Widget to show CIs

[Dan Munns]

Hi,

Long (rambling, I am sure) post warning...[TL:DR] at the bottom.

Pretty sure this is going to go down like a lead balloon but here goes.... Can we have a widget to show individual CIs?
And here is the why...

On the 'old' service portal, we tried to minimise the number of services. IT Issues, IT Requests, Marketing, Facilities etc etc. Nice and simple. User wants some colouring in doing? Off to Marketing you go. Printer chucking a fit? IT Issue logged.

You may or may not know this, but I have a lot of different teams using Service Manager as an ESM solution. Our largest single team is not IT. Or HR. Or Finance. And more are coming as I migrate away from Jira (yay). Lots of teams that, in the 'old world', would have one service with a couple of CIs, maybe a set subscriber list, to log requests and make their lives a little easier in the process.

Win, win all round. It makes sense to the user. It is easy for the teams (after a little training) and it is easy for me.

Enter, the Employee Portal! Kicking down the door full of wonderful new things. Bells! Whistles!! Shiny bits and all things amazing!!!

The crowd gasp. Hornbill administrators world wide are chomping at the bit to get stuck in.

Now enter me. Stick, mud, you get the picture....

(Note: Now before you all paint me as a change hating fuddy duddy who doesn't like extra work, think about this....I am posting this at 23:10 after spending a fair few hours on a Friday night playing around. I love change. And new toys. I also have a habit of breaking stuff and finding a tiny flaw in something and poking it until it explodes. That's just me. Sorry.)

Now, teams/departments that used to have a page full of CIs will have a whole page, with a single service. Upon clicking into said service you get the list of CIs. The users are up in arms. "Think of the extra clicks Dan!" they cry. "Think of the wear and tear on mice"

The teams/departments are outraged. "Look at all that white space!" they say. "It looks like we don't provide any services at all!"

"It is fine," says I, "try and fix it I shall"

"Do or do not, there is no try!!" is the reply (sorry)...

Anyway.... 

For whole, multi team departments this makes sense. IT encompasses Service Desk, Infrastructure, IT Security and Development Teams. The list of services is long and plentiful, the list of CIs even more so. I may even have to add multiple 'My Services' widgets and filter on category. HR would be the same (if I could convince them to use it, but that is a different story) Staff changes, queries, benefits, payroll, links to training and courses etc.

Plus IT have bulletins, feedback ratings, FAQs and more. All the makings of a healthy looking page (or 3) to captivate the user, make the experience fulfilling and leave them feeling happy and joyous. Or at least that they will get that printer fixed...

So (and if you have read this far I applaud you, fine reader)

[TL:DR] 

At the moment I am making a CI list by using the links widget, but this breaks the look and feel of the thing because they don't display the way the CIs do when you do it the other (correct) way.

A widget to show CIs based on a service (all CIs within the Marketing service for example) or the ability to select the services and then manually select the CIs you want would be very useful.

Note: No alcohol was consumed prior to the creation of this post. Or during its creation. I don't drink. I am probably just a little mad...

[Steven Boardman]

@Dan Munns i've asked the question about a new CI (or Request Items in the new employee portal) widget.

In the meantime, there is an option to create pages which are redirects to a specific service:

So in the Navigation Menu, where the Domains appear, you can have a menu item take you directly to a specific service view (rather than a widget page), and the service page will display all of the CIs (Request Items) for the user. 

From the Company Home page, go into design mode

Click on the Domain Page (menu link in the orange box), in my example i clicked on Facilities - and see an option in the righthandside to define the menu item as a Redirect

In the URL bar you can specify a specific service:

catalog/service/com.hornbill.servicemanager/24/ - where 24 is the Facilities service ID.   

Clicking on the Facilities menu item will open up the page, defaulting to the list of CI'S (Request Items)

 With that said, there is of course value in having a CI (Request Items) widget, so you can display this alongside other widget content on the domain page.  

[Dan Munns]

@Steven Boardman thanks for the example.

I did see this, and have a mess about before I wrote the rambler above, but I know what will happen.

"We want to display our feedback ratings" or  "We have a single bulletin that needs to show for a week only on our page" etc. etc.

For the moment I guess I will have to stick with the way I am doing it and creating a links widget that link direct to the RIs.

I am sure that many more widgets are already in the pipeline, just wanted to get one on the list before that list gets wayyyyyyy longer.

[Steven Boardman]

@Dan Munns it's now on the list of new widgets which we will be looking to introduce