Paul Smith

Hi @Steven Boardman The biggest issue for us with the changes to the e-mail was that the timeline update on the request was full of template and you had to expand to actually read the update itself. The above amendments you have made have not resolved this even when I have changed the settings to: 2. Revert back to the old email component i.e no preview or template selection (Globally) Before you made the changes the old email component resulted in only the update that was keyed showing in the timeline. Have I missed a setting because that is exactly what we want again ? Our ideal scenario is to give the individual user the option to decide if they use new Preview option or the old e-mail component but either way the timeline only shows the update itself not the full template ( if we want to see the full e-mail we'd use the View E-mail option available ). This cuts down on the noise in the timeline and encourages collaboration. I welcome your feedback Thanks Paul

To add to @sprasad and his concerns relating to the new change to e-mails... We use e-mails a lot to communicate with our external customers. The e-mail templates we use all have header and footer information in line with our company logo's/information. As a result when I now look at the timeline of one of our incidents all I can see is the template header which is meaningless as far as the update is concerned so I have to expand every update. This is seen by all of the staff here as a huge step backwards as before all that was visible was the update itself. The other bone of contention is that the support staff have to scroll down the e-mail template to the relevant section for typing the update. This makes it much more difficult than it needs to be and if they aren't careful they can over type the template information itself.

Thank you @Steven Boardman it would certainly be a massive help to us Regards Paul

Hi @Martyn Houghton thank you for this... sorry for the ignorance but what do you mean by the above in the context of what I'm trying to achieve ? Thanks in advance for the advice ! Paul

Thats a shame as we have Update set to TEAM and use it mostly for internal communications and E-mail set to CUSTOMER because that is our method of communicating with them. Our customers are External Organisations and in that respect the existing functionality is lacking slightly......ts nearly there but not quite ! Can we look at an enhancement request on this topic do you think @Victor ?

@Victor that could be a bloody good idea.... could you control the e-mail based on the visibility...... so if it was set to 'Team' its internal therefore dont e-mail but if its 'Customer' its external therefore e-mail ?

Interesting process @James Ainsworth that could actually resolve a different issue we have with 2 or 3 of our large external customers. How you you make the Document library available via the portal ? Thanks Paul

We currently use SLA's based on the priority entered at the time of logging the request (Typically a Support Incident). The SLA is based on the first response (update) by our internal analyst to our external customer. At the start of the BP we start the Response Timer, do some other actions, then set the request to 'Suspend wait for Request update'. If we use the update button to add an update to the timeline the Response Timer is stopped and we know that we have hit the Service level. The problem is that the update does not proactively tell our external customer that an update has been made so 99 times out of 100 our support analysts update the request with the following e-mail update: . This also updates the timeline and our e-mail templates have links directly to the request for the external customer to follow for them to update. When this e-mail update is used it does not however stop the Response Timer - so it looks like we are missing the SLA - nor does it progress the business process. This then gives us a further problem in that if the request is then Resolved, the business process doesn't generate the auto e-mail to the external customer to say what the resolution is. Its still waiting for to be used Can the update be included in the Suspend wait for Request update please or have its own Suspend wait for... category ? What would be even better is if you could Suspend waiting for 1 of a number of things to happen.....or is this already possible ? Thanks in advance

Hi @James Ainsworth We are desperate to push information out via services and the customer portal for our external customers to get the information themselves when they need it. We are finding the take up of using the customer portal is slow, so any and all encouragement for its use is to be encouraged. It might be that they are happy to get a report because its easy for them but its another reason why they wont interact with our system. Kind Regards Paul

@Victor we have a number of services available to the external Organisation most of which are available to all of the external contacts. We have a support offering delivered via a 3rd party and is emergency only is via phone. We then catch up the following working day and create a log of the call. Only the external management want to see that call list and they want to know who was responsible for logging it. I have created a service for the purpose of logging these calls but if I make it available only to the management contacts using the subscribers option I can only log it against one of them and not the contact who actually reported the problem. I hope that makes sense

Hi @Victor that works perfect thanks. Ideally I'd like our internal analysts to be able to log a request against anyone of the external contacts in that organisation but only make it available to see via the portal to 2 or 3 of those external contacts (the managers). Is that level of configuration possible ?

Nice one @Victor thank you !

I'd like to create a Service for an external organisation that our internal analysts can log requests against on behalf of that organisation. I want the Request List to be visible via the customer portal for only a select number of the external organisations contacts. I don't want those external contacts to be able to log requests themselves though via the portal only view what we've logged against it.....is it possible to configure the system in this way ? Thanks in advance !

Ok thanks @James Ainsworth

Thank you @James Ainsworth Excuse the ignorance but I'm not sure what linked to the change means to me. Do I have to actively look somewhere or do I get notifications of progress etc ? Kind Regards Paul