Gerry

@chrisnutt Yes of course, we have also added native XLSX format too. Gerry

I wanted to post a quick update on the progress of scheduled reports. We have been doing a lot of work in this area and have been looking at how we make this do some really useful things. There are a number of things we have had to develop in order to pull this together. Scheduling - we built a set of API's and system functions to support generic scheduling, we initially used this for scheduled tasks, this is now also being used to drive scheduled reports Presentation - we have re-styled all report output and have implemented PDF output, we will be replacing the HTML output with PDF output as the standard, this makes the report presentation consistent and portable on all platforms including mobile. Delivery - our current implementation of report delivery will be via Document Manager, not email. We have taking this decision as we want to facilitate other functions and capabilities, specifically we want to enable mobile delivery and report schedule history as well as collaboration of course. We are still rounding out some of the finer technical points but I am pleased to say that all of the technical problems have been solved so we have something working and I hope to have this in preview/beta in the next 2-3 weeks all being well. Gerry

Hi Keith, We have not yet decided what the pricing looks like, we see it as a utility app so not expecting it to be expensive. In beta I would have hoped for some more feedback, we know customers are using it but we have not been asked about improvements or had much engagement so its been difficult for us to judge if Timesheet manager is of any use or if we need to do more to make it useful. So while its in beta it remains free to use. we will aim to complete our market research asap and give you some indication of what we think the pricing might look like. If you have any feedback about the application, especially any gaps or areas of improvement that would be very much appreciated. Gerry

It would be better/more structured to create a new BPM node that can Notify a person, the request owner, the request assignee etc.. @ mentions are partially client-side, partially server-side, so any implementation of this in the BPM would be ugly and esoteric and not in keeping with the "no programming/coding in BPM" mantra. I have made this point on our internal workspace also Gerry

@m.vandun In our experience, doing this kind of thing using custom fields gets messy and out of hand quite quickly. We are limited by how far we can expand the number of custom fields to maintain efficiency. That aside, there are better ways of achieving what you need. In Customer Manager we have added the notion of Contracts and Supported Items, this is what we use ourselves to know which service contracts and products (in the case of our on-premise software) a customer has that we are supporting. We tried (and failed) to represent this information in custom fields but our data ended up being a mess, leaving our admin team to revert back to spreadsheets. I would suggest you consider looking at what Customer Manager can do for you. Customer Manager is not something we lead with so marketing collateral is scarce. However, being a software/products company that also provides support services Customer Manager has been built for "Companies Like Us", and we use it in anger. I believe its data model would lend its self very well to your needs - its worth taking a look i would suggest. I am the acting product owner for Customer Manager so I am happy to answer any questions you have. Gerry

Hi Sam, You can use the direct database query function in the Admin tool but I would suggest letting our support team guide you through that, they are on the case and will be following up with you very soon. Gerry

Hi Sam, Does this happen consistently? Would help to know that, it seems odd as custom fields are referenced by their identifier it would seem strange it would use the wrong field. It could be a problem with the ProCap putting the data into the wrong custom field. The starting point would be to establish what is in the actual database. If the data is correct in the database then its a mail template processing issue, but if the data is wrong in the database its a ProCap config issue. Gerry

Let me know how you get on. Gerry

@Lyonel I think in support of what @Martyn Houghton is saying, I would suggest the following strategies, but you should also consider why people find it difficult, that understanding is important when trying to change the way people work. So lets start with the idea that most of your people are going to be "wed" to e-mail and/or IM because thats the way they like to do things, thats what they are comfortable with. I had the exact same problem, the good news is I can pretty much guarantee that when you get your users to change you and they will be a hell of a lot happier and more productive, I have not seen an exception to that so far. Trying to explain the benefits at the early stages will be a waste of time, you need to lead people to their own conclusion, once they see it for themselves they will fully embrace the idea on their own. So this would be my top tips for transitioning your team to collaborate. First of all you need an overriding mission that you and your most progressive team members will buy into and totally support. I would recommend something like... "We are going to remove ALL internal team conversions from e-mail and/or IM into collaboration workspaces where we can capture and use the knowledge we create" and then... 1. Identify a small number of like-minded people in your team that can see the value in doing this. Get them into a room and discuss it and get general agreement that its what you all want to do. These people ideally should be some of your go-to people, the kind of people who are asked for help/support from within the wider team - I willl call these your "influencers" 2. Make a pact with your influencers that from this point forward you will only answer knowledge/how-to/general in workspaces (more on those in a moment). That means, if you or any of your influencers get a question via e-mail, instead of replying and answering the question, ping it back with a link to the relevant workspace and politely ask the requestor to join the workspace and post the question in there. You need to be disciplined here and possibly even mildly aggressive, so save for an absolute emergency where an immediate call for help is required, stick with that policy and force the issue. This is the point @Martyn Houghton is making and he is spot on here - this sis the key thing to do. 3. Select your workspaces to create wisely. Don't create too many to start with. I would start with 5. Pick a project where there is a lot of communication as one of them and add all of the people in the project conversation to that workspace and instruct/guide them to use the workspace instead of email, ideally one of your influencers will be authoritative enough in the project team, the project manager ideally to force the issue on the project where needed. For the other four workspaces pick your top 4 "knowledge conversations", for example, if you do a lot of SAP support, you will ideally have your top go-to SAP guy.gal as one of your influencers, get that person to create the SAP Support workspace and follow the rules around questions via email in step 2 above here. 4. Start asking people "have you posted that in the workspace" if someone walks up to your desk and asks you a question that you think would be generally useful information, simply ask something like "would you be kind enough to post this in the XYZ workspace, I think that question and my answer would be really useful for other team members", that way your question-asking team members are now getting to create and share knowledge in the process of just doing their job, tell them that and praise them for being part of your new way of working Now depending on the make up of your team will depend on how long it takes the penny to drop for the team, as a general rule, if your influencers alone do this, the people who benefit from their efforts will say positive things, and once everyone starts to see "success", they will pretty much all jump on the bandwagon, and that that point I think you will be very surprised at how fast the transition happens. I would give yourself from 1-3 months to gain momentum and up to 6 months for a total transition. You and you influencers will need to continue to advocate and influence for the first 6 months. Your measure of success will be when your email inbox is only filled with emails from people outside of your team and junk mail and your team members (when you ask them, should we stop using workspaces and go back to email) will so no way, we cant live without this - how did we work before we were doing this... I am happy to talk you through any aspect of this and help you on any specific issues to run into. Just keep in mind your job here is not to roll out a collaboration tool, your job is to coerce your team into becoming more collaborative through an electronic tool. I promise you though, the effort is worth it. Hope that helps. Gerry

Ok thanks, thats useful to know. We are very keen to work with yourselves and other customers who have an interest in this solution area. We know a thing or two about making software and technology to support it, we have a very nice platform that we can build such applications but we don't ourselves run project portfolio;'s in the context that you and our other customers do, so working together to understand your needs is very appealing. So keep on feeding back and I am sure you will see changes that take it in the right direction. Gerry

@Lyonel Thank you for taking the time to have a look at this, we are very keen to get feedback so appreciate it very much that you have taken some time. Out of curiosity, what solution are you currently using for this purpose? Thanks, Gerry

Hi Dan I am not sure I understand what you are asking for here. You say are you talking about people via the service portal? Can you expand on your scenario. the system is designed to allow anyone to raise requests via the service portal if they are subscribed to that service. I am struggling to understand what you are trying to achieve from your explanation. [edit] a good way of describing your requirement is to use "roles" and explain you business need. For example, "As a portal user I would like to ...... by being able to ..... so I can achieve .....", that sort of thing... this is often easier to understand than a product change prescription Gerry

@Dan Munns Yes that will solve the problem, stay one hour away from midnight on the 28th, 29th, 30th and 31st and it will work fine. This will be much more robust on the next update. Please accept our apologies for the problems this caused Gerry

Hi Dan, [edit] My apologies, I see my colleague has already provided the explanation to your specific scenario two posts above, hope thats ok. Thats interesting, we will need to look at that scenario too. The problem is, the error reporting internally (at the code level) is quite good, but we were not outputting the error messages in any meaningful way. The running away problem was a bad coding error, we were handling the said error messages but not reporting them, and more crucially not marking the scheduled job as failed. I am 100% sure the fix we have done will prevent any future run-aways, and if there is a problem with your specific schedule we will get a clear error message/explanation. Is you scheduled job still on your system disabled? Gerry

Hi All, Just an update, we found the problem with the run-away schedule. The problem id if you set a monthly schedule on the 30th then enable the month of Feb when the schedule runs it would throw a permanent error which *should* have set the job status to failed. Unfortunately a defect in our implementation meant we neither output the failure error message to the log or marked the job as failed, the effect was the schedule would continue to run every cycle. So we have done the following... 1. We now output the failure message to the server log 2. We now output the failure message and state info to the scheduled job log 3. We have properly handled this condition and now set the job status to failed. 4. We are going to add better input validation on the API's used to create and update scheduled jobs 5. We are going to add input validation in the UI to prevent such erroneous schedule configurations from being created. 6. We are going to re-work this to improve the way it works at the end of the month and automatically bring the schedule forward for any month that does not include the day you specified. These changes will be rolled out as soon as is practical. We will put in a temporary client-side validation into the UI and get that out asap to help prevent this in the short term. In the mean time, the work around is not to specify a month day of greater than 28 when doing a monthly schedule. If you have been affected by this problem please let us know and we can clear down the tasks that have been created in your instance database. Please accept our apologies for this defect, this should not have gotten through our tests or code reviews, so hands up, we are sheepishly off to go and right our wrong. Thanks, Gerry

@Dan Munns You can only see scheduled jobs that you create. We will be adding an area in the admin tool where you will be able to see all scheduled jobs at some point. The job scheduler is generic which means anything that needs to schedule stuff (future reports etc) will also make use of these capability. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton these were all related to schema changes on the table that holds BPM state (that table on your instance is around 10Gb in size), it takes time on large tables. The good news is we don't often change the schema for this table so I would expect you will not see this very frequently at all. None the less this is not efficient so we are looking into ways of changing the way we hold BPM state to overcome this problem. It will take some planning so wont be an immediate change but I will keep you informed as we make progress. Gerry

Thanks @Martyn Houghton, Of those you sent, four took longer than 9 seconds, we will investigate. We are pretty sure that one of the updates relates to a schema change to a table thats hold business process state, in your instance this table is around 10Gb in size! The majority of the data in this table is static so I expect that we will have to implement some form of object archiving to reduce the size of this table in order to prevent this type of update delay. As for the other three I am waiting to hear what we find in the logs, once I know i will let you know. Gerry

Hi @Martyn Houghton Thanks for the question. Firstly, I will say that its very unusual that an update would take anything like the amount of time reported above, its more typically 5-10 seconds, sessions are persistent and retry logic ensures users do not experience unavailability assuming the update time is below 15 seconds. I will need to ask our team to investigate that to determine why this happened in this instance. If we make database schema changes that cause an index re-build and if you have very large data sets then its possible for it to take some time but we generally are concerned with things that take more than a minute or two which is why I am surprised to see that. I expect something went wrong in this instance, we will need to investigate and get back to you. In terms of the question relating to the maintenance window. The problem with providing a day mask for this is we could end up causing problems. Updates are done incrementally and forwards only, and our publishing process handles this. If we provided this capability and you only allowed updates on Sunday at 2AM and we had number of sequential updates, there might be an incremental dependency that gets skipped causing an update failure. The system and our processes that handle and schedule our updates are tuned/configured and organised around the premise that instanced can be updated once a day, by allowing customers to gate updates over days would stall our ability to push updates at the rate we currently do so I would not be keen to change that. Now, we have in the works some fairly substantial under the hood changes that will change this behaviour, specifically for updates that do not include database schema changes there will be zero service unavailability, we will be getting back those 5-10 second windows you currently have. This is still work in progress so watch this space. Hopefully that makes sense. Gerry

Exactly Why do ITSM Vendors Lead with ITIL? I was inspired to write this article on the back of a question asked on the Back2ITSM community by William Goddard which was... I think the answer to the question is obvious, but we can explore it by looking at the role of a vendor in a niche industry. Firstly, and most obviously I think, vendors do not choose to lead with ITIL, Pink Verify or anything else. The buying public chooses, and vendors simply make and sell what they are asked for. The problem with niche markets like the ITSM space is there are different parties, with different agendas, and for the most part they are in conflict with each other. The Customer Organisation – needs improved efficiency and better ROI on its investments. They don’t care how it is done, and often don’t know what they need to do either. The command from above is ‘get it done’ and they want demonstrable results, measured essentially in reduced costs/increased business value. The Buying Customer – for the sake of this example, is the IT department and/or the people directly responsible for running IT Service within the organisation. They are under pressure to succeed by showing business value, with a backdrop of serious completion from consumerisation of IT, BYOD and cloud providers. They’re following an IT strategy, which often doesn’t dovetail with a business strategy. They don’t really know what to do and things move so quickly they are looking for help and guidance, so often tune into the next ‘silver bullet’ that has traction and early success. The ITSM Influencers – the people who guide the industry; experts, authors, pundits, bloggers, consultants, analysts, training and certification organisations…independent trusted advisors. The Vendors – the people who have deliver the tools that balance the needs and wants of the customer with ever-changing requirements, to deliver efficiency and lasting value that justifies the significant expense of their ITSM investments. With the definitions out of the way, let me explain some of the behaviours I’ve witnessed, and forgive me if I hit a nerve or two along the way. Let’s start with the Organisations. They are absolutely right - IT is expensive, often inefficient, and more often than not, struggles to demonstrate business value. Over the last 15 years, whilst ITIL has enjoyed prime-time, technology has changed radically, and the security that surrounds it is placing a larger burden on IT. Don’t get me wrong, security and privacy concerns should be taking centre stage, but there’s a cost, and the greater the demand for better protection, the higher that cost will be. Security teams now carry more weight than any other IT group, and that’s the biggest change that I’ve observed in the last 20 years. Once you are past the organisational governance and procurement, let us talk about The Buying Customer. Customers ask for ITIL, so vendors create solutions around it, and many lead with it. Vendors are in the business of selling products, so market forces of supply and demand are what apply here, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If customers consistently asked for a service desk tool that included a IoT coffee maker, trust me, vendors will start to provide it. If we accept this notion, then we have the answer to the question “Why Does a Vendor Lead with ITIL”. Perhaps a more interesting question is “Why DO Vendors Lead with ITIL?” The ITSM Influencers – If buying customers need help, and if influencers in the ITSM community say, “you need to be doing ITIL”, then customers will ask vendors for ITIL? It’s somewhat ironic then, when influencers berate vendors for leading with this. It should be remembered that Influencers have a commercial agenda too. It amuses me when industry pundits say “Vendors should sell solutions to problems and not sell product features.” The implication being “vendors just want to sell products, so shouldn’t be trusted. Instead, you should listen to us, and buy some consulting, education, certification, or get our help during your product selection process, because we’re independent and can be trusted.” If I sound cynical, perhaps I am, but I’m just pointing out that it’s not only vendors that have products and services to sell. Influencers work with vendors too, because vendors have sustainable revenue sources and are often “less good” at talking the talk. Just pick your favourite expert or industry pundit and google them - the odds are good you will find a video, blog or white paper content written by them for a vendor. On to the Vendors then – it is true, vendors are in the business of selling products/licenses/subscriptions. I make no bones about it, because that’s what vendors do. It’s usually honest and transparent – money for software that delivers productivity. But the assertion that a vendor is not interested in helping customers succeed, is nonsense. With a SaaS, pay-as-you-go business model, that viewpoint is ridiculous. I can’t speak for other vendors, but our motivation is to help customers be successful. Our efforts are often hampered by complex procurement, regulatory controls and 200 page RFI/RFP documents that make it as difficult as possible for vendors to comply, meet requirements, and also deliver real value. Isn’t it time for influencers and the community at large to stop referring to vendors as the “Dark Side” to justify “independent” services prior to vendor selection. To simply trade and exist, vendors have to: Make products to meet requirements that customers cannot fully quantify Navigate regulatory and governance requirements in a landscape that’s constantly changing Deliver consulting, training and education to customers - free of charge - during sales cycles, pre-sales, pilot projects Keep up with the latest “shiny things” because customers continuously ask for them. Answer the same questions, in the same RFPs – yes that happens…often – and submit a response that’s contractually binding. Differentiate with products/features against ‘unknown’ competition. As a side note, in almost all cases, when a vendor is in a competitive situation, and the customer will not disclose who we are competing against, we can generally guess. By the second round of demos, we’re asked for the “shiny thing” that was in another product – so we usually know who we’re up against Take the blame. Despite the buying process, independent consultants, implementation process or the day-to-day management of the solution, if it fails, the product is blamed. Everyone else washes their hands of it and moves on to the next project. Long after the ITIL foundation training is done, when the consultant is gone, and the people who implemented your solution have moved on, as a vendor, we will still be there, supporting you, and doing what we can to help you succeed. I rarely see an RFP that spells out the business problems that need to be solved. More often than not, it’s a shopping list of features/functionality, often derived from the bits people liked about their existing solution, topped with generic ITSM requirements based on a commonly used template. If customers would just explain the business problems they’re trying to solve, vendors would be in a better position to help. Vendors sell what customers ask for. Customers ask for the latest silver bullets that the industry pundits are promoting. Customers are told that vendors have an agenda and only want to sell their products, you need independent advice…and round and round we go… The Hornbill Promotion Bit: I am proud to say as a vendor we do not lead with ITIL. We have to fit within the ITIL box, but we will never allow innovation to be stifled by ITIL dogma. We lead with technology innovations that improve the way our customers work. We listen to concepts and blue sky thinking, but we base our products on practical, tangible things you can touch, see and use every day. With pay-as-you-go, no contractual tie-in arrangements, the balance of power has shifted to the customer. Vendors want customers to succeed, quite simply because their revenue and long-term sustainability depends on your continued success. In the age of on-premise software, with large up-front costs and long term contracts, the vendor had the edge, and customers had to “sweat the asset” and “justify the spend”. Today, if the vendor doesn’t deliver value, customers can walk away. If you’re a SaaS customer, and you need help, just reach out to your vendor, I guarantee they’ll be highly motivated to do everything they can to support you.

Hi Sam, Rather than having stock classroom training we deliver 1-on-1 with you that meets your specific needs. One of our solution specialists can contact with you to determine what you are looking for and what we can offer. Is that of interest? Gerry

Hi Sam, Is the email address for a Hornbill Collaboration or Service Manager user? Gerry

SPOTLIGHT: To Microsoft System Center Service Manager and Back Again People will tell you “there is no such thing as a free lunch" and this story is such a great example of that. Paul and the team at Vinci PLC have been on a bit of a Service Management journey over the last three or so years, having previously used our Supportworks on-premise solution and then moving to Microsoft System Centre Service Manager, and all for the right reasons of course, I remember them being very gracious and having good business reasons for doing so. I am delighted to say that we are lucky enough to once again have the custom of Vinci PLC and Paul has been kind enough to allow me to share their story. VINCI companies in the UK turn over in the region of £2 billion per annum and employ circa 9000 employees. This represents 6% of VINCI’s €38.7 billion turnover and 30% of VINCI’s European turnover outside France. VINCI employs around 185,000 people in 100 countries around the world. Like many other organisations Vinci are on a fairly aggressive Digital Transformation Program where Hornbill's Platform is helping VINCI realise an overall Enterprise Service Management strategy. I asked Paul some questions and this is what he told me. Can you give me a brief background of who you are and what your role is at Vinci? What Service Desk tool was in place at Vinci before you deployed Hornbill Service Manager? and what were your reasons to change? What other service desk tools have you used in the past? How does Hornbill Service Manager compare in your opinion? What other solutions did you consider/shortlist before choosing Hornbill Service Manager? What was your first impression of Hornbill Service Manager? What was your impression of Hornbill as a company during the selection, procurement and implementation process? Since rolling out Hornbill Service Manager, how has it gone since you went live? Can you pick out three things that you love about Hornbill? If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing you would change about Hornbill right now? Is there anything else you would like to mention in relation to Hornbill? In my own opinion, Microsoft System Center Service Manager is not a bad product, its quite comprehensive but it does come at a cost, and up until recently the costs were primarily just the invisible cost of ownership. The big problem though is the strategic reason for its existence. Microsoft are a great company and much of their success beyond their desktop application portfolio is built on a broad partner eco-system. Microsoft are not in the niche player business, but they offer niche products essentially through their partner network. If such a product just worked out of the box there would be no "skin in the game" for the partner eco system, so you can think of SCSM as a toolkit rather than a finished product, and as a toolkit, its specifically designed to create a revenue stream opportunity for Microsofts partner ecosystem either through implementation/customization services or providing add-ons that round the solution out. Of course the marketing of the product would not make that immediately apparent which is a trap very easily fallen into. As a niche player, Hornbill offers something quite different; our solution is complete out of the box. It's not a product. It's a service we provide, and as a result our partner ecosystem works differently too. Our partners' revenue opportunities come from adding value, by delivering support and services that focus on helping you get your processes, reporting and strategy all going in the right direction. Thanks again to Paul for sharing your service management story with us.

Hi @shamaila.yousaf Thanks for the suggestion. We have had a look at this and we think its a nice idea we are adding it to our backlog but its not presently in our 90-day development window, we will post here as soon as we schedule something around it. Gerry

SPOTLIGHT: Leica Microsystems Unifies Global Service Management with Hornbill One of the best things about my job is getting the opportunity to work with great companies who are doing interesting things, and at Hornbill I am really blessed to have such a pro-active community of customers that are willing to share and be part of the Hornbill community. I have recently been working on some integration ideas with Keith Bage over at Leica Microsystems to help them support some automation needs around their very large SAP deployment – that’s still ongoing so don’t have much to say about that just now, but in the mean time I asked Keith if he would be kind enough to give us some insights in to how they are using Hornbill within their organisation globally, this is what he had to say. Can you give me a brief background of who you are and what your role is at Leica? What Service Desk tool was in place at Leica before you deployed  Hornbill Service Manager? What were the business drivers and reasons for implementing a new solution? What was your first impression of Hornbill Service Manager? What other solutions did you consider/shortlist before choosing Hornbill Service Manager?  What was your impression of Hornbill during the  selection process? What would you consider your biggest personal success coming out of the project? Since you went live with Hornbill Service Manager, how has it gone? Can you highlight three things that you love about Hornbill? If you had a magic wand, what is the one thing you would change about Hornbill right now? Is there anything else you would like to mention in relation to Hornbill? Keith and the team at Leica are very progressive and have truly embraced the continuous delivery approach we have adopted. I know that Keith is presently looking at some interesting IT automation initiatives so hopefully he might have a little more to share with us in the near future. Thank you Keith for allowing me to share your story.