Nesting Services or adding FAQs against catalog items, grouping FAQ's

[Gary@ADL]

Hi Guys - just wandering if it is in the pipeline to be able to nest services, or something similar,

 

heres our scenario.

 

currently we have lots of services (approx 30), one for each different system we use. against each of these services, we have a few FAQ's. and a few catalog items

 

the issue is, is that when the customer goes to use the portal, they have 30 services to choose from, which is a bit confusing, so we are looking some of these services together into 6 groups. e.g. applications. hardware etc, an then use like an index workflow to route the customer down the correct workflow for what they specifically want, 

 

the problem will then be is that if we group say 7 services into one service just called 'applications'. we'l then have about 25-30 FAQ's against the one service, which isnt really ideal.

 

what we are wandering is if there is any plans to develop this area at all?  originally we thought it woudl be great if we could essentialy just nest the services under a top level service, or perhaps add FAQ's against catalog items rather than services, or even if we could have the ability the group FAQ's within folders within a service?

 

we are just batting ideas around the moment - we are definately reducing down to only 6 services on the customer portal, but it would be a shame to loose the FAQs against each area. 

 

something else we considered was also using the document manager, but unsure if we can provide links from the FAQ section straight to a doc, and we also like how the FAQs are embedded.

 

thanks

Gary 

 

 

 

 

[Steve Giller]

Isn't that how Catalog Items work, or am I misunderstanding your requirements.

[Martyn Houghton]

@Gary@ADL

I believe there are plans to support subscriptions down to the catalog level , which would allow you to control access to individual catalog entries within the single service thereby reducing the number of services you have. But at the moment the FAQ's exist at the Service Level, so there is no relationship to the catalog level, therefore I think this is what you would need to happen to support your scenario.

Cheers

Martyn

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Gary@ADL

Thanks for your post.

We do plan on introducing some more structure to services and provide a hierarchy of services.  This would come with the concept of having Customer or Business facing services that are supported by a number of technical services or 3rd party services.  Information provided in the technical services would feed the Business Services so that outages and other information can be easily presented to the up stream services.

The Search option on the portals can also be useful for narrowing down the services and catalog items.   If a customer is looking for something particular, this could help.  Maybe the search needs to be made more prominent to encourage starting with the search.

As @Martyn Houghton suggests we do have some other changes with subscriptions to catalog items being one of them.  This is still in our backlog but we will continue to review and progress these changes.

Regards, 

James

[Martyn Houghton]

@James Ainsworth

Is there an update on the backlog change to allow catalog level subscriptions?

Cheers

Martyn

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Martyn Houghton

This feature is moving up the queue but it hasn't reached our development team yet.  No timeline set.  We have made some significant progress in our change backlog.  We've had hundreds of great feature ideas and requests.  This particular change is classed as a higher priority change so hopefully it won't be too long before we see this being worked on.  I'll keep this post updated as it progresses.

Regards,

James

[Cizzling]

On 2017-08-24 at 9:44 PM, James Ainsworth said:

Hi @Gary@ADL

Thanks for your post.

We do plan on introducing some more structure to services and provide a hierarchy of services.  This would come with the concept of having Customer or Business facing services that are supported by a number of technical services or 3rd party services.  Information provided in the technical services would feed the Business Services so that outages and other information can be easily presented to the up stream services.

The Search option on the portals can also be useful for narrowing down the services and catalog items.   If a customer is looking for something particular, this could help.  Maybe the search needs to be made more prominent to encourage starting with the search.

As @Martyn Houghton suggests we do have some other changes with subscriptions to catalog items being one of them.  This is still in our backlog but we will continue to review and progress these changes.

Regards, 

James

We would very much appreciate having a possiblity to set parent/child relationships on services. Do you have an update on where this is in the development queue?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Cizzling

There are no updates at the moment.  I'll add you to the change and once we see some progress I will be updating this post.

Regards,

James