Gerry

@jcorfield @David Calder We had a look at this today and have planned some development work to happen in the next 90 days for e-mail related stuff including.. (in this priority order) * DKIM support for outbound DNS routed mail delivery * A code change for dealing with CRLF normalisations and use of CHUNKED data transmission * Direct inbound SMTP mail delivery to Hornbill You will see these additions in release notes as we roll out over the next 90 days. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton The problem with us implementing the suggestion is the system has been built around the notion of an Activity Stream do it does not really have a concept of transient data and differentiating between types of data, the assumption is each workspace is a "topic of discussion". Through now quite extensive experience we have found that using multiple workspaces to organise the flow of information actually works quite well, the information finds you and you can organise your own time to visit each topic where there is new stuff to look at. For example, if I needed to convey the type of information you are talking about I would personally create a workspace called "Rota and Availability" and post all of that information in there, that way, anyone who needs to see those notices would get a new notification and an unread badge on that workspace, and when they visit they know exactly what they would be looking at. I am a member of over 160 workspaces currently but I only ever have around 30 bubble up to the top during the course of a day, it really does work very well. What you are asking for is of course possible but based on my understanding of our implementation it would require a fundamental change to the fabric of our Activity Streams implementation. I can see the merit of having such data in the same workspace but I can see more benefit in organising streams into relevant topics too, thats at least what I wold suggest as something to try for now. Gerry

HI Martyn, As you know there is no concept that allows content to be deleted in a way that could change timeline history. What I would suggest in this case is you create workspaces that are specifically designed as notifications that are ultimately volatile, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you try to ensure that workspaces that are designed to hold long-term knowledge are not filled with transitory content. Does that make sense? Gerry

Hi, We are still looking at GDPR in conjunction with the legislation being formalised. We actually don't know how far the "right to be forgotten" goes, or weather or not there is even a requirement to "forget" someones actual name in relation to prior data, especially knowledge data. For example, many companies use peoples names as a makeup for e-mail address, I find it unimaginable that it would be practical to anonymise recipients in emails stored in peoples mailboxes, that will be even more impossible to achieve when people hold personal archives or older emails in PST files etc. So taking a more pragmatic viewpoint one might look at the spirit of the "right to be forgotten" meaning, its more leaned towards "forget me when you try to communicate with the world, I am no longer interested" as opposed to "annonymize me so that no one will ever know it was me that sent any emails still on your systems". Likewise I cannot see how a company would discard an important whitepaper written by someone who subsequently exercises their right to be forgotten, it just does not make sense. The legislation talks about the right of erasure in conjunction with "further processing" and weather or not the processing of said personal data is causing harm or distress, I very much doubt that holding information that someone has willingly contributed to a knowledge pool (such as collaboration, email, white papers of service tickets) would ever fall into that category, I personally think it would be fine to continue with someones name attributed to a piece of work they undertook. Of course like most government legislation, the EU committees have done their level best to make it all as ambiguous as humanly possible. This is quite a good overview: - https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-reform/overview-of-the-gdpr/individuals-rights/the-right-to-erasure/ In any case, so as far as Hornbill is concerned, all users (and contacts) are represented by an ID, specifically a URN which relates back to a profile record. So the basics of removing someones profile image and changing their display name/handle in their archived profile would actually do the trick, in that regard I do not think any specific functionality is required to meet the right to be forgotten requirement, its simply and administrative function to edit the individuals archived profile. Of course we could, and will probably add a button to "Anonymize this User" but thats really just sugar on top of something you can already do in about 10 seconds. As things become clearer in terms of our customers specific obligations under the GDPR legislation we will of course make product changes to assist with this where it makes sense to do so. Happy to expand on this conversation. Gerry

I do not believe that IE 11 supports this, you would need to be using Edge on Windows 10 and I think you might need a plugin too. Its a limitation of IE I am afraid, there is nothing we can do in Service Manager. Gerry

HI Carl, We have disabled the feature at the moment, its been superseded with something all together better which I am going to be announcing very soon. The problem with the web call is dealing with the complexity of "gluing" the inputs and outputs together. When we designed the BPM I laid down and absolute mandate that outside of simple browsable (point and clickable) "expressions" there will be NO programming skills required to use the BPM. Now while the WebCall concept is a real game changer for automation its also entirely impractical because the only possible way of getting the flexibility is to use some sort of glue code to pass params into the web call, there are options like URL encoded, form encoded, URL params, headers and so on. Now we could almost deal with this using expressions although it would be messy it could be made to work, but the bigger, MUCH BIGGER problem is how to handle return values and map that back into something useful that the BPM can use for onward processing - this is where it basically gets impossible, the only way we could make this work would be to expose some form of scripting programming in the BPM so despite some early experiments our conclusion its just not really workable. The WebCall may still get put into production but with very limited capability, but right now, after experimenting and playing with it, the good and very competent folks here at Hornbill did not think we would be doing our customers any favours by releasing this. We have an infinitely better solution which we are working on right now, in fact its almost finished and I will be covering it in great detail at our next Hornbill INSIGHT event which is in June 28th. So watch this space, we have goodness coming very soon. Gerry

@Steven.Hawkins To be honest I too have struggled a bit with this, it was brought up internally a few times and as @Daniel Dekel says we are continuously looking to improve this. The reason why it opens on hover is to minimise the number of clicks required, we ere aiming to not regress from the previous navigation scheme so we definitely need to do something with this Gerry

I would suggest not assigning tasks to individuals but to groups or roles, this would solve that problem all together. Gerry

Innovation: Customers don’t always know what they need until you show it to them There is an old saying that goes something like “the customer is always right” and if you follow that principle you cannot really go too far wrong, do what your customer wants you to and you will have a happy customer that will spend money with you. The problem with that approach though, is if you ask, all customers will want is a BIGGER, BETTER and FASTER one of what you have already provided them. Our natural instinct is to look at the world as it is today, good or bad we understand it and we are comfortable with it – so if we can just make it better then that’s always our preference. The truth is, a safe approach like this always leads to a bad place of stagnation and boredom which is why innovation and moving forwards is so incredibly important. See this previous article I wrote on Why Innovation Matters One of my favourite examples is the food and drink industry for preserving food, it was typical for restaurants and stores in metropolitan cities to take regular deliveries of big blocks of ice in order to keep their ice boxes cool. The companies whose business was to create and deliver the ice blocks focused on improving ice production, improving delivery and so on. But one day in the early 1900’s someone invented what we know today as a refrigerator. As it turned out, until that day people needed ice, and no one realised what they actually needed a refrigerator – that’s a fine example of innovation at work. Innovation does not have to be ground breaking, when you boil it down, innovation is simply change for the better, and one of the biggest blockers to innovation is “CHANGE” because people don’t like change, and that explains perfectly why, when you ask your customer what they want, they will ask you for a bigger, better, faster one of the things you already have given them – improvement WITHOUT change. It is always good to remember that innovation is not just about amazing new technology or ideas, its primarily about leadership. As a leader, your job is to create the refrigerator and not to work out how to make longer lasting ice. I was inspired to write this article because I had a recent example of exactly this. One of the features of our platform includes an e-mail interface and in observing how it worked and how our customers interacted with it, we wanted to re-design it, now this was not so much about a ground-breaking invention but it was a significant change, and as I have already mentioned, people don’t much like change. To cut a long story short, we made the change which we thought was a really big improvement, communicated and soft introduced this great new UI to our customers. One of our customers Gary (who has graciously given me permission to refer to his comments) responded to this change with the following feedback: - Ouch…. well that made us stop and think, not a good piece of initial feedback. The truth is though the UI change was a vast improvement on what was there before and we knew it, but we also got a lot of other positive feedback too; the change was a big step forward so why this feedback? Well if I have not said it enough times already, Innovation is about leadership and when innovating, as a leader you have to assume that your customers don’t yet know they need what you have created. Of course, you have to be sensitive to the fact that you can also be wrong and your customer could be right, and in those situations, you have to be willing back down too, innovation is not a free ticket to do what the hell you like, but you need to be a strong leader to Innovate well. Always listen to your customers, consult with them and learn but always drive forwards too. Back to Gary, fast forward a few weeks, and with some constructive exchanges taking on board the sensible points that we missed and this is what he posted some weeks later. We have created a platform which almost requires us to innovate and we even sell that idea to our customers when prospecting. Companies like us find it easy to innovate when they are starting out, you can drive change, try things out and make mistakes, no one cares, but as soon as you have paying customers, things get harder, the more paying customers you have, the more pressure is on you to just do what they want – “bigger, better and faster”, and the larger proportion of conservative/anti-change mind sets you have to deal with the harder it gets to do, your customers will buy into innovation when they are first buying the great thing you have created – BUT – once they are using it, they can resist change which can really stifle innovation if you let it – which brings us right back around to leadership; you need strength and conviction to drive forwards, to take customers where they do not even know they need to go, but it is not just about what you as an innovator does, the truth is your customers need to join with you and allow you to innovate, if your customers are paying you they are always right, so you must listen to them and serve them well, but if you don’t make space and take the initiative to continuously innovate or your customers don’t allow you to innovate then you will most likely stagnate and die. I asked Gary for his comments on the above, and this is what he said: - We have a very transparent approach to our product development process and customer engagement model, if you are interested to see how we approach driving change you can read the original postings and conversations here: - https://forums.hornbill.com/topic/10160-old-email-view-has-changed/ https://forums.hornbill.com/topic/9558-new-improved-email-view/

All, We have now finalised the agenda for Hornbill Insights 2017 which is being held on the 28th June. Despite the title of this forum thread this is not a replacement or re-invention of the HUG, we have yet to organise the next HUG, this is still on our agenda and list of things to do. We are into our third year of live customers on Service Manager and I am pleased to say that customer acquisition means we have a lot of customer now using this, so its high time we had a formal session to talk about where we are and what we are doing moving forwards. So although this is aimed at HSM users, there are still quite a considerable number of Supportworks customers keen to migrate to Service Manager at some point in the future so the invitation to attend is being extended to them also. This day is focused primarily on education and our thoughts and vision for Hornbill so if you want to find out how you can get even more value out of what you already have this is a must attend event. Spaces are limited though so please get in quick if you want to attend, the facility we have reserved has limited capacity - when its full - its full. If we are over subscribed we will do our very best to prioritise fairly. Your personal invites wild be sent out over the course of today and tomorrow via email so please look out for it and register if you are planning to attend. PLEASE ONLY REGISTER IF YOU INTEND TO COME ON THE DAY, WE HAVE LIMITED SPACES AND EACH SPACE COSTS REAL MONEY WHICH WE DO NOT CHARGE FOR, IF YOU DON'T ATTEND SOMEONE ELSE WILL MISS OUT AND WE WILL STIL HAVE TO PAY THE BILL! WE WILL KEEP A TRACK OF THIS AND WEIGHT YOUR FUTURE PRIORITY ACCORDINGLY https://www.hornbill.com/insights17-agenda/ Thanks Gerry

@Lyonel I have just seen the agenda today so I believe these, along with the registration form will be sent out tomorrow. Places are limited to 70 for the current venue reservation but the focus for this day is around Hornbill Collaboration and Hornbill Service Manager, there will be no content relating to Supportworks, (that will be in a future HUG) so we wold not be expecting a large uptake for our customers that are currently using Supportworks, if there is we will have to re-think, or maybe place limits on numbers per organization etc... will cross that bridge when we get to it Gerry

@DeadMeatGF Ahh fair enough, well let us know if you need us to get it back, we cycle backups every 30 days which is the backlog window you have before the data will be permanently gone from our systems. Gerry

@DeadMeatGF Steve, You can take a look in the following table. h_buz_workspaces however, there is no soft-delete, so when you delete a workspace the record is deleted from this table, same is true for all the posts, comments, likes and other associated embedded media. Only way back would be from backups and a manual process to get the data out, import it back in, regenerate all the GUID's etc... its not an easy task Gerry

@Lyonel When the report is run its data thats created, not the actual report. The data can be pulled down over WebDAV with the required access token but its quite a complex thing to do. I am not sure what form the data is in. @NeilWJ can you shed any light on this? Gerry

Jamie, The activities data structure is very different to requests, while requests in service manager are designed to work like a request list, the activities view is somewhat simpler model, activities are meant to be much like tasks in outlook. I do not believe we will ever get close to the management and reporting functionally you have in service manager in the tasks system, it was simply not designed for that. I will post a reference to this post on our internal workspace for the dev team to look at although given current development commitments I doubt much will happen with this in the short term Gerry

@PSG The likely solution to this would be to provide a link back to the task as I dont think its even possible to show the task contents in the timeline. I will chase this end and get someone to respond to you tomorrow. Gerry

Innovation: Why does Innovation matter? Around seven years ago I took a long hard look at our business, our products and the Service Desk tools market. I was trying to make sense of why it was progressively getting more difficult to differentiate. This was a time when there were 100’s of helpdesk and Service Desk tools a customer could choose from, functional requirements were being defined by ITIL rather than customer needs. The infamous “PinkVerify” tools list had expanded from just a few to over 50 vendors and Gartner even retired their IT Service Desk Magic Quadrant citing “lack of innovation” in the industry – so what was happening? Well the behaviour of the customer changed considerably and to understand why we need to look back a little further. IT organisations were looking to become “ITIL Compatible” or “ITIL Certified”, IT teams were looking for new ways to succeed within their organisations. The “industry pundits” had done a great job a convincing everyone that ITIL was the magic pill that would solve all the problems that IT were facing. The idea was by adopting ITIL, IT would become less of a reactive “fix it when it breaks” cost centre and more strategically aligned with (and therefore more valuable to) the needs of the business. However, the reality with what was happening was quite different; Innovation in the consumer space had really taken off – for example, your average person could walk into a computer store, buy a laser printer for not much more than the cost of a weekly shop, take it home plug it in and start printing. Yet at work, the same experience would require lots of paperwork and bureaucratic cost justifications and would require a cost sign-off of ten times as much money to get the printer three weeks later. As executives started to experience this, they were rightly starting to question the value that IT was bringing to the table. Another great example of this happening was the initial explosion of BYOD (remember that little nugget), where execs and managers would buy their own iPad or Notebook and use it at work, simply because it was easier than trying to go through IT and the by now established security police. IT still had a value so it could not just be outsourced (although lots of organisations tried that too) but no one really knew what ITs value was and so the need for IT to prove itself was created. It is hard for a function that has previously not had to justify itself to suddenly have to demonstrate business value, and for executives it is hard to give direction to IT when it's them who are questioning the value of IT in the first place, so something was needed to fill the void – enter ITIL… It’s a framework, its best practice, its proven and it has been around 20 years, every podcast, pundit and consultant is saying ITIL is the answer and so the direction from the execs down was “Just do ITIL” – and so they did…and the industry created ITIL consulting, training services and vendors created ITIL products to meet that demand. Of course, history now tells us that the dogma surrounding ITIL ultimately made the situation a lot worse and not better, and when it went wrong and everyone who previously was pro-ITIL was suddenly seeking to disassociate themselves with it, but that outcome is what ultimately killed innovation in the industry, that’s what led Gartner to scrap the MQ for Service Desk tools in 2011. So what really happened? Well I am describing this from a vendor perspective; the truth is we lost the ability to innovate. In fact, innovation transformed into “how many ITIL processes can I get certified on PinkVerify." The truth is products were being defined by what the PinkVerify (and other benchmark type reports including the Gartner MQ) set out, and that was almost exclusively NOT what customers actually needed. Customers had stopped driving innovation because instead of asking for what they actually needed, their RFI’s and RFP’s were pushed out asking about what ITIL processes your tool supports. To compete in this landscape and win business, vendors behaviour changed too. Instead of differentiating by innovation, vendors would focus on getting more processes into their products and making them more "ITIL compatible". It stopped mattering that there was no innovation because customers stopped demanding it, they wanted ITIL and that was that. Of course, when customers got their ITIL compatible tool and sent everyone on their ITIL foundation training they could tell their bosses that they are now “doing ITIL” and for a short time there was congratulations and jubilation for all concerned – that was until the same execs with the same consumer experience were not seeing any value improvement from IT. In fact all they were seeing was a big investment in ITIL and nothing really changed – no ROI. And to make things worse, by this time, while IT was being misled by the dogma of the industry movement that surrounded ITIL, the next wave of innovation had taken hold and was in full flow, once again threatening IT – THE CLOUD (that’s a whole other article). So back to the question “Why does innovation matter?” The truth is that as consumers, we rarely know what we need until someone has shown it to us. Who knew that we all needed smartphones? But when we see something that can change our work or personal lives for the better, we know it is what we need. Innovation is the thing that makes this happen. For me and for Hornbill, I looked at where we were and what the industry was doing, and I decided to change things and set a course to transform Hornbill to put innovation in front of everything we do, which meant taking some pretty big and uncomfortable steps. For a start, we set out plans for a brand-new product that facilitated rapid innovation by enabling continuous deployment so we could push features daily. I changed our organisation by removing old-ways of thinking and behaviours and re-structured to underpin this new approach. I stopped our organisation being led by the tune of industry reports and benchmarks like PinkVerify or being put into the nicely contained box that the Gartner MQ would impose on our thinking. Instead I switched our entire focus on what the customer needs to succeed, what can we do to make things better for our customers and the innovation we could drive on behalf of our customers. Now, our product roadmap is defined only by that thinking. The truth is, to innovate you need to be prepared to do things that not everyone agrees with. You also need to be prepared to put yourself on the line and to lead and not be led, and you absolutely should to be prepared to fail every now and then too. Of course, to lead you have to have something to say. You need to have good ideas, and in the case of a company like Hornbill, you also need to have extraordinary people to execute on those ideas. Innovation is important because innovation is simply another manifestation of leadership, and its only leadership that takes people forwards. If leadership is important, then so is innovation.

@nasimg I am afraid that the product is growing as is the use of its features so breaking up the forums into logical sections is really the only practical way to organise things. As I have no doubt you are discovering Hornbill is a lot more than just Service Manager so there is a lot to keep track of. However, in the case where we are making a big change we always place the link to the respective forum post in the app by the feature so as a general rule, I would suggest when we add a new feature and post such a link its probably a good idea for you to simply follow the post, that way you will be notified via email as the conversation develops - thats the best way to keep track of these changes if you need to. Thanks. Gerry

Hi @shamaila.yousaf If you have not deleted it then it should be there, I expect its just a visibility issue which is good news. Just so you are aware, Hornbill is a cloud solution so @DeadMeatGF will not have any visibility of the backups, that would be something Hornbill would need to do if you need to go down that route. @DeadMeatGF can advise you further. Gerry

Hi, Only the owner of a workspace is allowed to delete a workspace. If you select the Delete option it will prompt you to confirm and tell you that the delete operation is permanent as shown below, it defaults to No so you have to positively press the "Yes" button for this to happen. As far as I can remember this is NOT soft-deleted behind the scenes so there is no easy way to just get this back. If the content is important, the only way we could get this back would be to recover it from a backup, it should be possible but will require dedicated resource to extract the specific data, as well as any embedded image content. If you wanted us to go down that route that would I am afraid be a chargeable exercise as it would be fairly time consuming. Gerry

Hi Thats not exactly correct, any user (not just admins) can be given rights to access the reports within the admin console. its really just a question of configuring the appropriate rights so they have limited access just to the reports. Gerry

@Henrik Brattlie, Manag-E The date is still good, we are just finalising an agenda, I hope to be getting an official communication out early this week. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton I think thats the point, there will always be something thats *needed* thats not there, reporting is quite different to providing a list to browse and drill down into - thats my concern. Once we add the export we are opening the doors to reporting requirements and thats not really what the intention of the list in the service portal is. Perhaps, before we go adding an export we could get a clearer picture of what other information might be required - it may be that we would need to build a specific reporting/exporting feature that would be flexible enough to serve future needs - rather than creating something that will turn the list into something it is not intended to be. This might also be a diversification between the service (internal) portal and customer (external) portal as I do not invasive that an internal user would ever need (or justify a need) to be able to download the list of open and historic requests. @James Ainsworth we should look at this requirement in more detail before we just throw an export list option in. Gerry

Hi @Martyn Houghton Ok thanks for the clarification, that makes sense. I guess my only concern if the simple exporting of what is being displayed turns out not to be enough, service reporting requirements this way could lead to a lot to *extra* needs. Just exporting the list to CSV should be pretty straight forward. Gerry

Hi @Martyn Houghton Could we know more about the use case here? I say that because having such a function would most likely lead to needing more complex functions like formatting, sorting, date range filtering etc... which is not really what the list in the service portal is intended for. It is highly unlikely an internal IT user would require such a capability so I expect this is something to do with the need to facilitate external organisations/service integration of some form... It would be useful to understand the use case so we can make a judgement of how best to meet such a need. Thanks Gerry