James Ainsworth

The displaying of the users on-line status and availability is a good idea and I believe this has been requested elsewhere. You will see in some places within the collaboration, such as workspace members that we show a green dot to indicate their on-line status. We also have auto-assign rules for the BPM that use the availability settings to determine who is available for auto-assigning. So we are not far from being able to provide this. I will feed back once we have established some plans for implementing this.

Hi Paul, I have done some investigation and when I created a custom form with a date field in progressive capture, the date format was using the format specified on the user's(co-worker) profile. The date format for a user is set during the creation of their account and can be modified by an admin in the administration portal or by the user in the main collaboration app. Keep in mind that you need to log out and back in again for the new date format to be applied. Can you just confirm if your end users are external contacts on the Customer Portal or internal co-workers on the Service Portal? Regards, James

Thank you for your post. I can see that there are a few possible requirements that we can bring together to be able to achieve this in the future. We do have a particular change in our backlog to allow for some settings to include a BPM suspend and wait for closure. We could also consider some options to the stop and start timers or possibly add a pause/un-pause timer option. At the moment we are doing some work on the Service Level timers and we will need to wait until this work is complete before looking at additional options.

Hi Greg, Thanks for your post. As mentioned above you can control some of the items that are visible to a customer in the timeline so that information that you feel isn't necessary for the customer can be hidden. You may also be referring to the overall layout of the entire request. On the portals I can see that a more simplistic layout could be beneficial to customers. We have had a lot of focus on the portals in recent months and this is an area that we will continue to look at.

Thank you for your post. At the moment, most of the visibility and ability to work with requests is based on team membership. As a member of a team, you are then available for assignment. With a Service based approach in mind, we are soon to add the option to assign Service Owners to a service. Initially this will provide improved separation between services supported in different areas of the business, however we will then be able to extend this so that Service Owners (or possibly managers) that have been associated to a Service will have this visibility that you are looking for without having to be a member of a team. You have also mentioned the User's status. I can see this as a very useful feature where any member of a team can set their user status to an option that would hide them from the assignment list. I'll have a look to see what we have planned in this area.

Hi Samuel, Thanks for your post. The calendar feature is currently tied directly to existing Change requests that have already been raised in Hornbill. It sounds like you would like to add an entry to the Change Calendar that is not an existing change. Possibly a comment or note that contains changes that don't require a full change request? Depending on who the audience is, you can also use the Service Manager Boards. Although this does not provide a calendar view, you can add comment cards and also automate it as part of a change process. There are some long term plans to provide additional functionality in the future around the existing change calendar. However, is more likely to come later in the year.

Hi Martyn, Your screen shot suggests that the date is on a custom progressive capture form. I'll do some investigation to make sure that it is using profile date formats and not taking the format from somewhere else.

Just to confirm, are you referring to the icons on the timeline updates on a request as highlighted?

Hi Martyn, No further plans as of yet for this. You will have seen a number of new features around the services for the portals. We have had a priority on completing planned improvements and new features to extend the base functionality of the services. We will continue to keep the option of having custom images in mind and re-visit this once we have covered some key areas of the services.

The Business Process engine is possibly the most flexible and best place to look to configure the behaviour of requests. We are also looking at adding an application setting that would allow you to set the default behaviour for the selection of a closure category on all requests. This is still currently in the planning stage and not scheduled yet. I'll update this post once it is scheduled.

Hi Gareth, Having a column in the request list to show the current category assigned to each request would be beneficial. I'll discuss with our development team and look to get a change put into our plans. I'll try to let you know once this is scheduled.

Yes, to start with we have provided a set number of variables that relate to content on the requests but we are more than happy to look at adding more as we get feedback. Thanks for yours and we will see what we can to.

Hi Gwynne, I would be interested to understand how you use Job Type in reference to requests. Do you use this for a particular request type?

There are two ways that this can be done. If you open the Service form for the Change Request service, within the Details section there is an option titled "Portal Visibility". Simply change this from Visible to Hidden and it will not be displayed on the portals, but it will still be available to the Support Staff to raise requests against that service from within the main client for the subscribed users. If you would like the service to be hidden for most, but still available for a small group or an individual, you can control the visibility using the subscriptions. Just make sure that you only have the group or individual listed within the subscriptions. The default is to have everyone subscribed.

Hi Chris, The visible results on these searches are limited so that you don't end up with too many results to browse through. As you type the number will reduce. Returning smaller result sets also helps with performance. You can also start the search by typing their last name. Depending on where you are searching you can even type in the organisation name so that you see all the people from that organisation. Hope this helps.

Great to hear that all is working.

Kelvin, Can you confirm that your instance has been updated to Service Manager 2.23.x?

Hi Lee, This difference is between the reports and the request list is most likely a result of the request list being restricted to only requests that you are either a member of the team that is allocated to the request or you are a member of a team that supports the service that the request is associated to. In the reporting within the Admin portal, there is greater visibility to all the request records. If possible, identify a request that is in your report, but not visible in the request list. Once identified, check to see the team and service assigned to that request and compare this to the teams and services allocated to you. If these do not match, you would not be able to see it in the request list.

The new feature that provides variables in the Email Snippets is part of the Service Manager 2.23.x update. This update is available for the live environment. You can check to see if this update has been applied by clicking on your profile picture in the top right of Hornbill and selecting About. For a quick overview of the Snippets feature, including the variables, you can watch this.

Hi Gwynne, Great to hear that you are looking to use the activities within the requests. The combination of activities created as part of the workflow and manually created activities are a great way to manage the work required to complete a request. At the moment the assignment of activities doesn't generate an email. A Hornbill notification is sent which can be visible within the notifications bell at the top right of Hornbill. From within your profile, a user can also enable desktop notifications which will present selected notifications from your Windows task bar. Your browser would need to be open with an active session to Hornbill to see these, but it could be minimized or you can navigate away from Hornbill and still see the notifications. Another great way to see your notifications if you find that you are not regularly in Hornbill, is to have the mobile app installed on your phone.

One of the ways I would suggest, and this is the way that I personally do this, is to create a custom View in the request list that lets you display the closed requests. I have a condition checking the Date Closed and I have this set to last 30 days to prevent too many historic request from coming back. Once you have your view defined you can then select this View whenever you want to access your recently closed requests. You can then use the filter at the top of the request list to quickly filter this down to the specific customer. We are also looking to provide access to the customer's requests when viewing a customer record.

This discussion is continued in the following post: https://forums.hornbill.com/index.php?showtopic=8249

We have added a feature which will be available in the Service Manager 2.24.x update that includes the setting app.request.allowResolveCloseWithoutAnalyst. This will be set to True by default. Once available, if you wish to enforce a request having an owner before the request can be resolved or closed you can set this to False.

Hi Nasim, From what I understand a fix has been put into place and will be available in the Server Build 2521 update. You can check your Server Build by clicking on your profile picture in the top right corner of Hornbill and then click on About.

Hi Tina, When raising a request from an email, it uses the same progressive capture as when you click on the "Raise New" from the request list. This Progressive Capture can be set in the Service Manager applications settings with the Admin portal. The setting is app.itsm.progressiveCapture.newRequest. Keep in mind that changing the progressive capture here will change it for both raising requests from email and when selecting Raise New from the request list. In this progressive capture used for raising requests from emails, you can include Progressive Capture forms such as the Customer Search and Services to help guide the support person to selecting a Request Catalog Item. Once this is done, the request will be available to the customer on the Service Portal. I hope this helps. Regards, James