Gerry

Keith, From an audit point of view, if you need to track and audit who does what in relation to your processes, would it not make sense for those users that are doing UAT to have access to the basic collaboration capabilities so they can be assigned and complete tasks. This is how other organisations use the system, its exactly this type of use case the system was designed for, its a process automation tool. I think what you are seeking is for users to be given the "equivalent" of tasks functionality, but via the portal so they do not need to be a collaboration user on the system? Do I have that right? Gerry

Hi, Customer logins' have very limited rights on the system which presents a number of problems, it would be generally good practice to schedule and generate reports (PDFs) which are then made available to customers via the portal, this is similar in concept to the way your typical online banking system works, you can't run a report to get a statement, these are generated periodically and presented to you via your online banking portal - I would suggest customer facing reports should work the same. Now in general, Hornbill Service Manager has been designed with the internal IT function in mind. It has of course expanded beyond that because it does cater for supporting external customers too (what we call contacts and Organisations) and we even provide a customer portal as you know. Reporting output for customers though is not an area that we have really focused on in our Service Manager roadmap. To meet reporting requirements for customers there are some specific areas of functionality that is unique to that need, these in include things like branding per customer, customer context, scheduling, document storage and publishing and notifications via email for when new reports have become available. There are also a whole range of reports from simple SLA/performance, call volumes and resolutions, time spent/charged and supported products etc... I think we are light in most of these areas as our reporting efforts have been focused on reporting that is good for the support team and business providing support, rather than the CRM end of the scale where reports are provided to the end user. It would be good to get a better understanding of the nature of the reports you are talking about? Gerry

Hi, Our scheduled tasks are implemented as a schedule job as opposed to a calendar (think windows scheduler as opposed to outlook) so tasks only get created at the point the need to be, hence the name "scheduled" tasks as opposed to "recurring" tasks. It would certainly be possible to visualise the schedule of tasks created by the scheduler as a current/forward looking calendar but I am not sure thats what you are looking for. Can you expend further on your use case(s)? Gerry

Not easily, because there will be many places that reference that ID in your collaboration and applications, as it forms the user record primary key, and even worse that that, throughout the system we use "URNs" and in the case of a user, the URN is constructed using the UserID. This is why we provide Name and Handle fields. Its not impossible to change but it requires some direct database manipulation and would be quite a complex thing to do, I don't think we have how to do this documented anywhere as each application will use this information. Gerry

@dwalby Our guiding principle is, if the thing we are integrating with is available with a free tier option and is in common use and accessible in the cloud with publicly documented APIs, or if its to services that relate to simple messaging such as SMS texting, notifications or other simple outbound communications like Twitter etc then we consider the integration part of the iBridge basic integrations which are free to use. In this case it is a commercial application so we would treat this as a premium integration and would require a subscription to the iBridge premium. All premium integrations are available to use for free but are limited to ten (I am pretty sure of that number) invocations per month. However, if we need to develop this integration for one customer (its not thus far come up) we would not prioritise that work if there was not a iBridge Premium subscription in place. Hope that makes sense. Gerry

@Paul Smith You can ping service.hornbill.com or customer.hornbill.com to get an IP addresses, however you should know this is a load balanced front end so you could get one of a number of IP's and they are goe-dependant too, and they *could* change so thats generally not a good idea to hard code IP addresses. What would be the correct way to do this is, on your current web server, configure it so it responds with a 301 Moved Permanently and re-direct the user requests to your current web server to the correct URL. This is the correct way to do this and will be most reliable for you. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton The best solution for this would be some form of file library and sharing capability, similar conceptually as Document Manager is for Documents, but for files. We have all the infrastructure and components to make such a solution but it would need to be an application in its own right and that not really made our priority list just yet. Internally we run a an SFTP server which has a web front end, so we can upload files via SFTP and share via an HTTP endpoint, the files only live for a duration (90 days for example) so the storage consumption is self-regulating. Share URL's are opaque so controlling access is done via these in a very similar way to Dropbox or other popular file sharing tool. Our implementation works for us but its very manual and does not incorporate any kind of library. I can see the need for it and I can see the benefits of having something like this would bring, but as there is no real commercial opportunity it has not really made the priority list because we have so much else going on. Possibly an integration with DropBox or other file-sharing service might be a good solution here? Gerry

As far as I am aware we do not have anything pre-built but depending on the API/Database access it would probably be trivial to create an integration like we do for many other asset data sources Gerry

@Dan Munns We dit not implement it that way because we felt on a mobile device it would be better to have "the report" so you were always looking at the latest one, but because of document versioning you can always look back to previous reports. Its not impossible to make it work as you describe but it would soon become very noisy in the document list. Gerry

I fixed that for you

@lee mcdermott It sounds like we have just failed to include the "alt" text on these links... I will progress internally for you, this should be very easy to resolve. Gerry

I think you are talking about this section of the request details? The problem here will be horizontal screen real estate, it would be good to understand the screen that your visually impaired user renders, would putting alt text behind these icons work? Another option would be to make them wrap into more vertical space. Gerry

@Dan Munns A user can be a member of more than one department which would make deciding which one problematic. A better option would be to have a "business unit" or "department" manager property against each users profile I think. Gerry

@Victor Thanks for the clarification, if that is the case then I would consider that a defect, I will pass that on internally. @m.vandun are you able to confirm this is the case? Gerry

@Dan Munns This could be an enhancement to our VPM, we do not presently have the notion of "approver roles" in the BPM but this does sound like it would be a useful addition, I can understand the need for hierarchical approvals based on manager roles, so any user would have a line manager and a business unit manager attributed to them, this could then be used as role based reference in authorisation assignment. I will take that internally, it sounds like a good improvement. Gerry

@m.vandun Have you asked the original sender to re-send the message in case there was some transport error? Does it always happen with emails from that customer? have you ever successfully received emails from that customer? If they send the email from another account, like a gmail account for example, do you then receive it ok? There is an outside chance that there is a problem with our RFC822 or MIME decoder implementations, but given we are processing many 10s of thousands of emails per day on our systems for a broad and diverse range of customers from all sorts of different email systems so I expect its most likely an invalid message and the only ones who can fix that are the originating sender. If you want to attach the message here I can have a cursory look over the file for you. Was there more than one attachment? Gerry

@Dan Munns So you want to be able to send an email to a basic users managers manager? from within BPM? What will the managers manager then do with the email? what action would they take as a result of the email notification? Gerry

@Dan Munns ok thanks for the clarification, that makes perfect sense now, I understand the use case. Ideally yes if your line managers had collaboration subscriptions then you would have exactly what you need, this is exactly how we have designed our system, to give IT the capabilities and tools to support enterprise wide initiatives like this, its a pity there is not a good commercial fit as I am sure the platform would really help a lot here. Sounds like you are doing the right thing, what we are seeing more and more is IT broadening their expertise beyond IT processes which is a great way to deliver business value, sounds like you have your work cut out for you, please let us know if we can be of help. Gerry

The most common cause of these problem we see is when there is invalid UTF-8 content injected in by Exchange injecting disclaimer trailers etc... the attached message to that email will be the original RFC822/MIME encoded message so you can compare it against the standards to see whats wrong with it. Basically, while trying to decode the message we found a problem with its structure or format, there should be more explanation in the attached files of the message. Gerry

@Dan Munns Just following up on this, do you mind if I ask a question. You indicated that you would need 600+ people to be "approvers" and I am curious about the use case here - I fear we may not be understanding your needs so would be good to understand better the use cases. I don't know the total number of employees at your organisation but 600+ approvers seems to be a very large number. Can you offer any insight? Thanks Gerry

Can I clarify, are you talking about the customer portal or service portal. I ask because we have the problem of user authentication when using SSO, in this configuration there is no login option, its a pass-through. I do agree with you that this is a much cleaner way of handling the login but curious about your specific use case to help our internal discussions. Gerry

@Dan Munns You welcome, sorry its not going to work for you, thats a shame. Gerry

@Dan Munns I thought I would respond on the point above you asked about as this does come up and I thought it worthy of some commentary. When we designed our platform we looked at the type of users that would need to interact with the system and for what purpose. The essence of Hornbill is its a business process automation platform designed for the enterprise, its designed to enable different business functions to automate processes in the broader sense. Of course its probably obvious that one of our primary go-to-market streams is via Service Manager aimed at IT and Customer Service teams/organisations. So when we looked at how we should structure pricing we followed the same set of principles that we have done for as long as we have been in this market, the specific one thats relevant here is the fact that we monetise (subscriptions) based on the notion that people who "participate in the process of providing service" subscribe, while people who are the recipients of the service being provided (i.e. customers) do not need to be a subscriber, this has always seemed fair. So in light of that we have a number of user classes, specifically 'users' (who are subscribers) and then we have 'basic users' and 'guest' who do not need a subscription. 'basic users' are typically internal to your organisation while 'guest' users are typically external to your organisation. The platform provides core functionality including the Business Process Tool and the business process tool is designed to orchestrate both automated and human tasks. Human tasks are orchestrated through activities which have configurable outcomes which can drive business process flow. So BPM and Tasks (My Activities) go hand in hand, they are essentially one in the same. An authorisation therefore is simply a 'type of task' and in order to receive a task and to be able to action a task you have to be a 'user'. neither 'basic' or 'guest' users can receive, or action tasks through any means, including email. This falls under our guideline as I feel an authorisation is something that happens as part of the process of "providing a service" to a customer/end user. So this is an intentional control because this is how we structured our monetisation strategy of the platform. Pretty much every enterprise class business process automation tool out there also charges on this basis. Now in comparison to a complex application like Service Manager, it is entirely unreasonable to charge the same amount for someone that just needs to authorise things (aka a manager or budget holder) as someone that uses the main features of Service Manager daily. For this reason, Tasks are a core feature of the platform and anyone that is a 'user' of collaboration can (amongst many other great things) receive human tasks and automations orchestrated by the BPM without being a subscriber to Service Manager or any other comprehensive application). So looking at the world from a Service Manager viewpoint you can consider what we call a "Collaboration Subscription" as an "Authoriser Subscription" that also has lots of other capabilities like Collaboration, Workspaces, Messaging, Tasks and Calendar Management, Shared Mailboxes, Co-worker directory etc... a "Collaboration" user costs considerably less than a Service Manager user and has a much steeper volume discount curve, its designed that way so you can roll it out to a much wider audience within your audience, a collaboration user quickly gets down to the £2 to £3/user/month with reasonable volume and below the £2/user/month after that. I personally think thats very good value for money in comparison to other tools that can do the same job. One of our competitors I know will be asking for upwards of £15/user/month for BPM type authorisation capability. What I would encourage you (and anyone else for that matter) to think about though is this - supposing you did have this task/authorisation/collaboration capability for a much wider audience in your organisation for a modest £2 or £3/user/month, what else could you start using the tool for, how much more "value' could you extract from the tool. When you start thinking in those terms I expect most organisations could see a great ROI Sales pitch over I just thought this thread was a good opportunity to explain some of our thinking around this particular topic. Gerry

Hi Chris, Most of them are self-explanatory apart from Device & App history, not sure why we would need that to be honest. Identity - we use the basic info like name/handle when connecting Location - we support location tagging with the "Check-in" option Photos/Media - Hornbills rich content allows for adding images, videos etc, we need access to those files in order to let you post them Camera - same as above Device ID - we use this to identify the device when its registered against your user account Hope that helps. Gerry

@Paul Alexander You are one of our published advocates so we are very happy to oblige... https://www.hornbill.com/blogpost/spotlight-to-microsoft-system-center-service-manager-and-back-again/ Gerry