Gerry

@Adrian Simpkins Sorry I did not specifically address your suggestion "If we could have some further options in the Edit options on an image that just let us update the existing image that would assist in lowering the admin. " my apologies. From memory there is a technical reason we cannot do that, I think its because the storage we have to and that powers this function generates the ID's based on content, so change the content, changes the ID, and we happen to use that same ID in the URL. We was aware that the Hornbill Image Library would fall short of being an image sharing solution, we really built it as a system for holding brand images for the portals and other areas of customisation, with a view that in the future a more flexible image sharing app/tool would be something we want to develop. Gerry

@Adrian Simpkins There is this free service you might also want to consider. Simple to use, free to get started. Never used it so not a recommendation as such, but seems to do the sort of thing that would work as it has a "replace image" feature (on the paid for versions at least). https://imgbb.com/ Gerry

@Adrian Simpkins Some kind of media sharing tool/feature in Hornbill is on my list of "nice to have features I would like to see because it would be handy" list, but these rarely make the priority list for development. Maybe one of our further hackethons. Its a bit like the Image Library in Hornbill but the ability to keep the link, but change the image, its that sort of thing. Its been asked for a number of times before. You can buy systems for doing exactly this, they are called DAMs (Digital Asset Management systems) they are very expensive for what they are and generally only marketing departments see value in them. Gerry

@CraigP It really depends on the function you intend to use the Microsoft Account permissions for. Each system that Microsoft provides is different, has different needs in terms of access, so it depends on what iBridge/ITOM automations you plan to use, what functions they will perform. We are not ourselves Microsoft experts, we may know, but we may not also know the specifics. Often when developing integrations we will not concentrate on the granular specifics of each Microsoft service, we will follow their developer guidelines which will often just say, things like Admin rights. Your Microsoft admins should have a good understanding of the specific rights/permissions needed to perform the specific task(s) that you need to. As I said we are not Microsoft experts and have no direct paths ourselves to Microsoft for support, Microsoft's services evolve and change frequently, so internally we *might* know specifics but its not something we can always answer. If you have more specifics you might get a better answer than this. Gerry

@Adrian Simpkins The only way to achieve this would be to host the image on a public facing web server, and reference that in the signature rather than embed the image in the email, that way you can change the image on the web server whenever it suits. Gerry

@s_devoy Yes, you would need to push those into Hornbill via API or email events, so depending on what hooks Azure events provides, you can either write a script to invoke an API on your Hornbill instance, or if you can configureAzure events via email, you can mail that into a shared maibox and then use an email routing rule (provided on the Hornbill platform) to perform an action like log/update request, create a task, send a notification - that sort of thing. Gerry

@s_devoy Please see here.. https://www.hornbill.com/integrations If you want to see the the specific details behind any of these integrations, navigate to the Hornbill Admin Solution, browse what you are after and you can click through to get more details. If you are an iBridge user and there is something you need that we do not already have, raise the question on the forums and the odds are very good that our integrations team will create it and get it onto the platform so you can use it. Gerry

@Sam P The problem here is, how would the system determine what constitutes "the good stuff" vs whats "not needed", I know there is a lot of talk of smart AI and stuff like that nowadays, but computers are just not that clever. This is one of the biggest problems with email, the unstructured format, the propensity for every organisation to have their own appended disclaimer statements further polluting the already messy replied and forwarded emails in a mix of plain text, HTML, random images, signatures and all sorts of other stuff, as well as the speed at which senders/forwarders/repliers respond to messages without any consideration to format, content relevance and so on, I am afraid you are doomed when it comes to email to *always* have to manually intervene, strip out just the good stuff using human intelligence to keep your system of record clean. The best solution here is to move away from accepting requests or updates via email and move your users/customers to a point where you are using self-service. Gerry

@Salma Sarwar "two parallel tasks" - you can put timeouts on human tasks, you can also organise your task assignments to groups instead of individuals to ensure there is never a likely hood of no one being able to complete them when needed. From what I can remember, there is also a super-user override you can complete the outstanding tasks that way. If authorisation function works better for your use case, I would use that. There are many ways to achieve these things, you can just re-adjust your approach to get what you need. The question is, what is the business scenario that would lead a business process to stall because a human task you have assigned cannot be completed - understand that and design that possibility out of the workflow. Gerry

This is pretty much ready to go. The initial work has been done to focus on the Analyst Search/Browse workflow and forms the foundation of the Knowledge Management function within Service Manager. We will build on this and expand/improve the knowledge integration in relation to the "Request Logging" both on the Portals and when an Analyst is logging a request in the usual way. We are aiming for much tighter integration of knowledge within the call logging workflows including solution suggestions and knowledge outcomes. For now, here are a couple of videos to wet the appetite a little. Knowledge Management - Analyst experience - https://youtu.be/WE3hkujJS58 Configuring the Knowledge Management module - https://youtu.be/J-8acPNJyRo I am chasing internally to see what else we need to do in order to release thing functionality to customers. As this is a new capability that sits along side what is already there, this will simply become available, there is no need for any kind of feature switch. I will post here as soon as I have a confirmed release expectation. Gerry

@Berto2002 Basically BPM/Workflow != AutoTasks, they are two completely different, independent and non-connected things. The Workflow is an orchestrator of activity (both human and automated) while AutoTasks are a bit like scripts that can be run, in context, from a button or other interaction. An auto-task can also be run from within a BPM Workflow. However, an AutoTask cannot influence the internals of a BPM Instance state, which is what the checkpoints are part of. Gerry

@samwoo from your other post, what you are talking about is handling/managing requests from your citizens right? This is actually quite a big, and very specific area. The main reason for this is a lot of the interactions (requests) would not include a login. For example, an inquiry into a council tax bill might only require you to provide your address, surname, DOB and last bill value to "authorise" the request you are making, and each service you present to your citizens would have different authorisation criteria etc... as I understand it, the who and where information in a typical local authority is very fluid, and because of the diverse range of people, there are age demographics, some have smartphones, some still use pen and paper etc... and all of those people need to be catered for. A "CRM" system used in this context is not something you can easily classify as "A CRM Tool". As I am sure you can appreciate, Hornbill is technically capable of doing this quite well, the portal (customer) is not ideally tuned for this sort of thing, but IC is a good potential alternaive to the other "forms" system you will likely be using. In reality though, you will not get very far into your organisation before they will ask you the "who else is using Hornbill for the CRM requirement in organisation s like ours..." question to which the answer will be none... and I expect that is where the conversation will come to an end. It really does to depend on what CRM tool you are using, and how its being used. Service Manager can certainly handle the transactional and fulfilment end of things no problem, am happy to explore that a little further with you if you want. Gerry

@samwoo, You could mean anything from customer management, account management, sales automation, marketing automation... etc... sort of endless category really. If you can be more specific I would be very interested to know more. Good questions to answer would be: - * What CRM tool are you currently using? * Who is using the CRM tool? * What are they using the CRM tool for? Thanks Gerry

Yes, until the end of January 2023 Gerry

This is available now on live.

@Cecilia Blumenstock I said, one or two weeks, you said one or two months I will meet you in the middle here, you have been a long standing customer. I will extend the service portal until the end of January, so 31st will be the last day, that it though... no more, 3 years and one month is a lot of "extension"... Gerry

@Cecilia Blumenstock @Gareth Watkins Its a little disingenuous to suggest this is a last minute thing which is how one might read your comment - we first announced the decommissioning of this *before* the pandemic, so over 3 years ago ,we have been reminding and delaying every since, this is not a new thing, we put it on hold when COVID hit and have since waited another year or so, I am reluctant to continue to drag this on ad infinitum, so the plan is to shut this now, unmaintained and technically not really supported portal down at the end of the year, part of our "quiet time" clean-up. There is an option for a re-direct, how long we can keep that active I am not sure to be honest, I expect we possibly cannot, as that redirect is a function of the portal its self. I think three years ago our thinking was, customers would migrate and we would provide a re-direct for simplicity. We do not want to disrupt our customers, or your customers, but we have had this on the cards for a number of years now, and the fact that we are having to maintain this service as operational is actually blocking future developments, so it really needs to come to an end. If you both can give me a date in January where you are happy now to agree to service discontinuation, I will see what I can do internally to delay this, but if you are asking for more than a week or two into January then I am reluctant to. Gerry

@Malcolm Because you typically run a business process against a request, changing the request type is a challenge, so typically you would just raise a service request, and then perhaps raise another child request of the appropriate request type after whatever triage process you follow. I can tell you, the redesign of the portfolio in Service Manager is proving to be a challenge, we are currently working out how best to effect the changes we want to make to take Hornbill forward as we have many ESM requirements we want to meet, but we are figuring out how we can get those changes without impacting customers, there is no easy answer to this it seems, and its not something we can do as quickly as I would have hoped. None the less, we are looking at it, and I there are definitely things we have in mind that could help with what you are trying to achieve, but I would not suggest waiting for these changes as we have no clear delivery date for this change and the end result might not be what you want. Gerry

@billster Yes it is, if you grant the user the "sys.a.manageUsers" right, they will be able to perform a password reset on any user account. Use right with caution though, it basically means, anyone with that admin right can change any aspect of any user account, including resetting the password to gain access via direct login. A better alternative is to have the users who's password needs resetting to just use the "Forgot Password" option on the login screen (if enabled), they will receive an email and will be able to reset their own password. Gerry

Not easily I am afraid, it depends how you have set your instance up, basically, if you have no user accounts with the rights to do this, you will not be able to because of security controls. Our cloud team can do a one-time recovery of the 'admin' account password for you, but only if they get a formal request from the email address of the person who is registered as the authoritative account user on your Hornbill instance. If thats not possible, and you still need access then we would need some kind of authorisation from your executive to initiate an account password recovery. In general, no one at Hornbill has administrative access to any customers instance, any access we get we ourselves require permission and do that through the support access key that our customer has to generate. Gerry

Its not possible to change the logo of the login screen, you can change the image and include your branding on that, you can also change the text that appears below the logo from what I remember. Gerry

@Dave Longley In a typical two-way integration, there is a two way need for each system to call back into the other system. As a general rules, integrations push from the originating system to the target (integrated with) system. So for example, if from the BPM you log a ticket in another system, the BPM would make the call through our integration bridge to the other system, log a ticket passing in our reference number, and return the remote systems ticket reference and store that against the source ticket. If you then require the source system to get updates from the ticket in the remote system, it would typically be the remote system that would be configured to call back into the source system with the provided reference and post updates/perform whatever logic is then required. That is typically how two-way integrations would work Gerry

Following on from the above errors and by way of an explanation. Over the last few days/weeks, Microsoft have been updating their servers which changed the priority of TLS version negotiation as part of the key exchange process, and our server was not handling the case where the negotiation was declared as TLS1.3 and that key exchange negotiation failed, there was no fall-back to TLS1.2 which there should have been. So no fall-back and a failing TLS1.3 key exchange negotiation. This was a problem in Hornbill's code, triggered by changes being made by Microsoft. Our initial thought was this was a Microsoft issue, given that our other independent test points on systems like GMail, Postfix and others were all fine. A work-around was applied to our code and provided as a hot-fix, this hot fix forced the negotiation down to TLS1.2. We since applied an update to one of the third party libraries we use after their feedback has confirmed the problem is now resolved without the forced downgrade to TLS1.2, that will be in the next platform update. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, and we appreciate just how important Hornbill is to our customers day to day operations. Unfortunately when working with 3rd-party systems, changes do happen and from time to time that are not within our control and things can get broken. Hopefully we continue to demonstrate that we are able to respond to these kind of events and resolve the issues in a timely manor. And for those that want some more technical details, this is the technical bit... ------- The issue related to TLS 1.3 ClientHello w/ the "key_share" extension. The initial ClientHello message can include pre-generated key shares. While it is not computationally intensive to generate an x25519 key share, and virtually all servers support x25519, it is far more computationally expensive to generate an secp256r1 key share. If our server generated it, then for applications that requires high-performance w/ many connections, the extra work of generating the secp256r1 key share would be significant. Therefore, Hornbill SMTP implementation just pre-generates the x25519 key. If that key is not supported, the server will simply respond with a HelloRetryRequest, in which case Hornbill sends a new ClientHello with the secp256r1 key_share, or whatever other key shares are needed. Microsoft at some point seems to have stopped supporting x25519, or maybe changed something with the HelloRetryRequest request, such that the HelloRetryRequest failed after a failed negotiation attempt for a TLS1.3 negotiation, its not clear exactly what has changed or why as this is not documented. Hornbill SMTP implementation now pre-generates the secp256r1 key share specifically for Microsoft servers. This is the best generic solution because TLS connections will have better performance for the vast majority of SMTP servers currently supporting x25519 -------

I have extended the function we are adding to include the ability for you to define the status(s) that you would consider completed, so when you use this suspend node you will be able to specify one or more status's that all linked requests should meet before resume, this means you can use it for other types of status-related suspensions. Will post an example once its ready for internal testing Gerry

@SJEaton Just to confirm the above, the dev team has said this is most likely available in the next Service Manager update, so a small number of days from now most likely, depending what else is in the release pipeline. Gerry