Frank Reay

+1 here too. It's a right pain. Grouping of roles is much easier to manage (and explain to the auditors!).

@James Ainsworth This is excellent news - thanks for the update. I have made the setting this morning (to a 'virtual' round of applause from my support staff!). Now we all need to do is have the option to completely disable Comments in an Instance or at the least have better notification of when a Comment has been made on an Open Request. But these has been raised elsewhere! My guys really don't like them.

@Steven Boardman yes you are correct. All sorted - thanks.

@Steven Boardman OK I understand the principle now. However that pop up in the BPM does not enables us to pick Attribute fields to copy into a Custom Field - see screenshot (we would expect to see it at the top of the list for Get Customer Details).

@Steven Boardman I have followed your steps above to record when a user is a VIP by the use of the Attribute 1 field under Basic Details in the Profile. That is all good but I now want to show that in the List View of our Requests. You say above: "This enhancement will allow you to copy a customer attribute i.e a VIP status into a request custom field and in turn display that request custom field as a column in the Custom request list views. " But how do I actually 'copy a customer attribute into a request custom field' so that it is available to display in the List View? Also when I have previously used Custom Fields they still appear in the List View Under Columns and +CUSTOM COLUMN as Custom A, B, C etc in the drop down. Can I rename/relabel these so that when they appear in the drop down they show that they have been used in this Service and what for?

@Gerry On the face of it that looks ideal for us so yes please. I have a meeting this afternoon with Samrai so will mention it to him.

@Gerry Thanks for the info and noted. One of my main requirements in Asset Management (as this is where we get the real value from the tool) is for the system to automatically raise an Activity or prefereably a Request for an asset when it is approaching a key date (eg end of hardware life/support contract) from a date held within the asset itself. I am not sure whether we can effectively do that from within HB or if we need an external tool to monitor these asset dates in HB and raise a Service Request at say 2 months before the date.

We have LOADS of email templates! Most of them sit in the Requests Group (probably like lots of other people) such as: But they can actually be placed in Groups which is really useful ie you can place all Change emails in the Change Group. That's great when defining a BPM (as you can choose your Group) but NOT when looking in the Service Portfolio Config screen as you can only see the Requests Group to pick a default template. I do find this frustrating. Can this drop down be expanded to include all Groups.

When generating Emails from the BPM for Connections all of the recipients are set to bcc. This is the default as Connections can be external customers so addresses may not want to be shared. This is fine but there is no option in the BPM to make such recipients To: or cc:. For our internal mails this would be really useful for follow-on notifications etc. Please support this request if you feel it is of benefit.

@Steven Boardman I really like the idea of the Lifecycle Processes as we are currently designing how we want to use Asset Management in HB (we are in discussions with Samrai). The Lifecycle is exactly one of the principles we have been considering. I know it is very difficult for you to say but what sort of timescale are we looking at for this - 2020 or 2021?

This is a useful tip. However we do get caught out when a portal user updates the Request via a Comment against an Update in the timeline (we can't keep reminding them to enter @mention). The Request Owner never picks up on this Comment and gets an earbashing 2 days later by a frustrated Customer! I have raised this before but this make me think of an obvious solution - the same as in Facebook when the comment prefixes itself with the name of the person who entered the update that is being Commented on. In other words the @mention is automatically put in for the user. Even better of course(!) would be the ability just to switch on/off Comments across a whole instance as in my view they disrupt the Timeline flow.

The recent update 1944 gave us the ability to edit responses in the Questions section which is really useful. However it seems that the edit pop up only appears when the question is a free text response. It does not appear possible to edit responses if the user had to originally select from a drop down or some other controlled response. Is this deliberate as it does somewhat limit this functionality - we normally do prefer our users to select from a controlled list as this enables far better reporting? The Delete pop up appears next to every question but that is of less use (well, to us anyway!).

In our build if you point the resolution category level at a single high level category (without any sub-categories) then it does not ask the agent to select a category when resolving. The system knows to pick that single category - so it is set but doesn't have to ask for it to be selected and you can just make it a 'benign' category. Other Services can have their Request Types pointing to other high level categories but if they have a structure underneath then the system does prompt for a category to be selected when the Request is being resolved.

I am aware of the iBridge for Hornbill to talk to Salesforce, however does anybody have a process whereby Salesforce raises a Request in Hornbill? There doesn't appear to be anything in the Salesforce world for this and the Hornbill iBridge seems to assume it is the originator (not Salesforce). I would have thought this is not an uncommon requirement but I can't find anything. Do we need to go down an in-house developed method?

Many thanks. 1. If you can let me know the direct link once done that would be great. 4. Yes, the category would be a custom list as I guess some customers would view this differently. TBH it is not too important. The main requirement is being able to put some date/time info (and maybe free text) in small font at the bottom of the bulletin so that users can see how current and important the announcement is.

Thanks for your response. My comments: 1. On the Home Page I want to put in a Quick Link to the Service Desk FAQ's. If I go to that page and copy the url (https://live.hornbill.com/xxxxxxxxx/catalog/service/com.hornbill.servicemanager/1/) when I use the url it only takes me to the 'Service Desk' Service home page. I can't get it to point direct to that Service Desk FAQ page. 2. Sounds good. 3. I would like to set the order to whatever I want. Our current order certainly isn't by most viewed (it always defaults to the order of Date Created with the oldest at the top). See screenshot: I would like to group as defined by myself eg MS Teams, Accessing the network from home, Password issues etc. And then order those groups as I require. 4. The sort of Categories I am thinking of are MI, Permanent Advisory, Temporary Issue etc.

But don't you need to prompt the user to enter a reason especially if Rejected? That is important for us to capture. What we do find frustrating is if you click on the words to the left (instead of the tick) then you go to some other superfluous pop-up and then to the above pop-up. That does create an extra click for no reason that I can see.

@Steven Boardman Many thanks for this and it does look very useful. It is quite powerful so we need to ensure then when our analysts start 'playing' (ie pressing the button to see what happens!) that they don't do more damage than good! However I think within the BPM we can do some validation and this will satisfy our use case. The requested 'pop up' warning when the button is pressed will also help enormously (ie 'Are you really really really sure you want to do this?'!!!!) - hopefully that will be available soon.

We have recently gone live with the new Employee portal and the 'look and feel' is much better so thank you. However we do have some suggested improvements which hopefully other people will support. We are not using Domains so I can't comment on that area. Quick Link to a Service FAQ’s is not possible from the Home page – the link only goes to the higher level ‘Make a Request’ Page (we can’t go direct to FAQs page) Service Page – there is no Design Mode. I know it is possible to change some text/link colours but that is across all pages. In particular we would like to be able to remove the Details tab and have different colours for the different Request types. I do find the Service Pages a bit bland and a 'let down' after the Home page. Not specific to the new portal but we would like to be able to order and group the FAQ's when displayed to the users. Again not specific to the new portal but on Bulletins we would like to show info on each Bulletin such as Date Added, Date Updated, Category. We can do this at present but it has to be part of the Bulletin text so must have the same font size and takes up a line. It would be useful to have this as small font at the bottom of the bulletin for users to view.

That was really useful to know and pick up on.

+1 for us please. Could this page be configurable?

We are currently on the My-Services Portal and when a user wishes to raise a Request within a service we can configure the page (via Settings) to make it look really nice. I know this was an experimental setting but the users loved it. However the Employee Portal does not seem to pick up these Settings. The page has no Design Mode so I end up with this which looks much less attractive and rather bland. Can we have some colour back please?

Thanks Jeremy - I had literally just worked that out for myself!

I have the Home Page Manager role and have changed the COMPANY HOME text on the home page to SERVICE PORTAL HOME. However we are not using Domains. When the user goes into a particular Service, that page still shows COMPANY HOME - it should show our updated text. The individual Service Pages do not appear to be configurable so I cannot update the text on the page itself.

Thanks James. Yes you are correct. As a tech company we have a number of tools (build and deployment tools (cloud and on-prem) for our websites, internal DB's etc) and users have varying levels of access. We have a homegrown DB/Excel which records the access rights by tool per user but this is very manual, standalone and far from ideal. Yesterday I put in a request (via our Premium support) for a 1 hour demo and discussion on what Hornbill can offer (either with HB holding all this info OR acting as an orchestrator (talking to the homegrown DB/Excel) tied into our starter/leaver processes). So that session will probably answer this requirement but a heads up beforehand with your thoughts would still be really useful. We are coming under increasing pressure from our parent company auditors :-( to show we have full control and visibility of what access any individual has at any point in time (particularly when employees leave by their own choice or otherwise!).