[Placeholders do not display for Drop down lists]

Hi Martyn,

I can see that there would be some benefit in providing different help text to a support person than an end user when using custom forms in a Request Catalog Item progressive capture flow that is used by both the support person and the user.  Maybe providing slightly more '"technical" help.

The concept behind the Request Catalog Items is that the support staff can raise something on behalf of a user if the user was to phone in rather than raise something on self service, following the exact steps that a user would experience. Possibly even prompting the questions to the user over the phone.  The end result being exactly the same, independent of whether if it was raised via the portals or on behalf of a user by a support person.  With this in mind, I would be interested to get some examples of the differences in help text that you would want to provide. 

[Asset Owners / Used By]

Hi Gareth,

In this scenario do you think it would me more fitting to provide some way of recording suppliers and/or supplier services?  At the moment our Services have a focus on business services and eventually will allow for technical services to underpin these.  These technical services could include those provided by 3rd Party Suppliers.

We have designed the assets to be internal and these can contain a great amount of detail to record costs, depreciation, location, along with import and integration options.  Much of this may not be needed or applicable when working with 3rd Party Suppliers. 

Do you have any 3rd Party Supplier services such as printing where they may supply hardware that is located on your site or is it all hosted?  I would also be interested to know the minimum information that you need to record such as 

• Name and contact information of Supplier
• Status of Service/Hardware

 

Many thanks,

 

James

[Raising new requests]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your post.  The Mobile Service Manager app currently provides the management of existing requests that have been assigned to a support person or any of the teams or services that they support.  This includes activity management for these requests.

We have plans to extend out the abilities for raising a request as well.  This work has not been scheduled as of yet but we will keep you posted on any update to this.

Regards,

James

[Asset Owners / Used By]

Hi Gareth,

I would be interested to know the types of assets that you are supporting for your external contacts and the level of information that you would like to store against them? There are some considerations for providing something to manage "products" rather than "assets" for external contacts. 

Martyn is correct that the assets have an internal focus and you can assign only internal users.

Regards,

James

[Change Request - Customer (Contact) not displayed]

I'm going to try not to get too entangled in ITIL and best practice other than to say that many areas in Service Manager started with ITIL in mind and from there built on to provide the flexibility needed by our customers.  By the sound of it, what needs solving is that ability to report on a customer and show which requests, of any type, that are linked to them.

What we are trying to solve with having the "Raised by" instead of the customer is that it give an internal reference point for either the CAB or the engineer facilitating the change to go back to.  As a result of an incident being raised a change may be requested to fix something.  This request will generally come from the incident owner, problem management, or possibly someone who has been brought into review the incident because of a particular area of expertise.  These will generally be the people referenced against the "Raised by".

The Connections feature was added as a way to manage the connection to the customers.   Some may only have one customer linked, but others will find that a change may impact or provide something for multiple customers.  The Connections allows for both scenarios where as the "Raised by" is only ever a single person.

Some of the progressive capture forms are specific to certain types of requests.  It is not always obvious where each form can be used.  The Customer Search progressive capture form is primarily for Incidents and Service Requests. We have a planned change for a new progressive capture form to add Connections when raising a Change or a Problem, however we may find that the Customer search could be made to accommodate this when used with Changes and Problems.

James

 

 

[Analyst details not available on the customer portal]

We had not originally considered this as from previous feedback Service Desks did not want customers bypassing the defined entry point to the service desk by contacting a support person directly.  It can also become problematic when that Support person is on holiday or off on sick leave and the customer is trying to phone that individual.  The  other consideration would be that in multi-team environments some teams may want to publish their phone numbers and others may not.  So the decision to publish phone numbers would have to considered across all teams if it was a single on/off setting.

I would be interested to hear from other customers about their thoughts on publicizing more information about the individual support staff in the portals.  There may be an immediate difference of opinion depending on if one is supporting internal users within their organization or external customers. Possibly hiding individual contact details is an old way of thinking and we need to allow these channels to be opened up.

James

[Request List - availability Custom Fields]

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.  

[Simple List Items ordering]

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

[Live Chat via the Portal]

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

[Gamification]

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

[How can I hide services from Analysts ?]

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

[Posting to the "Public" News Feed]

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

 

[Email - Request On Hold]

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.

[Team update icons]

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.

[Service Search/Filter facility]

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

[Advice request]

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.  

[Replying to emails from more actions does not show in timeline]

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

[Sending emails with orginal call details]

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.

 

[Messages on Service Portal]

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.

[msg attachments do not open]

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

[Change Request - Catalog Items]

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.

[Reporting definition filter error]

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.

[Schedule Calls to log automatically?]

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?

 

[Re-order FAQ's attached to services]

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

[Change Request Calendar]

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