Gerry

@shamaila.yousaf Yes I think you probably ought to look at how you are using the boards, if you find yourself needing to have an object in more than one list on the same board you should look ay how you are using boards, you are probably trying to do too much with a single board, break it down keeping in mind the restriction on having an object appear only once per board and it should become self-guiding for you. Glad we got to the bottom of it - you can see how important terminology is Gerry

Steve, Yes document manager is oddly as the name implied designed as a tool to help you "manage" "documents" and as you rightly point out file attachments are more often than not transitory by nature. Some documents you might want to move out of email and into something where it will be managed. The suggestion above was for an option to "Save Attachment To Document Manager" which I think is a perfectly reasonable addition, I really like the idea of making the system smart enough to know that a file attachment us a newer version of something you previously stored in DM and for it to give you an option to update DM with a later revision, that would be pretty awesome but as you say its not exactly simple. As for cloud storage, it absolutely is for all practical purposed limitless, the only limit is how much you want to spend on keeping the stuff you store. That is of course also true for normal IT/on-premise storage although users never quite see it like that - Office/Exchange is the same, no one cares about how much storage they use so long as they can keep their documents and emails forever, do not have to spend any time managing or taking responsibility for them and so long as they don't get held accountable for and/or have to pay for the storage they consume. Some people have a bit of a love-hate relationship with document manager because it basically highlights these things. Being extreme about it, a document takes time to create and therefore has an intrinsic value to your organisation, if it does not then why would your organisation pay money to allocate time to allow you to create it. If it has value, then it probably also has a lifetime value, so by definition that document must be owned (i.e. someone needs to take responsibility for it) so it can be reviewed, maintained and at some point when it no longer has value can retire the document. If the document does not have any intrinsic value then why does it exist or why do we spent time moving it around or waste money consuming compute and storage resources keeping it. All too often a document gets created, passed around in email for a while and put into the graveyard we all know as a network share, where everyone involved in the creation of the document washes their hands of the responsibility of managing it, while IT are left accountable for storing it forever in the slight off-chance that someone might need it three years from now. We build document manager to help organisations manage at least some of their important documents., building a library of knowledge is important, those knowledge documents are arguably some of the most valuable an organisation can hold and also relaly need to properly maintained, I think thats what Document Manager enables you to do really well. I know thats quite an idealistic view and probably quite impractical for a lot of cases but even if 10% of the junk that is floating around IT systems were better managed companies would save a whole ton of money.

@shamaila.yousaf I am afraid I am not sure now, I dont know enough about how the boards work with tickets, perhaps someone else can provide more information Gerry

Hi, Thats what I thought. @James Ainsworth thats the clarifiation I think you was looking for. In terms of the number of files that can be saved to document manager? No there is no practical limit, the only limit is disk space, your instance includes 30Gb, you can subscribe for more space and there is no practical limit to the amount of storage space we can provide you. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton I will PM you as I have a question thats probably not suitable for public presentation at this time. Gerry

HI @Martyn Houghton How quickly do you need something in place for this? Gerry

Hi Martyn, The problem with any kind of notification, even if its a voice dailer is that people can leave their phone down stairs or turn on silent mode or as you have identified don't hear an SMS notification. VOIP services have this capability which could be integrated with. However, just a wild idea for you... One solution I have seen work well for this, is to use one of those 24/7 outsourced service call centers but use them in reverse. Instead of the contact centre being called by the customer, your automation sends them an email, they raise something on their own systems from that, the email contains your current on call roster and the instructions, the job of the callcenter is for a real person to make calls and contact a person directly, they can then report back and confirm (service portal link or something similar in the email), who they have contacted. That way, like an emergency service there is no room for error and you have a human intelligence confirming things are done as required. Gerry

Hi @Stuart Torres-Catmur Of course, I will ask someone to get this out to you today. Gerry

@shamaila.yousaf I am not entirely sure TBH, that message sounds like you are adding the request to a board but its already present on the board you are trying to add it to? Gerry

@shamaila.yousaf Can I just clarify, are you asking to do this automatically, or are you asking for an option to click on a file attachment and choose an "Add To Document Manager" option? I am thinking that latter but I just want to make sure we have clarity around what you are asking for? Gerry

@Martyn Houghton As I said, a simple list export would be reasonable to add, but I expect that will not be enough, for a start I expect those lists to be ever growing historical lists, and so downloading a whole list into Excel and then having to extract the rows based on a date range for example would be a common use case, and we would not support date range selection for example. The list is pages for display, this would be another problem as the export would only export the current page - unless we go and build different queries and code to deal with reporting output, albeit a simple tabular list this needs to be built with the extreme possibilities in mind, again this type of function is way beyond the scope of the request list designed to allow customers to browse their list of open requests. This is where a reporting module would come in, it would allow you to define some basic report types that the customer could use to extract the data they need in a more usable way. Possibly it might also let the customer schedule their own report and/or get the output in PDF form. There may be some scope for simplified dashboards too - in essence what you are talking about, a customer friendly self-serve reporting interface is what I would be thinking Gerry

@samwoo @Martyn Houghton I just want to re-iterate the above comments, providing reporting features/capabilities really is beyond the intended scope of the service portal. I think we could/would add a simple list export of what you can see on the screen/in your list but it would not go much further than that. The scheduled reports as @James Ainsworth is suggesting would be an option. Exporting the list as you see it on the screen in the portal would be another option. But providing a customer facing reporting tool, no matter how trivial would be out of scope, simply because once we add it we would then be faced with a barrages of "oh can we just have this extra field" or "I just need to be able to specify a date range"... and so it would go on. So rather than trying to turn the request list (and the behind the scenes data model and queries) into something its not designed to be, it would be more appropriate is to create a customer facing (i.e. present in the portal) reporting module which you could choose to provide to your customers or not. Thoughts? Gerry

@Martyn Houghton Ok I will add to our list of things to look at, not sure how quickly we can get to this though, we have a lot going on at the moment and of course people are only just coming back after the summer holidays. The problem with this sort of change is it involves multiple teams and changes need to be progressively rolled out up the stack so it will take some time. In any case, we will investigate and plan what is possible and take it from there . Gerry

@Martyn Houghton yeah I think thats the problem though, the forgotten password policy and process is quite different to a password expired policy, the later requires advance notice and options/prompts to change when you log in. While its quite common for internal systems to have this ability, its very unusual to have external/public systems behave in this way - apart from LAN access I cannot remember a time when I have been told my password had expired. LinkedIn was the last one I think a few years back. So your requirement is, you want to be able to change your password policies globally, then have it so the next time a user logs in they are forced to change their portal password? Gerry

@Ralf Peters OK thanks for the clarification, the portal should show the attachments, I am not sure why that is not the case, I will need to ask internally, will post back soon with a clarification Gerry

@Lyonel Can you please check with your team if anyone is doing any *integration* work using the API. There appears to be a large number of API calls being made in quick succession with a valid session which would indicate possible API usage. The team are looking into it so we hopefully can be more specific but I thought I would ask the question while they are doing that Gerry

@Martyn Houghton There is nothing currently in the short term backlog for this. When you say password expiry "process" I guess the devil is in the detail here, as if we have an expiry process you would also want/need a recovery process too right? Can you expand on your use case just so we have a clearer picture of what you are trying to achieve? Thanks Gerry

@Ralf Peters I am not sure there is another way to achieve what you want,. If I understand what you are asking, you seem to be wanting your accounts team to work on tickets (albeit in a basic form) but to do that without being users of the system. Our guiding principle when designing the system around subscriptions currently is based on the idea that if you are a "participant" in the "provision of service" then you are a user and subject to some form of subscription, but if you are the "recipient" of the "delivered" service then you are a customer and would use the portal which of course does not have a subscription cost associated with it. The only other thing i can suggest which I guess *could* work is if in your BPM you sent the email to the customer to include a link to the ticket in the service portal, they could then interact with the ticket as a customer. Please be aware though that if any subsequent feature requests or enhancements that arise as a result of this type of use arise, we would test your use case against the above guiding principle before considering any changes. Hope that helps Gerry

@samwoo Thank you for the clarification, the use case makes perfect sense. So why not simply add the document to document manager and attach the document to the request? thats what document manager is for. Perhaps what is needed here is better integration between document manager and service manager rather than re-inventing document manager inside service manager. Gerry

Hi Mike, Can you expand on that a bit, I am not sure I understand what you are suggesting? Gerry

There has been some investigation work done but I will need to find out what the current status is. Its holiday season at the moment so not everyone is around, I will get a status update and post back when I have something. Gerry

Ralf, Have you considered bringing those customers into the Collaboration fold? This way you could raise tasks and assign them to people or teams, these tasks could be raised manually or via a request. You could then also collaborate with these customers in real time. Just a thought... Gerry

SPOTLIGHT: London Borough of Brent Embraces a Shared Service Culture We have worked with the team over at London Borough of Brent for a good number of years now. Back in 2016 they transitioned from an on-premise Supportworks deployment to Hornbill Service Manager in the cloud as their service management solution. I was talking to Nasim about their journey, and he was kind enough to share his story with me; here is what he had to say. Can you give me a brief background of who you are and what your role is at London Borough of Brent? What Service Desk tool(s) were in place at London Borough of Brent before you deployed Hornbill Service Manager? What other service desk tools have you used in the past? How does Hornbill Service Manager compare in your opinion? What was your first impression of Hornbill Service Manager? What other solutions/tools did you consider/shortlist before choosing Hornbill Service Manager? What was your impression of Hornbill as a company during the selection and implementation process? What would you consider your biggest personal success coming out of the project? Since rolling our 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? Nasim and the team at London Borough of Brent are doing some really interesting things, their continued expansion of their shared service is testament to their ability to generate cost savings for their service partners and ultimately their citizens yet continue to improve the service they deliver to their end users. Few public-sector organisations have managed to move towards a portal only service experience, this is where London Borough of Brent are truly bucking the trend.

There would be a problem with this, a ticket can be added to more than one board at a time so the data model would not lend its self to having a column in the request list to show the board the request is in as it could be more than one board. It would be better to deal with this in your business process design instead. Gerry

@Grant Fettis If you are using AD and have SSO configured then would this not be a question for the ADFS system administrator as its your ADFS server thats doing all the of the user authentication? If you are not using SSO and are using the authentication scheme that the Hornbill platform provides then thats a reasonable question. We have been looking at more enterprise-grade features and 2FA is something that we have considered. However, most of our customers opt to use SSO with their own enterprise security systems so any effort we put into our inbuilt authentication scheme would that far seem to be a bit of a waste of time as our customers would not benefit from the effort. [edit] A quick google search and I found this document: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-fs/operations/configure-additional-authentication-methods-for-ad-fs Gerry