James Ainsworth

Hi Martyn, Other customers have also suggested that this would be desirable. One of our challenges is the name of the column. As different services or teams may use the custom fields for different information we need to consider how the column headers are displayed in a way that is descriptive enough to understand what the contents is and not just have custom_a at the top. I would also be interested to know if you have any fields that you think could be added as a standard field to the requests. We may find that fields that are possibly more generic to the way that others work can be approached in a different way from the custom fields.

Hi Martin, Thanks for your post. I just wanted to let you know that there is an existing post where we are currently discussing options for sorting the Simple Lists. Have a read and let us know if this helps. You may also want to jump onto that discussion so that everyone is aware that this is a requirement for you as well. Kind regards, James

Hi Adam, Thanks for your post. We have recently been discussing options for a live chat feature. It is currently not scheduled for the short term but I will post back here once we have a better idea of our approach to this. James

Hi Adam, Thanks for your post. I completely agree with you. When the achievements were first introduced is was always in the plans that we would extend this out to provide some automation in the assignment of these achievements. I'll see if I can find out some more about the plans for introducing this. James

Hi Ralf, We have a planned change that is not too far away that should solve this for you. The list of services provided in progressive capture should have the options to hide or show based on both what the customer is subscribed to and what the person raising the request supports. We will keep you posted as we progress this change. James

Hi Samuel, The Newsfeed is not something that you post directly into, but rather a place where all of the things that you are following are correlated into one place. Everyone's Newsfeed will have different content based on what workspaces they are members of, what people they are following, and what requests in Service Manager they are following. The Post option at the top of the Newsfeed will add a post to your own personal Buzz and only those users that follow you will see these posts in their Newsfeed. The option for setting a post in your Buzz as Public should allow any user to visit your profile and see these public posts without following you (as mentioned by Daniel there is a planed change for this), however setting it to public will not add it to everyone's Newsfeed. James

We do have a planned change in our backlog to provide settings that will allow you to control which Action items you want to make available while a request is on hold. This is not scheduled yet but it will be something that we look at in the future.

Hi Chris, I just wanted to see if you are still seeing the globe icon along side the Team option. I was unable to replicate this. The globe icon is normally related to public posts. The default setting should be set to show just the Customer and Team option. The correct icon for the team is the 3 people grouped together.

Hi Martyn, Thanks for your post. There are a few planned changes for the services list. One of these changes is to display only the services that are related to you. This could be that you are the owner of a service or that you are a member of a team that support the service. This will allow different areas of the business to keep a separation of none related services from each other. The information provided for each service at the moment is minimal. We are looking to include more information in the services list so that you can see important information without having to go into the service record itself. As with the Requests List and the Assets List, some of the features for filtering will eventually come to this list as well. The "Quick Filter" will probably be the starting point. Regards, James

Hi Derek, The starting point for this feedback feature was to store the information in the database which could then be reported on. Having this information visible in the request for the support person is also a valid requirement which we do have in our backlog as a feature that will be added in the future.

Hi Chris, You are correct that once you use the More actions to view the email it is using the system email forms and there isn't currently a link between this action and the request. In the past, when viewing the email from the More actions menu, it did not use the system email form and had a read-only version of the email partly because of this reason of not being able to keep the history of the reply or forward. By request we did implement the system email form to provide the reply and forward features, but we still need a way to close this gap to capture the reply or forward in the timeline. I'll raise with development to investigate. Regards, James

I would recommend using the Snippets Feature for this. On the Email Action on each request there is a Snippets option where you can create and share commonly used information for your different emails. Using the Snippets lets you choose when it is appropriate to include this information. For more information you can watch this video or visit the wiki for more details.

I just wanted to let you know that our Bulletins feature along with the ability to publish Known Issues to the Self Service Portals is now available for you to use.

Hi Chris, We are investigating this with our development team. We are looking to see if there is an issue with how we decode this type of attachment. James

Hi Martyn, Thanks for your post. We are looking to expand the options for providing multiple progressive capture scripts for the different request types. We started with the Incidents and Service requests in order to provide the options out to the Service Portals through the use of the request catalogs. Extending this type of functionality out to the other request types would be a natural progression. This is something you will see in the future, but not currently scheduled.

Hi Tony, I was trying to have a look to see if I could replicate your issue. In your screen shot it lists Requests, Owner, RaisedBy, Owner, etc which are visible in the first pick list for the selection of the table. I have the same list. If you select Requests here and then in the next pick list below, you should see the columns which are the options that are visible in Steve's screen shot above. I seemed to get the Report Definition Error when I changed from an Entity to Database Schema report. I'll look into this but it may be a valid error as I had defined a filter under one type of report and then when I changed to the other type, the filter was no longer valid.

Thank you for all of your posts. I would like to continue to get your feed back on this topic as I too can see the importance of being able to schedule work to be done. As some of you have mentioned in Supportworks you were able to schedule a "call" and possibly some people went further and created their own "call class" to create something that would represent a job that could be scheduled. The Hornbill Activities have been recently gone through a number of improvements and they now include a calendar view, a list view, and an extremely flexible Board view. Managers can now also get better visibility to oversee the activities assigned to their managed teams. Activities can be assigned to teams or individuals including Hornbill users that don't have have access to the Service Manager app. Activities can currently be associated to Service Manager requests or to the organisations stored in Customer Manager. It would also be reasonable to add the functionality to associate an activity to an asset, for example a server that requires back-ups to be changed. As one approach to managing jobs, I would be interested to here from you what you feel is missing from the Activities feature to fulfill your requirements?

Hi Ralf, In our initial implementation of the FAQs, we have set the order to be based on the most helpful. As customers feed back if an article has helped it will move to the top. This will be expanded over time to provide different sorting options which could include some form of setting a preferred order from within the Service form. James

Hi Tony, In the Service Manager 2.27.x update which is expected to be available next week, there is a new BPM automated task which will let you set the schedule of a change and have it automatically added to the change calendar. Once available, give it a try let us know if this has helped.. Regards, James

Hi Ralf, Thanks for your post. At the moment the on-line status is used only in a couple of places within the main client such as the workspace members. There is also the user availability setting which allows a user to set if they are on holiday or out of office from their profile. We will be looking to make more use of these two options in the future. The user availability is already used as part of the automated assignments in the BPM workflows where it will not assign to a user that is not set to Available. This status can be seen from the user's profile and the profile popup which is displayed when you hover your mouse over a user's profile picture.

HI Tony, As an alternative to using the Change Calendar for tracking changes for your teams, the Boards are a great way to view upcoming changes. The Boards can also be driven by the BPM engine so that you can automate the movement of the changes through the Board Lists. A recent feature added to boards now allows you to assign multiple teams and individuals to a board and allocate either edit or view only access.

Hi Tony, Thanks for you post. The items on the Change Calendar are added on a request by request basis and currently there is not an option to clear all these with a single action. The schedule for each change must be removed by using the Scheduling action item on each change request. Team views for the Change Calendar and colour options for completed changes are not yet available. I will have these raised as changes for Service Manager. Regards, James

Hi Adam, Thanks for your post. I can see that there would be an advantage to having an Action Item for setting the categories. I'm always interested in how categories are used by our customers. Categories seems to be one of those necessities for for reporting, statistics, and possibly for just for grouping together similar types of requests in your lists. They also tend to be a challenge when making changes to the Service Desk which may also result in changes to the category tree which always has potential for creating issues with historical statistics. From a support person's perspective it is always that being faced with a massive tree that you are never quite sure where the correct category is so you find yourself opening and closing different branches and selecting in the end what you think may be a close match but never too sure. What happens to requests associated to a category that you now wish to delete or move? There are always lots of questions and challenges with categories. Even the initial creation of your category structure is a challenge. Where do you begin? Feedback that I have had in the past is that the category structure often ends up being a replication of information that we possibly already have associated to a request such as site, service, asset, type of asset, type of request, department, source, and I'm sure there are a few more. I would be interested to hear back what types of things that our customers put into their category trees. This may help us find a better and more manageable approach to how categories are constructed and used in the future.

Hello Ralf, Thanks for your post. There are two aspects of sharing a document. One is to share with individuals that are helping to collaborate on the creation of a document and the other is to publish the document in a library. The option for sharing with individuals is done through the document details where you can assign individuals and provide them particular rights in order to contribute to the creation and management of the document. If you are looking to publish a finished document and you wish to share this with a group of people or possibly everyone, you are able set the different libraries up to provide this access. There is a video here that takes you through setting up a library. You will need to have the role for Managing Libraries assigned to your account in order to set up the different access to the libraries. Regards, James

Apologies for the confusion. The wiki page has been updated to match what has been posted in the App Store. We also now have a forum area for all questions regarding Configuration Manager. We will look forward to your feedback.