Gerry

Just a quick update on this. We are adding this node but in the design phase we are running into problems with how to deal with input and results to/from WebCalls and the only way to make this flexible enough is to provide some form of basic coding interface to glue stuff together. This is not ideal, i do not want to morph the BPM into any kind of programming environment so although I will continue to progress this and add it as an experimental feature, I would not recommend it for production use. I need to find a better way of adding this capability without the need for customers having to code in the BPM. This will almost certainly mean some form of integration bridge to host the "glue" code and present the BPM with something that is usable by non-techs. As an interim we can use the webcall node but as I say without us providing a way for you to write glue code its use will be very limited I think. Anyway, please watch this space, integration approaches are high on our agenda at the moment and I have no doubt that whatever solution(s) we do come up with should be pretty awesome. Gerry

Andy, We run our backups nightly, generally in the early AM for a given timezone. Depending on what data and the size of your data set and full recovery may take an hour or so. I would encourage you/your team to sense check on here what you are going to do, ideally you don't want to trash your own data if you can help it Gerry

HI @greggjf Yes this does come up from time to time. We present time in this way to help you at a glance, but did you know that if you float the mouse over the time and wait 500ms it will show you the absolute date/time in a tool-tip popup? Does that solve your problem? In any case, we agree with you that some people prefer to have the absolute date/time displayed instead so we are going to add a user preference setting so you can choose one behaviour or the other, that should be deployed within the next week or so. I have had a play around with this myself and I cannot get it to do anything without it prompting. A quick code review would suggest that its not possible for this to happen either so not sure whats going on there.... can you re-create the problem on our demo sandbox? In any case, upon review of the "Delete All" button, we don't much like the current implementation ourselves so we are going to change it so you are forced to select "Delete" or "Delete Permanently", with a double conformation for the latter. This change has been specified now and will be in the works in the next day or two, will be rolled out by the end of next week the latest. This would appear to be a configuration issue, please see @Victor comments above. Thanks again for the feedback, its very much appreciated because we do genuinely love working with our customers to help improve our solution for our community. Gerry

Hi Greg, Thanks for your comments/feedback, can I ask you to expand on a couple of things please. Time stamps are meaningless - Can you be more specific here, "The stamps" do you mean timestamps? In what way could they be more meaningful? Raise ticket from email only brings over the customer name and nothing else. - To the best of my knowledge this behaviour is a function within Service Manager and should not be influenced by which mail view you are currently using. Is there any possibility of a screenshot or further explanation? Delete all email button in both views is dangerous and has wiped out the mailbox 3 times already, - I think I can see what you are saying here. In our defence, when you press the Delete All button it does prompt you with the message "This action will completely delete all the messages in the current folder. Are you sure?" telling you what its about to do but I think we can definitely improve on this and not just do a permanent delete by default. If you are going for an Outlook look then the functionality needs to work in the same way, at the moment the new version just looks pretty but isnt good to use. - yes I agree, we see Hornbill as a living breathing thing and always appreciate feedback and suggestions. Thanks, Gerry

@Martyn Houghton Oh ok, thanks. Maybe if you have the time you could write up what you are trying to achieve, it would be interesting to understand the full scope of what your file distribution requirements are, I am not sure I fully understand the need. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton Just curious to know, what file distribution tool do you use/would you intend to integrate with? Gerry

@samwoo As a general rule, if you want to make use of API's or integrate two or more systems you need some basic programming skills - this is why I am not totally comfortable with adding this to the BPM because it turns the BPM into a programming environment - which is bad for both the BPM and the people (like yourself who do not have programming skills) because it starts to turn the BPM into a programming environment. This is where a lot of vendors get it wrong, its a mistake we also made with Supportworks so I am not too keen on re-creating those past problems. However, in the absence of anything else this is a good interim feature to support those that have the technical/development skills to make use of it. Once introduced we will always support it, but only as an *advanced* feature. This advanced feature will ultimately be superseded with something better. High on our agenda is integration and we are working on a number of things to make it possible for people without programming experience to achieve a high degree of integration and automation orchestration within your IT department which can be driven from the BPM - so watch this space in the coming months. Gerry

@Keith I am not 100% sure but I think it *might* be possible to do this from the admin tool in the language strings directly. As I say I am not 100% sure, someone from the SM appdev team should be able to confirm one way or the other so we will post back here. It is however probably worth pointing out that while we aim to have everything 100% language translatable, the odd thing might slip through every now and then though, we are human too and possible not perfect every day so if there is something we have missed I am sure we will sort it out very soon. Gerry

Relevant to this thread is this previous conversation:

Relevant to this post is this:

@Lyonel Lol you are welcome, glad to oblige I would really love to hear about the kinds of integrations you would like to make using this functionality if you care to share? No the URL can be any HTTP or HTTPS GET or POST request. You should keep in mind that it will be our servers making the actual web call so whatever URL you use has to be reachable on the public Internet. With regards to using HTTPS, while we will not enforce HTTPS we would of course strongly recommend that you do use it because of the traffic being transmitted over public networks Gerry

I thought I would post a quick preview of an upcoming feature of our business process tool. We are expanding its capability to include a new "Web Call" node. This new node will enable you to make calls to other systems or cloud services applications via restful API's which significantly expands your options for automation of business processes that need to interact with other systems. My goal as the architect for our platform technology has always been to keep the BPM 100% code free so that process managers do not have to have a programming background in order to make effective use of our BPM, but thats always a play-off, and this is one example where the absence of code limits absolute flexibility because there are so many different shapes and sizes of API's out there, code is the only "glue" that will give you ultimate flexibility. To solve that problem we are also developing an "API bridge" service that can contain and run glue code required while still keeping the BPM clean and code free for simpler day to day use. Once this feature is rolled out (expected to be in the next 2-3 weeks max) we will be exploring options for achieving the same for on-premise IT infrastructure and operations type orchestration and automation which I hope to be announcing in the coming weeks. This initial implementation is only the first step on our journey for much greater expansion of our BPM integration capability broadening our scope of IT Service Management into IT Operations Management for which there has been a significant demand for. Gerry

@Gary@ADL, Yes we really are that awesome (just kidding of course) the icons appear up on the top right when there is new stuff, this is effectively a "little" menu button that works just like the main menu button but is only shown when there is new stuff. Glad you like the enhancement. Gerry

@Lyonel @TSheward_SGW Thanks for your feedback. You should consider the new nav a work in progress, our work is never done. However, this change paves the way for other things we would like to do so watch this space. In reading your comments I thought I would pick up on the one point you both made around the sub-menu's .... We took quite a lot of time in debate about how this should/should not work, and there is no perfect answer to the problem. The old nav had sub-menu's so we are stuck with having to do something. The problem with having the whole tile as a hotspot for showing the sub-menu is it can be very annoying when you want to click on the tile to the right but you were not quick enough and the sub-menu pops up and is in your way. What we have come up with seems to work quite well once you are over the the initial impression of it, basically give it a week or two of use and you may well become more comfortable with it. The other thing to remember (as we have to too) is that whatever we do has to work on browser and mobile devices with touch so its actually a lot more complicated to get right than it may initially look. Anyway, please keep the feedback coming, its most appreciated. Gerry

Hi Doug, Yes someone could possible load the database through the tools we already provide, however we have restricted the amount of direct DB access via SQL you can perform, we have application-level pre-parsing of SQL to prevent harmful statements and we have application-level load supervision and controls to watch for dumb queries and can kill them before any harm is done to the performance of the system/instance I cannot give you a positive response to your request because as I say there is currently no technical way for us to provide this to you in a safe an appropriate way. We would not provide customers direct access to the underlying database raw as it would be too risky and would mean delivering performance to our performance standards could easily be compromised. One day in the future we may offer a data replication service where a separate database is run in our DC and your instance data would be replicated to it, this server we could provide you direct access via the MySQL wire protocol to without any issues, this would mean you could use an ODBC driver. However, I must stress that while we have this under consideration we have no technical solution to provide this, we still need to consider security and other issues. Gerry

Steve, It will recognise it as a user ID I believe. Gerry

Hello Melissa, We have not really progressed with this I am afraid. We recognise its an issue but we don't really have a solution to the problem at this point. This only ever comes up once as each customer is setting up their users. For many we tackle this on "import" so on-going is generally insignificant. I will keep it on the agenda but if I am honest by the time we get to do anything about this I expect your implementation phase will be done and it will no longer be a top-of-agenda item. If we do make any progress I will be sure to post back here. Gerry

Nasim, I expect this is some oddity in the IE11 behaviour, as far as I am aware this does not occur in Edge either otherwise I would have expected it to be reported before. Although its sometimes possible, we are very reluctant to put "hacks" in to deal with IE11 issues because it can cause problems for other users. If we can replicate the problem this end we will see if its possible for us to do something Gerry

Hi Doug, At this time we have no way of providing you direct access to the underlying database for this purpose. Being a SaaS service we have to continuously optimise queries and database performance, something we could not do with such an arrangement. Gerry

Hi Mark, Its probably in the archives now as we archive everything 24/7. If you have a support service you could log a call and the techs might be able to retrieve the log. Alternatively wait until it occurs again and then download the log for the same day. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton I will need to ask some of the devs some questions, as far as I am aware this should only happen when there is no inactivity. In the case of a dashboard slideshow this will never be the case. However, we are using Websockets for notifications and screen update events so I am wondering if it has something to do with this -I will need to investigate further. However, we have many customers using the slideshows and most of them do not seem to be having this problem so I am not sure how easy it will be to replicate, its possible environmental. Gerry

According to the error message... No recipients found. Unable to process the message Looks like the email message its self did not include any email recipients (from, to, cc, bcc)... so an invalid email message. The tracking ID will allow you to look in the logs and see the message processing Gerry

@Martyn Houghton The way this is normally achieved is the reverse of what you are thinking (I think). So instead of the BPM having to send all possible variables (for example, all values of an entity) to the service being invoked, what would happen in practice is the integration tool upon receiving an event would make a call back into the Hornbill service to get whatever addtional information it needs in order to complete its work. This is true for WebHooks also, when we fire an entity WebHook for a record update, we only send the changed field values as part of the request so its hard to predict which values receive, however, we always send the primary key. So most uses of WebHooks involve a script that when fired will grab the primary key value its been passed by the invoker and then using an API key (which is generally hard coded into the WebHook script) will call back into the Hornbill service using one or more of the API's to retrieve further information. There are a number of reasons its done like this but the main reason is to ensure that all "programming" stays contained within the integration platform only. Gerry

@Martyn Houghton Yes it does, there is no more clicks you need to do to achieve the same result as the old nav system. In fact in a couple of cases you can get to the same place with less clicks. We are going to have this in preview for a few weeks so there will be plenty of time for discussion, review and comment. Its currently on our beta stream which means we are using it internally already and getting plenty of commentary already Gerry

@Kelvin I am afraid this is still work in progress, we have had to do some other important works under the hood which have taken priority for now. We are currently working on the "events" system, this is the area thats responsible for automated screen updates when things change, this work is primarily for email and tasks functionality so needs to be completed first, but has turned out to be a bit more complex than originally though. So I expect we have another 4-5 weeks to go. But do be assured its being worked on. Gerry