Extracting attachments from Hornbill

[Keith]

We must comply with both Sarbanes Oxley and FDA regulations and are experiencing greater and greater scrutiny of our processes in Hornbill from auditors in relation to this. We are often asked to provide information in a variety of ways including reports, outputs, or just raw data. One aspect of data that may be required is that of attachments, yet to my knowledge there is no way to extract these. 

As this relates to compliance I am concerned at the possible consequences this may bring. It would be great to have the possibility to extract attachments in some way, even if it were an admin activity via the use of another supporting tool or app.

Is this is a requirement that others have too? 

 

Regards

Keith

[Gerry]

Keith,

Can you be more specific, "extracting attachments" is very broad in scope.  Perhaps you can give me an example of what you need do to?  Attachments can of course be accessed and therefore extracted individually, but I think you are asking for something different. What would the SarbOx or FDA auditors want to see exactly?

Gerry

[Keith]

Hi Gerry,

Apologies for the lack of clarity. 

Our auditors will typically want to sample a batch of requests to assess whether we are compliant and following the processes we defined. The samples volume is typically percentage based so will fluctuate but are probably in the region on 25 to 50 requests at a time. However, if we fail a particular sample they may want to review a much greater number. 

We need to provide all supporting evidence on these requests and in the main I have been using the print feature in the request which is good for text based summary but we really need the attachment also. As not all attachments are images its not just a question of outputting the image with the print out.

What I think we need is a way to mass export attachments across requests. I'm not sure how we would tell the system which requests we need attachments for, I'll have to leave that to you guys  

In fact come to think of it, a way of mass printing multiple requests would also be good

Hopefully that gives you a little more insight. 

Regards

 

Keith

 

 

[Gerry]

Hi Keith,

Ok that makes more sense now.  So the problem is, a mass export.  So you somehow (lets leave aside for now how) you get a selection of tickets, say 50 of them, and you print them.  What about the attachments, what do you do with them, export them into a folder structure?  So what would you provide the auditors, a print out or a bunch of files in a folder structure.  In my experience auditors don't like having to deal with files they like everything printed, the requirement to look at attachments on requests will make that very complicated and all sorts of technical complexities.   

Its quite a specific requirement, I am not sure building it into the tool would be terribly useful for most customers. Possibly we (or your guys) could build an extract tool as an open-source command-iine tool where you feed it the criteria, it uses our API's and WebDAV to get the request details and the file attachments and it makes you an audit pack. 

I like the idea of having audit extracts from the system, that would be a very good "enterprise-class" feature but I am not sure how that would sit in the priority list for the Service Manager dev team, it would be quite a big task to get it done.  Is this something that is urgent for you?  If it is, and you could work with a command-line tool for extract, you could possibly consider our expert services team who I have no doubt could build something like this for you with relative ease?

Gerry


 

 

[Keith]

Hi Gerry,

Glad I was able to make a little more sense second time around

I accept that this is something of a niche request and certainly wouldn't want to divert resource away from development of more important features in Hornbill. The suggestion of a command line tool would be acceptable and I believe we have some outstanding credits for expert services so will do as you suggest and direct this request to them.

Regards

 

Keith