[Show analysts online status]

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.

[Change Request Calendar]

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.  

[Change Request Calendar]

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

 

[Updating the category when logged via portal]

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.

[Granting access to documents]

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

[Configuration Manager]

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.

[Dashboards on live portal]

Hello Ralf,

Thanks for your post. At the moment the dashboards created in the Advanced Analytics can't be consumed within the main client. We are currently looking at some additional reporting within the client and one of the considerations is to possibly provide the ability to consume widgets that have been created in the administration portal. This is still early in the planning phase, however I will try to keep you informed of the progress.

[Customize Tasks/Activities]

Hi Gareth,

I believe that the visibility of the delete was actually a defect which has been address or will soon be addressed. The deletion of an activity which has been created by a BPM workflow could potentially end the workflow so the delete option needs to be removed.

For BPM created activities you can remove the charging option per activity. This is done within the properties of the manual task node in the workflow designer.

Also within these properties you can define the different outcomes. These outcomes are presented as buttons when the activity is being completed.

There are additional considerations around the creation of task templates, but this is still in the planning stage.

I hope this helps.

James

[Custom Field]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your post. Do you have a use for theExternal Ref No field? If you are not using this for external references, the easiest approach would be to just change the label to read Internal Ref No. To be able to do this you simply need to have the Translator role applied to y our user profile. Once this is done you can turn on translation mode in the client. This is done by selecting your picture up in the top right. Next to the language selection you will see a translation button. Once this is selected you can right click on the label External Ref No. This will give you an option to provide a new label for this field.

A video is available which demonstrates how you can do this - click here

[Workspace - Post - Preview option]

Until there is a solution, you could either put your wiki text into a comment somewhere else, where no one is likely to like it or add a comment after it. After you have tested your wiki markup you can delete the comment and add it to a post. You could even create your own private workspace where you are the only member and test your posts there first. You can then delete the workspace when you no longer need it.

[Development - formatting forms]

Hi Kelvin,

Are you looking for something specific to support the purchasing of equipment or are you looking for just a more general way to layout out the different fields that you add to a custom progressive capture form?

[Edit the email content when raising a request from email]

Hi Martyn,

If you are using the Summary/Description progressive capture form when raising requests from email, the Description should be populated with the contents of the email. This should allow you to review and edit the information from the email. You can then use the right hand side of the progressive capture to return back to the Summary/Description form at any point if you need to reference the information after you have passed that step.

Is there other information from the email other than the message body that you are looking for?

[When raising a request from email it is automatically moved to Deleted Items folder]

Hi Martyn,

There is a Service Manager application setting called servicemanager.email.archiveFolderName. You can set this to the name of the folder that you wish to use for archiving emails that have been used to raise requests with.

[Adding all users to a new organisation]

Hi Kelvin,

Thanks for your post. I will talk with development to see what options we have. Out of curiosity, at what level are you adding All users to in your organization structure? Moving forward the organizational structure will play a more and more important role with the different applications so for best results you will want to make sure you define your different organization levels and add the users to the lowest level which in most cases will be department.or team.

An example of how this can be used is with the Service Subscriptions. When subscribing users you can subscribe the entire organization down to an individual. If you subscribe an entire organization it will include users in all of the sub groups as well. Having users in the departments then allows you to easily create services for a particular department while at the same time making them available to any services subscribed to the entire organization.

[Auto Assign - Team Membership Type = exclude Manager/Team Leader]

Hi Martyn,

Thanks for the post. Do you see the team lead and the manager still being available for manual assignments or are these types of users only there to oversee the team? There are a couple of approaches that could be looked into. It could be a simple right for each user that would allow them to be assigned requests or another option we have looked at is allocating one or more service owners to a service who could see and contribute to the request for this service, but unless they are assigned to the team, there would not be an option to assign a requests to them.

[Searching for users in the Admin tool is not working]

Hi Nasim,

A new significant release of the Administration is now available. I just wanted to check if you are still experiencing search issues using this.

James

[Show SLA information on customer portal]

In the Service Manager 2.26.x update we are including a new setting guest.com.hornbill.servicemanager.showResolveByDate which will enable you to show the resolve by date to portal users.

[Creating knowledgebase articles]

Hi Martyn,

We are looking into ideas around either uploading documents against a Service or making a Document Manager library available to a portal. So, possibly something you will see in the future.

[Workspaces - text containing two single quotes together get stripped]

Hi Martyn,

The markup that we are following is based on wiki markup which uses the two single quotes to represent italics. We will want to make sure that these are kept consistent with this format.

More information about the markup that we use can be found here

Regards,

James

[Unable to schedule a change in a past date]

Hi Gareth,

We have adjusted this so that you will be able to apply a date in the past. This should be with you in the next update to Service Manager.

[Unable to schedule a change in a past date]

Hi Gareth,

Thanks for your post. I'll have a look to see if the calendar can be set to allow for dates in the past to be selected.

[Could not connect to server (Error code: -1)]

If other users are successfully connecting using IE11 and this is confined to a small group of users using IE11, it maybe worthwhile looking at the IE browser Extensions and disabling these to see if any of these are causing issues.

[Query about team and user subscription to a service]

Hi Gareth,

As part of the Service Manager 2.25 update a fix was included for an issue where in some circumstances the last subscriber was not removed from the Subscribers component, but the subscription still reverted back to its default setting of everyone being subscribed to the service.

Could you confirm the current Service Manager version running on your instance? If it has been updated to 2.25 could you let us know if you are still experiencing the issue?

Regards,

James

[Email Facility Permission]

Hi Lucy,

Thanks for your post. I was just wondering if there was a particular scenario that you are trying to facilitate? Using the shared mailboxes provides some important controls with the emailing. One control is to make sure that only the support staff that you wish to send emails are able to do so. Another is the email template so the messages have a consistent look and feel. The shared mailbox also provides a standard reply email address to the outgoing emails so that responses can be added to existing requests.

[Leaving a Workspace]

At the top of the workspace there is a tab called Membership Properties. If you select this tab you will see an option for leaving a workspace. However, if you are the owner of a workspace you will not see this option. You must first transfer ownership to someone else before you can leave.