adaptable person who loves communicating with people and discussing solutions to business problems. I feel satisfied and joyful while working, analyzing complex business data, and drawing clear and simple conclusions that simplify work.

My family – an inseparable part of mine – holds the utmost importance in my life. A mom of a 6-year-old girl, I would say that being a mom feels wonderful. It’s what gives me a purpose to do better today than what I did yesterday and fills my heart with joy and affection. In my spare time I love doing experimental cooking, watching horror movies or series, and surfing the internet to learn more about various software and latest project management articles.

A zeal to enhance my knowledge base and skills keeps me motivated. I thrive on challenges and constantly set goals for myself, so I have something to strive towards – it could be a certification or training course. Too tough a person to get demotivated, I only get discouraged when I’m unable to match my own set of expectations for a particular task.

5.When you hear the word, Alcor- which 3 words strike you?

Nimble – Agile and adaptable, Alcor has a constant willingness to course-correct and rethink strategies, processes, and approaches.

Collaboration – Employees across multiple geographies work seamlessly with one another, within and between departments.

Innovation – Always seeking new ways to stay a step ahead of the industry and open to pioneering feedback and ideas!

Thanks for talking to us, Priyanka! You are truly an Alcor star! We are wishing you many more accolades ahead!

SAN FRANCISCO, May 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ Alcor announces the launch of High5 – Employee Reward and Recognition Platform built on ServiceNow™

Alcor, a global digital transformation services company, advising leading businesses on Cloud Platforms, Digital Workflows, Technology and Robotic Automation, Enterprise Service Management, HR Solutions, Integrated Risk Management and Data & Analytics, announced the launch of High5 – the first, fully automated, seamless and collaborative Employee Reward and Recognition platform built on ServiceNow™ and available on the ServiceNow™ App Store.

High5 supports organizations streamline their employee appreciation process and connect all employees on one user-friendly platform, making the process of recognition and appreciation of employees very easy. It helps create appreciative workplace culture, improve morale, unite employees and teams, retain employees’ long term, and motivate them to accomplish more.

High5 allows employees to show appreciation for the great work done by their colleagues, as well as celebrate their personal milestones, such as birthdays and anniversaries, by giving High5 points. If sponsored by the organization, these points can convert to tangible rewards that can be redeemed in the form of gift cards, cash redemption and more on High5’s e-commerce store. High5 reward redemption store features an extensive amount of vendor gift card options for rewards redemption, including donations to charities.

The High5 Basic and Premium plans with competitive features and pricing become a great solution for improving corporate culture of appreciation for organizations of all sizes and needs!

Sunita Gulia, Manager – Product Development at Alcor Solutions, Inc., commented on the High5 launch: “The organizational spent on employee reward and recognition programs has shown tremendous growth recently, and it will continue to witness an outstanding growth for the next ten years! With the High5 product, we cover the entire HR lifecycle on the ServiceNow Platform and make it easy for organizations to implement such a program seamlessly on Service Now while making it affordable for them.”

“We are very proud of launching High5 product and helping multiple organizations get to a new level of appreciation, while building up their corporate culture and achieving corporate goals. The timing of this launch is perfect. In the light of recent events, staying united with your teams and recognizing colleagues on their successful efforts is more important than ever.” says Anna Alferova, Sr. Marketing Specialist at Alcor Solutions, Inc.

Learn more about High5 product benefits by visiting the product page and watching an interactive video about High5.

For more information on Alcor Solutions, please visit our website at www.alcortech.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Alcor Solutions, Inc. is a global digital transformation services company based in San Francisco, CA. It is serving Fortune 500, Government Agencies, and other leading organizations in multiple industry verticals across US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and India. Alcor advises leading businesses on Cloud Platforms, Digital Workflows, Technology & Robotic Automation, Enterprise Service Management, HR Solutions, Integrated Risk Management and Data & Analytics. Alcor is a ServiceNow Elite partner, AWS partner, an Oracle Gold partner and works with Azure, Salesforce, FireEye, Tanium & several other cutting-edge technologies. It also provides business process consulting to capture, re-engineer and improve processes that can easily be automated to deliver real value. The Alcor consulting team are experts in Business strategy, Cloud Technology and Organizational Change Management. Learn more about Alcor Solutions at http://www.alcortech.com. Alcor Enabling Cloud™ is a registered trademark of Alcor.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, 2020 /PRNewswire/ Alcor Announces the launch of AccessFlow – Identity and Access Management Platform built on ServiceNow™

Alcor, a leading global provider of cloud solutions, security, and implementation services, has announced the launch of its new product – AccessFlow.

AccessFlow is Identity and Access Management (IAM) Platform built on ServiceNow™ and available on the ServiceNow™ App Store. It automates enterprise Identity and Access Management and compliance. With Accessflow, organizations can define access management blueprint, authority, access renewal and ongoing operations. It maintains enterprise identities, accounts, entitlements, and roles along with documented approvals, owner accountability, access reviews and dashboards for all functions.

AccessFlow provides competitive advantage to organizations by not only improving their productivity and employee satisfaction, but also providing process efficiencies and cost savings due to its efficient open architectural design.

“AccessFlow is designed to be truly a one stop shop for all access management needs across the IT access management lifecycle. It is based on data driven workflows & integrations, has an open architecture and embodies a great UX with a low code/no code philosophy so it is intuitive, quick & inexpensive to roll out and manage. If you are a ServiceNow™ user and have multiple security, authentication & identity management applications, AccessFlow acts as the perfect glue to give you a seamless user access management experience.” says Amit Singh, Alcor Chief Executive Officer.

Monisha Singh, Alcor Founder and Principal, Product Development and Strategic Alliances, commented on the AccessFlow launch: “We went through extensive research to gather voice of customers to build AccessFlow. Efficient architectural design, user-friendly self-service portal, agent workspace and mobile experience, as well as chatbot make AccessFlow an exclusive product in the marketplace. I am very proud of our team that developed this product and got it certified on the ServiceNow™ App Store in record time”.

Alcor is hosting a webinar on AccessFlow business benefits on May 14th at 11 AM PST:

To join the webinar and discover how AccessFlow can reduce costs and IT risk, increase business productivity, and improve employee satisfaction, please register here:

http://www.alcortech.com/webinar-attend/webinar-detail/

For more information on Alcor Solutions, please visit us our website at www.alcortech.com, follow us on  LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Alcor Solutions, Inc. is a San Francisco, CA based company that provides global cloud advisory and implementation services to clients in multiple geographies. Their clients include global Fortune 500 as well as leading organizations in multiple industry verticals. Founded in 2008, Alcor Solutions Inc.’s focus has been building strong competency on cutting edge technologies and advising clients in implementing them. They are passionate about their thought leadership and believe that successful IT implementations result equally from good strategy and technology excellence. Alcor is Elite ServiceNow™ Partner, AWS Standard Partner, Oracle® Gold Partner, and also works with several other technologies including Microsoft, Salesforce, FireEye and more. Alcor Enabling Cloud™ is a registered trademark of Alcor.

Tino Solis is Alcor’s Featured Employee for March 2020! Tino, IT Manager – Consulting at Alcor Solutions, Inc. evaluates his own success by the success of his team and loves solving business problems that incorporate people, process, and technology. A total family man and a goofy dad at heart, Tino is also an avid outdoor cook.

Ziying Magic Tan, Principal – Alcor Solutions, Inc says, “Tino has brought great consulting skills and leadership to our team from day one and is spearheading one of our fastest growing ITSM offerings. His team first attitude has influenced everyone around him and made a huge impact on Alcor’s success with our strategic customers. During this trying time, he continues to demonstrate leadership and commitment to excellence in everything he does.  We are grateful to have Tino on our team and look forward to a fruitful journey ahead together”.

Pamela Morris, Senior Manager, Consulting adds, “Tino has been such a committed and reliable partner on all the initiatives of which I’ve had the pleasure of working with him. He has the ability to not only handle multiple roles from Engagement Manager to writing detailed documents all while building a great team culture among his peers and those working for him. He can handle intense deadlines with grace as demonstrated when he recently moved across country with complete dedication to a very strategic client and then shortly after had twin babies! I’m so happy to see Tino recognized for his dedication and quality; he truly exemplifies the Alcor culture!”

Here is an insightful tete-a-tete with Tino:

1. What has been your experience at work here at Alcor?

My experience working at Alcor has been amazing! From great leaders and cooperative colleagues to pervasive team-first culture and plenty of opportunities to grow, there are multiple reasons that make Alcor a perfect workplace. The Leadership team here offers the best working environment and possesses great qualities of leading with vision, commitment, and empathy. I hope to acquire these leadership abilities to lead the people on my team. Talking about team dynamics, I just admire how everyone here works as a team rather than an isolated individual contributor. Every employee in this company, regardless of role, has been an absolute pleasure to work with as they understand the concept of a team mentality.

2. Why do you feel proud to be an Alcorian?

At Alcor, we have a quality of product and a quality of people that I love being associated with. I’m proud of the solutions that we offer our client base and the value we provide to each other, even amidst the chaos. It is highly commendable how Alcorians are always prepared to create a difference and help other team members to a degree that is worthy of being called quality work.

I feel blessed to be a part of this team and would say that – Anyone can offer Service management, but to make those service management efforts successful it takes the right partner that’s backed by honesty, integrity, and authenticity – and that’s who we are!

3. What’s been that one defining moment for you at Alcor where you felt happy, successful, and motivated?

Well, there are actually quite a few. The one that stands out most in my mind would be – when I showed interest in the Elanco project and it was taken seriously. It motivated me because my leadership team was listening, which is perhaps one of the most understated skills out there. As we’re in the business of listening, seeing my leadership listening to me, taking my interests, my background, and my expertise in mind, it felt really good.

Another similar situation when I felt motivated and even flattered was when I was allowed to take a step further into leading a  SIAM team – for which SIAM is a potential new line of business. The ability to contribute to product creation and an Alcor offering is very fulfilling and rewarding for me. It’s like wow, my leadership trust me and listen to what I’ve to say.

4. Who is Tino? How can you best describe yourself?

Professionally, I’m a Service Management Consultant who loves to solve business problems that incorporate people, process, and technology. Personally, I’m a total family man and a dad to the core – a goofy dad at heart, you can say!

I get motivated by being surrounded by people with an open mindset, people who listen, and people who encourage open communication. Other little things that motivate me are – little tokens of appreciation, be it just an email from somebody or a conversation. On the other hand, the demotivating factor for me is the closed mindset – when people aren’t taking what you’ve to say seriously or are just listening for the sake of responding as opposed to listening to the message I’m trying to convey.

Outside of being a goofball dad day-to-day, I’m an avid outdoor cook. I like to smoke meats, I like to barbeque, I smoke vegetables – I love all things cooking outside. Besides that I’m also passionate about spending time on Wikipedia. When traveling, cruise ships are my place to be because they allow me to go everywhere and at the same time go nowhere.

5. When you hear the word, Alcor- which 3 words strike you?

• People – The value add of our brand
• Authenticity – Pervasive in our culture
• Organizational Self Awareness – Spearheading with self-awareness of who we are as an organization and a belief that tomorrow we will be better than what we are today

Thanks for talking to us, Tino! Wishing you many more accolades ahead!

If you’re a developer and want to deploy your Flask based application on AWS Cloud without lots of manual intervention, then AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service. It helps in deploying and at the same time scaling of web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS. In addition, we need not pay any additional charges for using Elastic Beanstalk –as we pay only for the AWS resources required for storing and running our applications.

Flask is a lightweight web application framework build on top of python. It can be integrated with a large number of extensions. Here are the some of the biggest sites created using the Flask framework: Pinterest, Twilio, Lyft, Patreon,etc.

Let’s see this in action:

In this blog, we’ll deploy a Flask &MySQL based web application. For that, we’ll create two environments – Development env. i.e. Cloud9 and Production env. i.e. EB.

Case 1: Deployment on Development Environment (Cloud9)

Cloud9 is a cloud IDE that is used for writing, running, and debugging code. First deploying our application on Cloud9, we need to launch our Cloud9 machine from the AWS console, as shown in image 1.

Then, after providing the configuration settings, AWS will spin up an Ubuntu-based IDE instance, as shown in image 2.

Once the IDE is running and you’re able to access it, it’s time to upload your application code in it (You can choose to build an application from scratch or take help from one of the open-source Github repositories). Instead of uploading your code, you may choose to zip your application code and drag and drop your folder, as shown in image 3. With Cloud9, you can run commands on the terminal and, at the same time, see your folder structure on the left to start development.

As our application is database-driven, it’s time to launch our RDS MySQL database, as shown in image 4. You can create a non-publicly accessible database and launch it in the same VPC where your Development Environment is running.

Now,though not a good practice, but to simplify the entire process, you can directly enter your database credentials within your code. However, in production environment,it is always advised to store your credentials in system variables and pass them within your code.

If you’re using Mysql with Flask, always declare a cursor class because that’s how you are going to fire queries. The cursor will hold records within the memory &Dict Cursor is a Cursor class that returns rows as dictionaries.

Before we proceed to test our application, we need to install certain packages. As we’re running our application on Ubuntu, below commands should meet our needs.

> pip3 install flask

> pip3 install wtforms

>sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

> pip3 install flask_mysqldb

> pip3 install passlib

Also, let’s define the host and post for our application:

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:

application.run(host=’0.0.0.0′,port=8080, debug=True)

As you can see,the port of application is 8080 but Cloud9 & Elastic Beanstalk can do port forwarding. So, now we can access our application from Port 80 i.e. HTTP.

We’ll openup our application.py file and click on the Run button. From the Preview, we can goto our application landing page, as in image 6.

The final results after deployment looks as in the image 7.

Great! Now let’s login to our application and see if our database was configured correctly.

Case 2:Deployment on Production Environment (EB)

Now that we have successfully deployed our application on the Dev environment, it’s time to deploy it over EB.But before that we need to take care of a few things:

We need to create a requirements.txt file and list all our application libraries. Thanks to the Pigar, which can generate requirements for the project.As shown in image 8,we need to run below commands on our Dev environment from the project root directory:

>pip3 install pigar

>pigar

Now that our requirements.txt has been created, let’s see what other prerequisites we have:

Elastic Beanstalk is able to find our application’s code very easily when we select application.py as the filename and enter a callable application object(in this case, the Flask object,). EB looks for an ‘application’ callable by default.That’s already been taken care of.

If you face 500 internal error, just declare a secret key below your application callable, as seen in image 9.

That’s all we need to do.Let’s download our application from Cloud9 environment& zip it in the root directory level. For that, we just need to select our files and child directories, and zip them.

Now it’s time to launch our Elastic Beanstalk instance.In the window that appears, just select Python as a platform, upload the code, and click on create an environment. As our application can communicate with our database, which is in the same VPC, no other configuration is required.Environment creation takes about 5 minutes and,finally, our application is up and running, as seen in image 10.

Let’s hit its URL!

As seen in image 11, this will open a browser window using the domain name created for your application. You would be able to see the same Flask website that you created and tested locally.

Hurray, you did it! In case you get stuck somewhere, start afresh – follow all the steps again and voila you’ll get the desired results.

References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create-deploy-python-flask.html

https://github.com/bradtraversy/myflaskapp

About The Author:

Mayank Singh is an Oracle Developer, accredited certified technical professional who has excellent ability to develop & implement technical solutions for any size of business and believe in learning each day. He loves to bring cloud automation, and his favorite automation tools are Terraform and Ansible. He is also an AWS Solutions Architect Professional. Besides, he is a big fan of Crayon Shin Chan and Marvel and DC movies.”