James Ainsworth

The challenge is between what information is captured in Progressive Capture compared to what default settings you have, followed by what actions occur automatically as part of a BPM. One scenario that I have personally come across is where a Progressive Capture did not include the assignment form, an application setting was assigning the request to a default team, but then the BPM did a reassignment to a different team. The confirmation box when I raised the request only showed the default team assignment from the setting, then looking at the request, it was sent off completely different. This takes away any value of having the confirmation box. As an unlimited number of things can be configured in the BPM and different progressive capture scripts can result in the same BPM being used I'm not sure if using variables would be the answer. There are just so many combinations. Variable themselves need to be populated and the timing of this may not provide the latest information on the request so there is still a risk of the confirmation box showing conflicting information which can lead to confusion. My suggestion is that at the end of the Progressive Capture you maintain the view of the information that you captured along with being presented the new Request ID. This way the request logger can see the information they added, without it being obscured by the confirmation box, there is no conflicting information presented to them to cause confusion, and there is still access to view the request to see the final result if they desire. Regards, James

There are two options for controlling visibility to user information. One of these is for each individual user to select which sections in their own profile are visible to other users. The second option is for an administrator. The About page on the profiles can be edited by an administrator. The top two sections - Basic Details and Job Details are sections that everyone can see. When in design mode an admin can move fields from the other sections into one of these two public sections, which will take affect for all users. I'm going to assume that the visibility of the information about a user on a request will be related to this. Once the Work Phone field is moved to the Job Details, it should become visible again. The change in behaviour is most likely the result of the profile rights being more adhered to and they are now working as they had originally intended. Regards, James

Hi @lokent We are currently discussing a feature request that would remove the pop-up. Once an approach has been agreed on we will get a change raised. I will then keep this post updated with the progress of the change to let you know when it will be available. If you don't hear anything do feel free to give us a nudge by posting back here. Regards, James

Hi @dwalby We are big users of Workspaces when it comes to enhancement requests. Posts on the Forums are added to a workspace where we can collaborate on the requirement up to a point where we have the information we need to raise a change. This initial visibility and discussion in the workspaces is an important part of our process. It allows others who may not normally participate in a formal change process add their ideas. Once we feel we are ready for a change, we use the action menu on the workspace post for raising changes. This keeps everything nicely linked up. The change will have the post as the source where all of the initial discussions can be reviewed and the post will have the change reference automatically added as a new comment. Our BPM is set up to automatically update the post as the change progresses so that everyone that participated in the workspace post is kept up to date. We have a CAB Board and a Development Scrum Board that helps us visualise the progress of the changes. This is mostly driven again by the BPM. The change type/size will influence the BPM workflow and how a change progresses. Where some are very minor and can go straight to the development team, other changes have to go through CAB and detailed planning. We then utilise the Release Records to bring together the changes and fixes that form an update. That is our process in a nutshell... There is some detail in the progressive capture, workflow, and the contents of the change where we work with mock-ups, requirements, documentation, etc but also we try not to over complicate the process as we do like to work in an agile way where we can. Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any questions about any particular part. Regards, James

Hi Andy, Thanks for your post. I will see if we can have the font colour changed on the grey (closed) changes so that there is more of a contrast between the background colour. Regards, James

Hi @lokent Thanks for your post. At the moment there is no setting for changing the content of this information box. We have been considering changing this confirmation box, or rather removing it. At the moment Team and Owner are hard set and this may not be the information that you are interested in. It is also possible that immediately after this has been raised that the BPM goes and re-assigns it again, if you have that set in your workflow. What I would like to propose is that after you select "Finish" on a Progressive Capture it simply displays the request ID (no pop-up) alongside the information that you have entered with the Progressive Capture. Everyone's Progressive Capture is going to be different and all the important information at this point is the information that you have collected so far. From here we would also have options to raise another request, view the request that you just raised, or return to your request list. Would this work for you both, lokent and @Dan Munns? Regards, James

Hi Martyn, As mentioned in my previous post, this was added as criteria to another planned change which at the moment is not yet scheduled. However, I'm also looking into this to see if this can be done in isolation as a smaller change which may allow us to progress it a little sooner. Regards, James

Hi Joyce, Thanks for your post. I wont have access to your system to see your process or the request that you mentioned. Is there a particular node where the BPM stops progressing? This along with a screen shot of the BPM workflow and the properties of that node might allow us to get some ideas until someone can look directly at your instance. Regards, James

Hi @lokent Thanks for your post. A the moment FAQs are only grouped by their service. The original concept behind the FAQs was to provide for each Service a way to define a list of top questions asked by customers with answers that can be provided by using text, images, or videos. For anything that requires more than a question/answer scenario, some customers use Document Manager. I would probably need to understand more about the content that you would like to present and how it is being used in order to help point you in the right direction. Bulletins are another method of presenting information. We don't currently have any plans for adding additional grouping of FAQs, but it is something we could look into in the future. Regards, James

Hi Hayley, Could you open up the CSV download in Notepad and let me know the format of the date and if the YYYY exists there too. Excel will do a date format conversion based on your regional settings on you computer. I'm not sure about the PDF. If the Data Preview shows the date in the correct format we need to determine at what point the format is changed. Regards, James

Hi @dconagh Thanks for your post. The Customer icon for this action will be grey in colour and the Change Customer button disabled until a customer has been selected using the Subscriber Search. As a request will already be associated to a Service, the subscriber search will only return customers that have access (subscribed) to the service that this request was raised against. Let us know if that helps, Regards, James

At the moment "Following" is an action that has to be done by the individual that wants to do the following. We have tried to follow on from how other tools use following. For example, in Twitter you can choose to follow someone, but another account nor Twitter themselves would be able to add users to your following list. Something that we are looking at is the ability to prompt someone to follow something. For example if you are added as a member of a request you could receive a prompt to say that you have been added as a member to request xxxxx, would you like to follow this request? Regards, James

Thanks for the update @DeadMeatGF. I'd be interested to know what you think about having the Boards Action set as green when the request is associated to a board? It was intended to draw your attention and show that a board has been associated, instead of having to click on the Boards Action to find out if it is or not. Regards, James

Hi @DeadMeatGF I was wondering if you still experience this after doing an update to the latest build of Service Manager? Regards, James

Hi Hayley, I have had a look but I've not been able to replicate this. Am I right in thinking that your screen shot is from the CSV export and displayed in Excel? If not, let me know where you are viewing this result. The screen shot below is taken from the Data Preview option which is under the Data Collection Tab when creating a report. I was wondering if you get the YYYY displayed here too? Regards, James

Document Manager Plug-in for Service Manager One of the great things about apps on Hornbill is the synergy between them. This video has a look at the Document Manager Plug-in that is provided to the different types of requests available within Service Manager. This Plug-in lets you search and link documents which are stored within libraries held in Document Manager. This is ideal for making help documents, instruction manuals, and policy documents available for linking to any request.

Hi Martyn, This should not be the case. The rules are evaluated by three separate actions. The Service Level rules will be evaluated as you mentioned when the response and resolution target timers are started within the BPM. If you change the Service Level Agreement by manually selecting a different SLA from Amend Service Level form that you provided a screenshot, the rules will again be evaluated. There is also a BPM Operation that can be used to automatically re-assess the Services Levels at different points within your BPM. We are working on a 4th method which would change the Service Level automatically when particular fields are updated on a request. If a new Service Level Agreement is selected and none of the Service Levels associated with that SLA are applied, I would assume that none of the rules have matched. Regards, James

Hi Martyn, Thanks for your post. We do have a change in our backlog for this. I'll make sure that you are added to the change. Regards, James

Hi @SJEaton and @Dan Munns Our changes work through a process of being designed and planned to a point where it then goes into a 90-day queue. Once a change is in this queue, we look to have it available within this 90 days. This change has made it to the 90 day queue but development work has not yet started. This suggests that the timeline for this change is to have it available over the next 3 months. We have hundreds of great feature requests and each couple of weeks, we are able to provide new features that are available to everyone. We put a lot of effort into assessing and planning these requests to provide a good spread of new functionality that supports our different customers. As you have done here, please keep active on the forums whether it be suggesting a new features or promoting something that has already been asked for. Regards, James

Hi @katy_palmer You should be able to use the Source field to check the number of requests raised by email. This field is automatically set to Email for requests raised by email, Self Service for requests raised by the portals, and Analyst for those manually raised by your support staff. I not sure at the moment how you can report on requests that have been updated by email. James

Hi There are some changes in the backlog to do more with Priorities, but difficult to say if these changes will cater for these different ways of working with priorities. Looking a your list of priority names, in my opinion these look more like the names of Service Levels. I'm not sure what IRMA and the other abbreviation are representing, but the way the Service Levels are designed in Service Manager these look like they may fit well as Service Levels. We try to provide lots of flexibility in Service Manager as everyone can operate their Service Desks in different ways and we continue to put out new features an options to continue to extend these features. Focusing on what can be done now, and I understand that this might be a change from the way you work... One thing that is the same throughout your priority list that you posted is the High, Medium, and Low aspect of each of these names. The idea behind the priority list is to host these types of common priority names such as Major, High, Medium, and Low and maybe some desks will add None, as an option. The Service Level Targets (response and resolution) are part of the Service Levels. For each Service you can have multiple Service Levels and you can also have Corporate Service Levels to provide common levels of service without having to create duplicates on each Service. If each of your current Priorities are there to support particular response and resolution targets, the idea would be to move these from being a Priority to being a Service Level against the Service that they represent. I'm guessing here, but lets say that IRMA is a Service, you could create Service Levels by these same names under the IRMA Service. Then by using the Service Level Rules Builder you open yourself to having a number of conditions that can determine which Service Level (response and resolution targets) will be applied automatically. This might start with matching up a priority directly to a Service Level, but you can add to this had have things like if priority is medium and the customer is CEO then use the IRMA High Service Level. Another way to look at the Service Levels is to think of them as per service priorities. You could create service based priorities (Service Levels) under an IRMA Service (or using the Corporate SLA) called IRMA High, IRMA Medium, and IRMA Low. Remove all of your current priories but leave just High, Medium, and Low. Create Service Level rules to match up a selected priority on a request with the appropriate service based priority (Service Level). The result would be that support staff only have 3 priorities to pick from (High, Medium, Low) and the service based priority that includes the response and resolution targets (Service Level) is applied automatically. This takes all of the guess work out of the hands of the person raising and managing the requests. I hope that makes sense. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. Regards, James

Hi Ryan, From the above screenshot I'm assuming that you are using something like a Static Drop down Select Box as the field type on your custom Progressive Capture form. I'm going to try to look at options that are currently available to see if there is something that you can use now. Using the conditional fields options in the above video, you should be able to, on a single form in progressive capture, have a field to prompt for the user to enter quote number. This could then be followed by a Yes/No question Would you like to add another? Yes/No. Selecting Yes would display another field for adding another quote number and selecting No would continue to the next question. You can continue this to the maximum number of quote numbers that you want to allow for. You may even want to provide a description saying what the maximum is... or if they reach the maximum, the next thing you display is some instruction on what to do next, such as " you have reached the maximum of X. please raise a new request for any additional quotes" Would that get you any closer to what you are looking for? James

Hi @RyanMesser Thanks for your post. I'm not sure if I'm following exactly what it is that you are looking for, but have a look at this and let us know if this is the kind of thing you are looking for... There is additional information around creating custom forms on our wiki. Hope this helps. Regards, James

A defect has been raised for this issue. I''ll try to post back here once available, but in most cases defects will be available within an update or two so keep an eye open for the release notes. Regards, James

Thanks for your post. I have seen this on my own requests. I'll have development take a look. Regards, James