Add Connections based on certain criteria / bulk email connections

[Joanne]

Hello,

Is there a way we i can add a list of people against a service ie impacted and interested so that i can make a generic BPM that would then add those people as connectors against the ticket when raised?

Many Thanks

 

Jo 

 

[Bob Dickinson]

Hi @Joanne

I have found one way of doing this which may solve the requirement here. The key part of it is that you would need to decide on a max number of the people who could potentially be added. In my example below, I have chosen max 3 people but you could go up to 6 if you wanted.

The first thing you do is add some Custom Fields to your Service. You will need an admin role to do this, but within the details section of an existing service, you can click on the "Design" button and start adding in attributes. I have called mine "Connection 1", "Connection 2",  and "Connection 3". These are just single line text fields.
IMPORTANT - Please be aware, ANY CUSTOM FIELDS YOU ADD HERE WILL BE APPLIED TO ALL SERVICES.

As you can see in my example below, I have then edited these fields for my test service and added in the the User ID (important - not the name) of the people who I would like to be the interested connections

 

The next thing to do is edit a workflow. The 3 key components to this are:

1) A "Get Services" node - this will get all the service details for the service against which the request has been raised - we are interested in the values in Custom Fields A to C

2) Parallel Processing - this is so the connections all get added simulatneously

3) Decision nodes to check each of the Services Custom Fields - this is to see if it has a value set or not - if it doesn't it will ignore it via the ""No Match" branch.

4) Add Connection Node - This is set if there IS a User ID present on that custom field in Service. And you inject value from the custom field into the "Co Worker" option on this node

 

You can see how this is configured in my example below. Notice how I have the option for 3 custom fields here (3 decisions). If you wanted to up this, you just add the additional decisions and "Set Connection" nodes.
 

 

I have tested this and it all appears to work as expected - you can see from the above screenshots, that in the Service - Connection 1 and Connection 3 where both populated (but Connection 2 wasn't). Thanks to my workflow, it ignored Connection 2 (Custom Field B ) and has just added the two connections I specified:

 

I hope this helps!

Kind Regards

Bob

[HHH]

@Bob Dickinson
Since we support externally something like that would not work for us.
Is it somehow possible to retrieve a list of contacts associated with specific fields in the contact information and/or service subscriptions.
In our case we would like to be able to add all contacts associated with a specific service in a specific country.

[Bob Dickinson]

Hi @HHH

We don't have any functionality to be able to get a list of Service Subscribers and do anything with it. As you may have seen with Workflow in general, a "list" of anything is typically unable to be used dynamically - hence why I needed to come up with a workaround as per the above suggestion, where a defined number "List Items" can be set and the workflow logic can run through and perform actions for each list item it finds. It's long winded but it does work. 

So in your scenario there still might be a way around this - but only if you have a relatively small number of contacts that you were looking to associate. Would you be able to provide me with some more details about the specific scenario? 

Kind Regards

Bob

[HHH]

Thanks for coming back @Bob Dickinson
Unfortunately since we support externally each service has hundreds if not thousands of subscribers.

The scenario is basically to be able to email "Service Down" to the subscribing customers without having to rely on a third party software.
Having the Service Avalability in the portal as well as Bulletins  is a step in the right direction but some of our markets are still very e-mail oriented.

[Martyn Houghton]

1 hour ago, HHH said:

Unfortunately since we support externally each service has hundreds if not thousands of subscribers.

We too have the same challenge with external customer who are email orientated.

We are looking not only to advise customers of service impacts but also new releases and other announcements.

Cheers

Martyn

[Bob Dickinson]

Hi @HHH @Martyn Houghton

I see the requirement you have, but unfortunately there is nothing I can currently suggest with would feasibly allow a process to bulk send a huge number of emails. The only option we have available to send to more than one recipient is the "email external address" which allows multiple addresses with comma separation. So in theory, you would need to achieve that. 

The issue with a "get service subscriber" style node is the fact that there are so many different types of subscription method. Whilst you are refering to contacts, you could have a combination of Contacts, Users, Teams, Departments, Sites etc - with different data structures holding the email address in different places, and the potential for duplication too if one user/contact is a member of more than one of the teams. So it's not an easy thing to collate, let alone to then present all the emails in a format that the existing functionality could accomodate. I'll ask internally, but the development teams have a large backlog of requests so it may not be something that would be available in the short term. 

It sounds like it would need to be a new requirement and properly scoped by our development teams. In the meantime (and it's by no means ideal) but if there was a way of configuring a distribution list via a single email address (outside of Hornbill) then that could easily be configured to be called in a multitude of ways using logic based on whichever criteria you like. 

Sorry I couldn't be of more help here for that scenario!

Kind Regards

Bob

[Martyn Houghton]

@Bob Dickinson @James Ainsworth

We raised sometime ago the requirement to have the ability for subscribers of a service to be able to 'subscribe' to notifications for updates and service messages for the said service, which would then link to a more detailed bulletins section.

Cheers

Martyn