IMPORTANT! The feature My Boards in the Service Manager app has been superseded by the Board Manager app

[Guest Ehsan]

All,

This announcement is for users of the "My Boards" feature in the Service Manager app. If you are already using the much improved Board Manager app, no action is required.

The feature My Boards in the Service Manager app (accessed from the main menu via the Service Manager icon > "Boards" menu-item) has been superseded by the Board Manager app.

The Board Manager app presents a new look & feel, enhanced access control settings and extensive designer options, as well as integration with activities, documents, project tasks, posts and emails to track and organise tasks within teams and organisations.

The next Service Manager build due to be available in the week commencing 1st November introduces an option for a board owner to migrate to the Board Manager app. The "Migrate to" button within a board performs the complete migration, we expect this action to take no longer than 45 seconds per board. As a prerequisite, it is required for the Board Manager app to be installed through the App Store and roles to be granted to users.

For instructions and more information, please refer to the Migration section in this document:

• https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php?title=My_Boards

Kind regards,

Application Development

[nasimg]

@Ehsan

Can we remove the old "Boards" icon, or will it get removed at some point - its a bit confusing to see both.

Nasim

[Guest Ehsan]

@nasimg,

We will soon determine an end-of-life date for the Service Manager boards upon which date we will remove the icon and any corresponding functionality. This thread serves the purpose of providing information on migrating from Service Manager boards to the Board Manager application. The migration option will be made available next Tuesday.

Ehsan

[Guest Ehsan]

@nasimg, All,

The Service Manager boards can be turned off via the setting 'app.itsm.boards.disableServiceManagerBoards'.

Ehsan

[AndyHill]

For the old boards, is there a away as an admin, I can view any that exist regardless of whether they have been shared with me. I want to ensure everyone has converted their boards prior to turning them off.

[Alberto M]

@AndyHill, the way I've done that was using a SQL script in the admin direct SQL to list the boards with their owners. Something like this:

SELECT B.h_id, B.h_name, B.h_owner, A.h_account_status, B.h_lastupdated, B.h_archived, B.h_bm_id, COUNT(C.h_id) AS ncards
FROM h_itsm_boards B
LEFT OUTER JOIN h_itsm_board_cards C
    ON B.h_id = C.h_board_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN h_sys_accounts A
    ON B.h_owner = A.h_user_id
WHERE C.h_archived <> '1'
    AND h_bm_id = '0'
GROUP BY B.h_id, B.h_name, B.h_owner, B.h_lastupdated, B.h_archived, B.h_bm_id


 

[AndyHill]

Thanks @Alberto M worked perfectly.

[Guest Ehsan]

@AndyHill,

In the next Service Manager release, we are introducing an option called "Manage Migration" in the Boards menu for administrators to view the list of the boards in the system. Through this pop-up, a board can be removed. An example as below.

 

[Guest Ehsan]

All,

I would like to kindly encourage our customers who use the Service Manager boards to complete the migration process to the Board Manager application. We will soon announce an end-of-life date for the board migration, upon which date the Service Manager boards functionality will be removed.

Kind regards,

Ehsan

[Guest Ehsan]

All,

Following an assessment on our product offerings, we have closely considered the use cases with Service Manager boards and made the decision to continue to maintain with the Service Manager boards, hereby I would like to announce that you no longer need to migrate your boards to the Board Manager application. For customers who had migrated their boards, we will be in touch to reverse the migration for you.

Kind regards,

Ehsan

[Kelvin]

@EhsanAfter months of prep I migrated our Change process over to the new boards on Monday and have spent the last 2 days making changes. To now see this is slightly frustrating. Are you able to give reasons why this is the case and does this mean that the new Boards Manager will be removed?

Also what is happening with all the new features will they be updated onto the old Service Manager Boards?

[Gerry]

@Kevin

For existing customers you are free to use either approach.  What is driving our assesment is the fact that the market (being the ITSM market) is telling us they want a simpler offering, and the whole notion of "A Platform" with "multiple applications" is too complicated an offer to the market.  What @Ehsanis mentioning above is really relating to our ongoing internal packaging conversations, so any changes in this regard will only impact future offerings, our priced for life commitment remains firm for all existing customers. 

Today Board Manager is a free application, so there is no commercial reason not to use it.  Board Manager is far more functional than the board built into SM, so our intention was to encourage as many of our customers to take advantage of this while they can. Our commercial intention is to offer board manager as a priced option as an alternative to something like Trello, but in Service Manager terms, we still feel we need to have a basic boards capability, so we are looking essentially at keeping both options.   

You are free to use either capability and both will be supported, there will just be a less premium and a more premium variation that customers  can choose, both systems are usable from SM and the BPM so there will be no direct impact to existing customers.  

Hopefully that clarifies our position a little better?

Gerry

[Kelvin]

@GerryThank you for the prompt response. That makes perfect sense. 

I have received a lot of positive feedback about the board manager app so am glad we have the option.

[Gerry]

@Kelvin

Not a problem, I can understand why you asked, but I hope we have long since proved that we stand by our priced for life policy for existing customers, and we generally do not take things away, we mostly introduce new things for free and do our best to encourage our existing customers to take advantage of these things.  I am glad your users see a lot of value in board manager, that is where we have gotten to also, where we think its at least close enough to something like Trello that we can justify a charge for it in future offerings, but in doing so we do not want to diminish our service management offering, hence to two variations. 

Can I ask, were you previously using another boards-type tool before using Hornbill?

Gerry

[Kelvin]

@Gerry No we have only used your offerings, the Service Manager offering was ok, but the new Boards give so much more visibility and I really like the additional functionality with Tags and time elements. We have lots of plans going forward to drive improvements especially around monitoring SLAs, CAB processes and general visibility of Requests.