Gerry

Hi Samuel, Me and the team here at Hornbill take the quality of the service we provide very seriously so no thanks required, you should expect nothing less than a first class service from us. It is not always easy and we don't always get things 100% right, but we will always solve problems we can see and find new ways of making what we provide better. I will post with an update in a weeks time when I am sure we will know a lot more about what you have been seeing - thanks for your patience. Gerry

Hi Ralf, I am sure one of the SM product guys will jump in here but here is my 10 cents... shipping standard reports has been a long running conversation here amongst the product teams. On the one hand, in Supportworks we shipped over 300 OOB reports, some customers loved that and some hated it. A common thread though is reporting is complicated, and we know that, so providing advanced SQL reporting capabilities while awesome does not work for everyone - the biggest complaint we get around reporting apart from no OOB reports is "reporting is too complicated" and we get that. In our mission to make SM the best and most easiest solution to use for our customers we have come to realise we need something different for reporting. Like we have done for almost every other aspect of Service Manager and our new Platform for things like updates, codeless customisations, in-app micr0 training and other such stuff, we need to do the same for reporting, we need to take away all of the heavy lifting involved in reporting and make it simple for our customers to get out exactly what they need, when they need it without having to delve into the depts of database schema's and SQL JOIN statements. To that end our SM application team have a strategic initiative to provide a new layer of application-specific (ITIL, SDI etc...) reporting capability with much of what you need provided out of the box but tailorable by each individual customer as they need. In other words, we are going to be adding reports that we will treat like part of the product, which means those reports will evolve and improve over time - without disturbing your customisations you apply to the same reports. This is still work in progress so its difficult to be very specific at this point but that is our plan, and its our next high-priority focus after the completion of SLA and Configuration Management strategic stories, the first baselines of which are coming to an end this month (watch this space). This is not a straightforward thing to tackle and wont be done in a short time window, so you will need to work with the advanced reporting for now but watch this space, we should be delivering something quite compelling over the course of H2 this year. I will leave it to someone else to post answers to the specific technical questions you have. [edit] I should also mention that if anyone has any desire to put forward report ideas, specs or suggestions we are listening - does not meant you will get your specific report but it will help us deduce the most commonly needed reporting requirements - I think I can be honest and say as a vendor we would know a great deal less about real world reporting needs than our customers who do this every day. Gerry

Hi Samuel, Just a quick update, we now have three teams looking at performance at three different layers in our stack, this is mostly and observe and hypothasize exercise so I have nothing more to feedback at this time apart from letting you know that we are taking your feedback and seriously, and are looking at every aspect of it in order for us to understand what you are seeing. We can see some areas of our system where there is opportunity to optimise but as of now there is no single thing that stands out as a culprit, where we do see spikes, it just seems to be general load related - that though is only an initial impression, we still have a lot more to consider. If you would be good enough to relay to your users that we are looking at our systems and the response times so would appreciate it if you can bear with us for a few days while we make our observations. Gerry

Hi Samuel, We are going to take a look at the logs on your instance and monitor more closely for a few days to see if we can understand what you are seeing. An at-a-glance look does not show anything untoward apart from some spikes in use where response times on some API calls take a little longer than usual. In order to understand whats happening we need to study use patterns for a few days so please bear with us. If there is anything we can do short-term we will of course do that. Either way we will post back here with an update soon. Gerry

Hi Ralf, There is currently no global address book functionality in Hornbill. Because of the way in which we integrate with AD is primarily through SAML for authentication we had not built any address book import capabilities into Hornbill like we did with Supportworks. What I would suggest you could do is create the address list(s) you need on your Exchange Server (or other mail server you are using) and ensure that those mailing list(s) have an e-mail address (something like everyone_that_needs_to_know@hornbill.com for example ), then you can send to that mailing list and let Exchange distribute the message to everyone in the respective mailing list - will this work? Gerry

When you configure a service you can set which action options you have for that specific service. Choose "Services" from the service desk menu on the left side, choose the service this relates to, in the service click on the "Request Configuration" tab and you can see the optiuons in there. Not sure if changes in there effect the already raised requests, I imagine they do but I dont know SM that well to be sure, I expect someone that does know from the SM team will post more detail here. Gerry

Hi Martyn, This has been implemented and is currently washing through our quality stages, should be in an update in the next 2/3 days. Gerry

Ralf, You should also know that you can give users restricted access to the admin UI so they can access the reports and dashboards without being exposed to anything else. However, the reporting capability in the admin tool is really designed for administrators and advanced use only. Each application should provide a useful set of user-friendly reports and report creation capabilities - and as James mentions there is a significant focus on this in H2 2016 for Service Manager application team Gerry

Did you know that we provide an ever expanding list of open-source tools for integrating and extending the Hornbill platform. We release these tools as open source tools under a very liberal open source licence (shown below). Our team here at Hornbill support many of these tools via our community channels and we encourage our customers and technology partners to get involved. These tools and examples provide a great resource for getting started with API/WebHook level integrations with our platform. All of these tools are open source and are freely available in source code from our GitHub repository. https://github.com/hornbill/ Please also see our integration page for more details and documentation on specific tools that are in common use. https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Integration Gerry The Hornbill Community License (HCL) Copyright (c) 2015 Hornbill Technologies Ltd (https://hornbill.com) Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. * Where this software is compiled into a stand-alone program the above Copyright notice shall be included in the programs published documentation and shown in any help or about text provided by the software at runtime and shall be visible to the end user of the program. * Where this software is used in any way whatsoever to provide a hosted or cloud based service, application, web service API or integration, the above copyright notice shall be included in the published documentation and shown in any help text or about box provided by the software and shall be visible to the end user. * The ELUA or, in the case of a SaaS or Hosted service, the Terms of Service agreement shall include the following statement: - Portions of this software Copyright (c) 2015 Hornbill Technologies Ltd (https://hornbill.com) THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

The source code might offer some insight as to the specific error, looks like it could do with outputting the result of the userLogon call. https://github.com/hornbill/goHornbillCleaner/blob/master/hornbillCleaner.go Gerry

Gareth, Not sure the question is clear which is probably why no response. Date/times in the database are stored as DATETIME types and everything is in UTC yes, everything comes back in the API's as UTC so you have to do a local timezone conversion for presentation. If you can be a bit more specific about what you are trying to achieve I can probably give you some guidance Gerry

Martyn, Good call, added. https://forums.hornbill.com/index.php?showforum=132 Gerry

Martyn, I should have mentioned... in the spirit of being transparent, under the hood we do actually have something very similar to VPME, we cal it Flowcode and its essentially a graphical interface for drawing our functional logic flows, this is what is under the hood that make the BPM work, all of the functional nodes you can invoke are actually Flowcodes which are developed by the application team. It is not possible to let individual customers edit/add to these because we would not be able to update our customers instances if we did. Gerry

Hi Martyn, I think what you are asking for is something similar to what VPME in Supportworks could do? The BPM is not designed for doing functional logic, its designed for a very different purpose and we have done everything we can to make it as non-technical as possible so business users are able to work with it. On the Hornbill platform the equivalent to VPME would be WebHooks, conceptually very similar to VPME except the evens would be invoking some code that runs on one of your own servers. Are WebHooks something you have considered using? Gerry

Hi Tony, Ok thanks for the feedback, thats helpful. If you can answer the other questions I posed above that would be helpful also Gerry

Hi Gareth, Just an update, our user who has seen this error yesterday was also in Firefox, so it looks like it could be a Firefox specific issue. Would be good if others who have seen the problem could feedback, if it is a firefox specific problem we could at least narrow down the focus and see if we can find a solution. Gerry

Hi Gareth, Not that we are aware of at least. One of our remote workers (based in Australia) has also seen this error a couple of times so there is definitely something going on but we are not very close at understanding what the cause is just yet. Any feedback you can give us will help, thanks for asking your team to collate the information. Gerry

Kelvin, gwyne and Tonyo, Thanks for the report, our team have been looking into this today to try and understand what the problem is. We have attempted to re-produce this problem and the only way we can reproduce this is to disconnect the network and force the app to make an API call. Detailed Description of the Problem Having done a code review we have narrowed it down to one specific point in the code which will only be invoked whenever the browser attempts to make an API call to our services API endpoint https://eurapi.hornbill.com/[instance]/some_service The error code -1 is returned/reported if the browser failed to make a connection to our front end servers. We have checked the logs and we cannot see anything untoward on the server so we need to investigate further. Unfortunately the browser only returns us an http response code of -1, in the code there is nothing else we can get at the code level, we could see more in the browser console in the network tab (more on that in a moment). As more than one site has now seen this problem we are assuming there is something wrong our and and need to investigate further. More Information Required In order to investigate further can I please ask the following questions? How often does this happen? Once you get the error and do a browser refresh does everything work again? Does this happen to more than one specific user? Does it always happen to the same users? What browsers are being used where you are seeing the error? [EDIT] can someone who is seeing the problem also provide us with your source IP address so we can track through our logs What would be terribly useful would be to see what is reported in the Network tab of the browser console. Does anyone who is seeing the problem know how to inspect the network tab of the browser console? of if not, is anyone willing to talk to one of our techs so we can guide you through using the browser console so we can experience the error and get a screenshot of the network console errors? Any information/feedback would be much appreciated. Gerry

Martyn, Sure, we will bear it in mind. Gerry

All, Following a successful preview period the new admin UI has now replaced the old admin UI, the old admin UI has been decommissioned globally. Thank you for your feedback during the preview cycle, all feedback is invaluable and always welcome. The new admin UI is developed using the same technology stack (Angular and Bootstrap) as the User UI so not only is it much faster, slicker and more robust, but we are able to develop and evolve the tool much faster. One of the key objectives we had for this iteration of the admin tool was to pave the way for more application-specific administrative functions in the admin tool creating a clear separation of concerns between day-to-day use and administrative tasks/use. We hope you enjoy using the new Admin UI as much has we have enjoyed creating it. Gerry

Adam, You don't need to provide us anything, but you may need to re-configure your SSO profile in the admin tool. Generally that would mean, once you have added your new cert to AD, re-importing your XML Meta data into the Hornbill SSO profile, your meta data would include the public certs which we would hold in our database, when your AD generates a signed response using the new cert, we will have the new cert and will be able to authenticate the requests. I am no expert so hopefully that makes sense, it should certainly make sense to your AD admin/expert. Hope that helps. Gerry

Is it possible to get a screenshot, that seems like a very odd error, I just done a status check on your instance and everything seems fine, its odd that some of your users can log in and others not, appears on the face of it to be a local issue of some kind.

Hi Samuel, Yes sorry about the crappy formatting, we are currently looking into that and will try to sort it out. I am glad you like our approach and are not put off by my response. We have a deep rooted belief in what we are doing and we think all software used in the enterprise should be this easy to use. Traditional software upgrades, staging and managing/planning releases is archaic in many ways. There are some edge cases where CD does not work or is not acceptable, for example, in space flight or where human life would be put at risk if something did go wrong. For the rest of us though, the inconvenience of suffering the odd hiccup is far outweighed by the benefits of never having to worry about software upgrade projects, down time, massive UI change, training and all the other stuff that goes along with *big* releases of software. Gerry

Hi Samuel, I wanted to respond to your post in order to explain our delivery process, please read this carefully as its very important. We develop and deliver our application using a process known as Continuous Delivery, there are many advantages to this approach, not least of which is the significant cost savings made by not having to do more traditional software upgrades. You should think of Hornbill as a "service" to which you subscribe, you should not look at it as some on-premise software application. The Hornbill platform is automatically updated by us on a regular basis, we ensure that its kept up to date and we guarantee it does not break and if something does go wrong we fix it, this is already happening and happens 2-3 time a month at least. We make small low risk changes very regularly to ensure that we deliver new features continuously without breaking things. Think about this like Facebook, Google, Gmail or LinkedIn, if you use any of these platforms you will never know (or care) what version they are on, you will just use the service....Hornbill is the same in this regard. For historical reasons, we allow customers to regulate when they take the updates for the applications (in your case Service Manager, Document Manager and Customer Manager) running on their instance by presenting an "Update" button in the Hornbill App Store. In the future this "Update" option will be removed and applications that are installed on your instance will be automatically updated by us in the same way as we do currently for the platform, its important that you know this in the context of the questions you are asking. Its incredibly important that you keep your applications up to date, the longer you go between updates the higher the risk you are creating for your organisation in terms of potential problems and the harder it will be for our team to resolve any issues that might arise - most customers keep their apps up to date on our platform. So in answer to your individual questions.... The upgrades are recommended to be done out of hours. How long can it take to upgrade a single module? The update (not upgrade - important distinction) will take anywhere between 20 and 60 SECONDS, all that is involved is going to the app store and pressing the update button, you will see the progress bar. The "recommending to be done out of hours" is misguiding, it would be better to say we recommend you do this at a time when your instance is not in peak use to minimise risk of disruption, early morning, lunch time or at the end of the day are good times for most people. Applications can be updated on our system while it is being used live, there is no user disruption at all so you should not have to schedule anything, notify your users or do any of those planning things that are associated with more traditional software deployments. What is a realistic timescale to upgrade all three in the same night? Once we have this information it’ll be easier to time When you are in the Hornbill App Store you can press the Update button on all apps that need upgrading all at the same time, they will all update at the same time. Do you have a recovery plan if the module upgrades go wrong or the system goes down out of hours? Who do we contact? What can we do to resolve any issues? Yes we do, we guarantee nothing will break -- ever, thats part of our service and we stand by it, just update your applications and your are good to go. If something does go wrong just contact our support team and we will fix it. Generally we know about anything breaking long before our customers do and fix things before they impact anyone. Our platform is supported 24x7x365 so someone is always on had to fix something should it go wrong. However, we see very few problems occurring relating to an application update, thats part of the benefit that the Hornbill platform delivers. What is the road map for module upgrades? We do not publish any forward roadmap, we deliver features an updates continuously, our content changes and evolves continuously in response to customer and market needs, a roadmap, especially a date-bound one would remove our ability to be agile and evolve our solution in an adaptable and malleable way. You can see the change log/release notes for each application and the platform its self from within your instance admin tool. How many upgrades/versions do we have to miss before we stop receiving support from Hornbill until we have done so? Or how long can we put an upgrade on hold for. You should keep your applications up to date, the very best option is to keep your updates applied as incremental as our updates are pushed out, that is the lowest risk. We do recognise this is a burden for our customers which is why removing the "Update" button is on our agenda. Is there a test system for Hornbill where we can test upgrades (and other settings) before doing it to the Live environment? If not, is there any possibility of one in the future One of the key value propositions of our solution is there is no need for a dev/test staging, you as a customer are free from this burden, as I said before you should simply treat Hornbill as a service that you subscribe to and use, and relax in the knowledge that we do all this work for you in the background. All of this would have been explained while you were evaluating the solution as part of your Hornbill Switch On so you may want to speak with those involved in order to clarify these points. I am very glad you raised these questions though, I think the wider Hornbill Community will benefit from some of the questions and answers in this post. Regards, Gerry

Hi Martyn, Yeah we have never enabled editing of posts, the intent was always for users to correct with follow-up comments. I am sure we will get to versioned editing at some point but its not on the short-term road map at the moment I am afraid. Gerry