Steven Boardman

Hi Martin Thanks for the post. The options to add Start After and Due After have been added to the Expires After option for both Tasks and Authorisations. Two options exist 1. Set an arbitrary Days, Hours, Minutes for each 2. Choose a Time Variable from the available (Get Information > Request Details) options. Looking at option 2 above, we don't currently expose the Resolve by and Respond by dates in the Get Information > Request Details variables list but we are looking to add these options in as well. This is currently being tested and will be available on live shortly Thanks Steve

Hi Kelvin Thanks for your post. You are correct it is not currently possible to use custom fields on the request lists. We are currently looking at the ways we make the custom fields more accessible across the lists, email templates, reporting, decision making in BPM etc so we will look to update you as we make progress in these areas. In the meantime you can currently use the Get Information bpm node in the business process tool in order to query the content of the custom fields to influence the behaviour of your business processes and you can now include the content from the custom fields as variables in sub tasks / authorisations linked to the parent ticket and the custom fields, you can read more about this on our wiki here: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Request_Variables Regards Steve

Hi Greg Thanks for the clarification. There are a couple of things here. 1. The Head's Up Display (HUD) at the top of the view (in your screenshot), it is entirely up to you if the customer see's the HUD at all, or if you want them to see the stage names but not the checkpoints for each stage, you can configure this via the Services configuration, details on our wiki here: https://wiki.hornbil...ex.php/Services if you look under Request Configuration and Head's Up Display 2. The timeline for the request. Currently all customer facing updates which are written to the timeline which is again what we see in the screenshot you have provided. Chaz was referring to the ability to manually change the updates from being customer facing to being private to your team (4 analysts). You can change the default visibility of such updates in the admin, so they won't show. In the admin tool > Service Manager > Application Settings > Page 5 ( in the new admin tool) You can change the default visibility of the different type of updates, I have shown three examples below but there are several more. If you change these from Customer to Team this will hide the corresponding (email, update etc) created by the Business Process from being visible to the customer on the portal when they raise a request, those updates will still be visible to your support team. guest.ui.app.com.hornbill.servicemanager.operation.defaultVisibility Default visibility value for use when an operation creates a timeline entry guest.ui.app.com.hornbill.servicemanager.operation.defaultVisibility.assign Default visibility value when assigning a request guest.ui.app.com.hornbill.servicemanager.operation.defaultVisibility.email Default visibility value when emailing from a request Please bear in mind these are global settings to regardless of how the request is logged, if you change the above default visibility from Customer to Team, you will have to remember to change the visibility of any updates you do want the customers to see on the portal when you are manually adding them as Chaz described above. We are also exploring adding some more granular controls per business process so you can control the default visibility for requests raised against different business processes but this is not available yet. I hope this helps and do let us know if we have misunderstood the requirement? Thanks Steve

Hi Gywnne Thanks for the post. We do have a few planned developments around increasing the options for promoting linked assets, or connections etc from one request to another when raising a linked request. However the custom fields is a slightly different consideration. I will try to explain why. In Service Manager you can define different custom fields per request type per service. Which means you could use custom_a on an Incident form against Service A, to hold information which does not relate to the same custom_A field on the Incident form for Service B. Or in fact if raising a linked Change from an Incident, the Change could use Custom_a field for a change specific question, and inserting the data from custom_a from the Incident form may not make sense to the question on the Change form. Does that make sense? Secondly, if you are creating a linked request you could feasibly promote the content blindly to the newly created request, however if you subsequently linked other requests to the new request, what would you do with the custom field data from other linked requests? as on linking more than one could overwrite the content of custom_a from the first linked request, again does this make sense? Could I ask for a little more info on the challenge you have, and how promoting the custom field data would potentially solve this for you, so we can see if there are other approaches which can be considered? Thanks Steve

Hi Samuel Thanks for your post, there isn't currently a Members option in the views clause builder I am happy to put this forward for review and will update once we have progress on this. Thanks Steven

There are a few ways to resolve / close the request, one being the suspend wait for resolution, on the request being resolved you could use the remove from board node, after this. Thanks Steve

Hi Gywnne You do need to specify the board, as requests can exist on multiple Thanks Steve

Hi Gywnne We are shortly going to be releasing the next build of Service Manager and this include the ability to share boards with multiple teams, and with specific individuals, see the following on the wiki of the upcoming functionality: Wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/My_Boards This will allow you to assign users to boards, and they will not need to be members of teams Hope that helps? Steven

Hi Gwynne There is a BPM operation you can use in your business process on closure to remove the request from the Board Wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Business_Process_Workflow As the Boards are non perspective, and we don't know how customers will use them, there is no default logic to remove a ticket automatically from a breach board on closure, but if you include a node after the closure stage in your process this should give you the result you are after. Thanks Steve

Hi Mark Thanks for your post, and for everyone's input. There is not a separate request type of MI in Service Manager. You can use Priorities on an Incident to reflect either a Low, Medium, High or Major Incident. You can use the Link request feature to link other Incidents to this one. In addition you can use the Business Process Engine, on resolution of the Incident to check the Priority using a decision node, after a get request information node, and if this is Major you can use the Linked Request > Update linked Requests, to cascade down an update to the timeline of the linked Incidents. More info on Business Process Options on our wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Business_Process_Workflow Alternatively you could as suggested above raise a Problem or Known error from the Incident. This will allow several actions to be performed: 1. Use the above logic for updating Linked Requests > Updated linked requests at trigger points in the Problem Process 2. By Defining workaround information, you can make the possible Solutions available to the linked Incidents using the Solution feature - wiki reference: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Workarounds_and_Known_Errors 3. You can publish the Problem to the Service and or Customer Portal to notify customers of the issue, and allow them to add themselves as an Impacted User to the Problem in one Click using the Me Too option on the portal. This will add the users as connections to the Problem, and again using the business process engine you can automatically notify all affected connections via email that the Problem is resolved. This should help with cutting down on the number of repeat Incidents about already known issues. Publishing Known Issues: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Publish_Action_Item Connections: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Connections_Action_Item 4. On logging of a Problem / Known Error or Incident with a Major Priority you can build in automatic notifications to be sent to the wider customer base - using the business process tool you can send out emails to distribution email addresses, specific customers and or connections to a request. In addition you can automatically post the issue to a workspace to let other support staff that a request of this type has been raised. Business Process: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Business_Process_Workflow * See Email, Connection and Collaboration options to achieve the above We don't currently have the option to automatically close child tickets, but this is an area that we are currently looking into, and as we progress this we will update this accordingly. I hope some of these options help in the meantime? Thanks Steven

Thanks for letting us know Graham pleased it is sorted

Hi Martin The Search option will be presented on the Services landing page, so will search across all Services the user is subscribed too. This will be a multi-function search, which will search for matches from requests, FAQ's, Known Issues, Catalog Items etc and return results against each area. For requests we are looking at Request ID, Summary and Description initially. We may look to extend the search parameters in future updates Hope this helps Steven

Hi Chris Thanks for your post. Currently it is possible to publish knowledge to the customer portal in the form of FAQ's. These can contain hyperlinks, images and media content. You can learn more about publishing FAQ's on out wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Service_FAQs In Addition you can also publish Known Issues to the portals, and again more information is available on our wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Publish_Action_Item We are always looking at ways to enrich the customer experience and publishing some Document Manager content is an option but is not currently available. I hope this helps Regards Steven

Thanks Ralf We will update once we have progressed the 'Assign to Me' requirement Regards Steven

Hi James Thanks for your post, currently there isn't a setting to enable this. The requirement has been raised and will be reviewed and we will update, we will update once we have more information on a solution. Kind Regards Steven

Hi Gywnne Thanks for your post. Service Manager uses the Service (and in some cases system settings) to drive which Business Process to invoke, rather than the other way around. This is even more so the case where customers are using the Request Catalog functionality, and you can associate a specific business process to each request catalog item which you have defined and you offer to your customers, and as each request catalog item is linked to a Service, this is automatically picked up. You can read more about our request catalog functionality here on our wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Request_Catalog I hope this helps Regards Steven

Hi Tina Thanks for your post. This looks like a really good application of the custom forms, and there is nothing you have done wrong here. Currently it is not possible to include the answers to questions from custom forms into the email templates. We are aware of this and have a change in place to resolve this in the coming releases, this is very high on the priority list so watch this space. In the meantime, as you are utilising the custom forms and questions, and you have fulfilment processes in place, the following information on our wiki does explain how you can inject request and question variables into tasks which are associated to the fulfilment process, if you are using tasks and want to include the answers into the tasks which are assigned out: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Request_Variables Regards Steven

Hi Graham Thanks for the post. It looks like your configuration is correct. I have tested this using exactly the same configuration as shown above and this works as expected for me. Can I ask if the Priority Node in your business process is sitting behind any other nodes which have to be completed first before the Priority is set? any Suspend wait (Owner, Category, Priority etc) for nodes spring to mind? Just thinking if this is the case and a preceding action is not complete first the process would not update the request until it reaches the Update Priority node? Not suggesting this is definitely happening here but something to possibly rule out? Regards Steven

Thanks for the additional information Martyn We can look into the this and will feedback on the viability of cloning or other options we might look to introduce in this area. I'll update once we have some more information on this. Thanks Steve

Hi Martyn Thanks for the post. We have enhancements planned for the connections feature, which includes a progressive capture form to allow an analyst to add additional connections when logging a ticket for a contact, or for the contact to add other connections to the request when raised via the portal. This obviously would involve the connections being added manually but it would allow for them to be selected and added by the raiser of the request. Other connections can be added automatically using the 'Add Connections' option in the BPM under the RequestConnections Entity options if required based on a decision and branch on who the org or customer is (albeit perhaps not overly practical if you have multiple customers who require this, and need to add additional different contact's for each). We do also have plans for another option here to be able to add a Customers Manager as a Connection as a BPM node option (but this would only be for internal user's managers, as contact's at external organisations do not have managers in Service Manager). In terms of notifying other default connections there are no defined plans for this as we stand. You mention that you currently use distribution email addresses where needed to notify other users at specific customers where they have requested this. One option we could look to explore would be extending the current Email Notification BPM nodes to include an option to email a contact's Alternative Email address (which is available in a Contact's - Contact Details section) where you could hold a distribution email address the other parties which need to be included in automated email communication relating to the request, would something like this help in the absence of default connections? Regards Steven

Hi Chris Thanks for your post. Can I ask is it one external contact at one of the organisations you support? If this is the case you could build a decision node into your business process, on logging to check if the contact (customer) = x and if so branch in a direction to perform one of the following actions: 1. Use an Email Notification Node, to send the same Confirmation Email to another contact, or an external email address (distribution list for their team) 2. Use the Entity - RequestConnections - 2.1 Add Connections to automatically add the other members of their team (if they exist as contact's) 2.2 Use Email Connections to automatically send the confirmation email template to the other connected contact's 2.3 If the other team members have been added as connections to the request they can be included on future manually sent emails from the request, and or any other automated email communications through the supporting business process engine. Once either options have been performed you could join the process flow back to the existing path, which would be followed if you use a != condition on the contact. If you are not familiar with the connections functionality you can read more about this on our wiki here :- https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Connections_Action_Item You can read more about the business process options relating to decision nodes, branching, email notifications and connections on our wiki here :- https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Business_Process_Workflow I hope this helps Regards Steven

Greg Just to add an extra dimension to this, it is also possible that you can set different email templates to be used when manually emailing out from a request based on the Service the Request is logged against and the Request Type. This is all configured in the Services configuration in Service Manager. More information about configuring different email templates to be used when manually sending emails from requests raised against different services and request types can be read here on our wiki: https://wiki.hornbil...ex.php/Services under Email Templates. This will explain how this works with the default email setting both Dave, and Victor refer to above and the other options available to you. As Victor indicates the email templates sent automatically by the business process engine can be configured in the appropriate email nodes in the business process tool. Wiki: https://wiki.hornbil...rocess_Workflow > Automated Tasks > Email Notifications Hope this helps Steven

Thanks Martyn, Tina for your feedback, We are always open to suggestions. There are no imminent plans to introduce Service cloning, however could I ask if there are any specific aspects of the Services Configuration which is most time consuming or if it is it simply the ability as you say Martyn to take a carbon copy and then modify it? Thanks Steven

Thanks Ralf and Tina for your posts. We are currently in the middle of developing new Service Level Target functionality for Service Manager and you will start to see this being introduced in the coming releases. This will initially be around the creation of both Global and Service Specific Service Level Targets, with a rules builder which will allow you to define per Service the conditions against which different Service Level targets should apply (including Priority, Catalog Item, Customer, Organisation etc). Following on from this we will be introducing functionality which will allow you to define your own sub statuses, and against those sub statuses define the likes of the following: * If the Status should Pause the Service Level Timer * If the Timer should come off hold when the request is updated * Notifications including customer emails Due to our Continuous Deployment approach, once these new features (and others) are ready, they will be made available to you and you will not need to do anything to take advantage of them. I hope this helps give you some visibility of our developments in this area. Regards Steven

Hi Ralf Thanks for the post. Service Manager filters the assignment lists / options based on the teams which support the services which the request / requests are associated against. You can read more about the setting of visibility of requests / assignment options based on the teams which support the different services you offer on our wiki at the following link: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Services - If you look under the Service Visibility section. Service Manager does not have the same 'Accept' concept as Supportworks, it uses the Assignment options. We are always looking for ways to make Service Manager more intuitive and we have discussed an 'Assign to me' option but this has not yet made it into development, is this the sort of thing you were looking for? Regards Steven