James Ainsworth

Hi Claire, Thanks for your post. We have chosen to provide a library of icons rather than allowing the unloading of custom images. The idea behind this was to provide a consistent view and styling throughout. We use Font Icons which render quickly, and are easy to work with when it comes to size and colour. The library of icons is updated regularly and the number of icons available increase with it. The icon for a service is used in many places and the same icon can be displayed as a large icon on the Portals, to a very small icon in a list. In this example we are able to combine two icons to show a relation between a Service and a Request Catalog Item belonging to that service. We have not dismissed the idea of providing a way to upload custom icons, but there isn't anything planned in the short term. Regards, James

Hi Martyn, Thanks for your post. While the front end in the Services Forms provides Service specific sub-statuses, in Administration you can created global sub-statuses. The one area that might need some consideration is for a Service to exclude a global sub-status. Regards, James

I just wanted to update this post so say that a feature for including a Start and Expiry of a Bulletin has been provided in a recent update to Service Manager. Regards, James

I just wanted to update this post so say that a feature for including a Start and Expiry of a Bulletin has been provided in a recent update to Service Manager. Regards, James

I just wanted to update this post to let you know that some new settings have been provided with the latest update of Service Manager. Enabling these settings will enforce that the last item in a category tree is selected. There are separate settings for the Request Category and the Resolution Category. guest.servicemanager.request.category.closure.enforceLastItem guest.servicemanager.request.category.request.enforceLastItem Regards, James

I just wanted to update this post with information about our latest release. As of Service Manager build 1189, there are now options to control the size of the service icons, the number of icons available per page, and which information is displayed along side each service icon. This will cover some of the requirements discussed above. Requirements that were not included will be considered in future releases. Please see the following post for more information. Regards, James

I just wanted to update this post with information about our latest release. As of Service Manager build 1189, there are now options to control the size of the service icons, the number of icons available per page, and which information is displayed along side each service icon. This will cover some of the requirements discussed above. Requirements that were not included will be considered in future releases. Please see the following post for more information. Regards, James

Yes, that is a possibility. These are the types of ideas that we are considering for that change.

Hi @Drew Davies There is API documentation for this here. The two parameters you would be interested in are these... Regards, James

Hi @Paul Alexander I believe that the challenge we will have here is that there can be more than one authorisation and therefore multiple notes. While we were able to do this for a single task, we will have to look into how something similar can be achieved with multiple authorisations. Regards, James

We do have a change in our backlog to look at this. There are challenges with this as the the original customer of the incident may have provided information that they do not want to share with co-workers, and as the connections are under the control of the Service Desk, to share that content to other end users without the consent of the original customer, this is likely to cause problems. I would be interested to hear feed back about concerns or questions about the sharing of requests without the knowledge of the original requester. Regards, James

Hi @samwoo In our plans we have a change that will be adding the Document Manager plug-in on a Service in the same way that we have recently done for a request. These documents could then be presented to users of that service. I didn't want to talk too much about this as I has sensed that you needed something over the next couple of days and I was trying to think of any alternatives that could be considered today. More linking to documents both to Document Manager and external document sources is a good step in extending out where help information can be stored. If you think that having the Document Manager plug-in on a Service would help you, I'll add you to the change. Regards, James

Hi Ulrik, Thanks for your post. Once a request has been raised, a BPM workflow can't be assigned to it. Unfortunately, merging can't be done either. You can use the Linked Request option to raise a new request. This will carry over some of the information from the original request and create a link between the two so that the original timeline can be referenced. I hope that helps. James

Hi @Drew Davies I just wanted to summarize the information around automatically assigning requests as reading through your comments, I think that it does do what you are looking for. The Round Robin will assign to offline users. There is no analyst calendar to track which of your staff is on holiday, however each individual user can set their availability on their profile. An admin can also change this on their profile in administration. Online status and Availability are two separate things. The online/offline Status just indicates if the user is currently logged in with a valid session. There are two BPM operations that provide automated assignment to team members Assign on Round Robin Basis Assign to Most Available (least number of requests assigned) Documentation can be found here under the Assignment section. Both will take into consideration if someone is on leave (a user has changed their availability on their profile from being available). Both will assign to off-line users, but the Round Robin as an additional option of setting it to not include off-line users. The default is to include them. This same option will be added to the Assign to Most Available as well at some point. When using the Assign on Round Robin Basis, provided the Include Offline Users is not set to Yes then requests raised on Self Service out of hours will be assigned to a user, unless all of your users have set their availability to anything other than Available. I hope this helps. Regards, James

HI Steve, Thanks for your post. I've replicated and now have the same BPM at the top of my list :). I'm sure that this will be an issue with the name and I'd suggest that we look for a fix rather than having anyone playing with the data. I will post back once we have heard from the developers. Regards, James

If you are trying to store a URL in these fields, you could try a URL shortener.

Hi @samwoo These custom fields... are these the custom fields on the service forum under the Extra Details section? James

Hi Samuel, Thanks for your post. The originating purpose for the Frequently asked Questions (FAQs) was to provide a way of listing something like a top 10 list of questions asked against a particular service, and provide an answer to those questions. When looking at options for Sharepoint documents, I might lean more toward looking to see what we can do with document libraries. However, it might be that the document you have in Sharepoint fits the purpose of an FAQ. I would want to make sure we find the right mechanism for Sharepoint integration and not extend the FAQs too far away from their original purpose. Regards, James

Hi @Martyn Houghton No update at the moment. It is still in line but not with development yet. Regards, James

If there is more than one Service Level Agreement but no rules defined, the first Service Level will be used. If you have some rules in place, the order of the Service Level Agreements doesn't have a barring. If you are able to add a rule with no conditions, this is probably something that wasn't intended to be allowed. If a rule has no conditions, there is nothing to evaluate. The current way that this works is that if no rules are met, no SLA is applied which was done to cater for situations where a SLA is not required for a requests. The Routing Rules have similar logic where if no rules are met the message is not processed. If you want a particular SLA applied, if all other rules are not met, then the last rule needs to be a condition that is always met. We might in the future provide a setting to allow a particular SLA to be applied if no rules match. Regards, James

@SJEaton From our perspective we do not know how the values of 0 were added. We don't have a fix to apply to remove these values. This might be more of a matter of cleaning you data. I will revisit with our developers in case something was missed. Regards, James

Hi @Siobhan You are right with the BPM validation and publishing, but you will need to create a new ticket to test after each time you publish the BPM. Regards, James

Hi @Kelvin First, it is great to hear your feedback and kind words. Many thanks. Regarding the Supporting Teams option on a Service, yes this has always been the case that if you don't select a specific team or teams that the Service is supported by all teams. This was done to allow for a more simple and faster setup. When there is an exception to the case and you want a more closed group of people working a Service, you would add the individual teams. It is important to consider what is being captured in the requests and if there is any data that you feel is sensitive and visibility should be controlled. With 30 teams, if you leave a Service set to be supported by all teams, this will also be reflected when assigning a request as all teams will be visible which can make it a bit more challenging for a user to know which is the right team to assign to. You may want to have the team assignments automated in the BPM as much as possible. At the moment, setting up Teams is done as you have described where you need to update the Organisation structure in Administration by creating teams and adding users to those teams. I will be interested to hear ideas and comments about this and if there is more we can do to work with Teams. Regards, James

We have a change that has reached our development queue which will allow you to enable/disable the different request types for a Service. On the Request Configuration tab of a Service each request type will have a simple toggle to disable a particular request type. When raising a new request, if a user selects a particular request type from the Raise New options, only the services that allow for requests of that type will be displayed. If the Request Type form in Progressive Capture is used prior to the Service Form, again this will reduce the Services list to only show the services that allow for the selected type of request. As this is now with development, we should see this provided over the next couple of months. @DougA I'm also going to look into your original requirement where if you use the setting servicemanager.progressiveCapture.servicedetails.catalogRequired that Services without Request Configuration Items are not displayed. This makes sense if you are unable to select them anyway. I just need to be careful that this doesn't impact anyone's way of working Might also consider a setting on each Service where in the Request Catalog section of the service you could enable/disable this per service. Regards, James

Hi @clampj At the moment the Site selection within the Description only seem to present the customer's site for selection. If you are not getting any results then this might be that the customer does not have a site associated to them. We do have a change in the backlog which will change this to allow for the selection of any site. I'll add you to the change. This isn't currently scheduled to be started on, but as a minor change hopefully it will not be too long before we get this done'. I'll update this post as it progresses. Regards, James