Download of ticket detail

[RIchard Horton]

While it would be nice to think everyone will keep using Hornbill forever there will be scenarios where people don't and will have a need/desire to take an extract of their ticket data. What are the recommended ways of doing this ? Using the Export to CSV gives some form of compromise but it's not a good view of the longer fields and doesn't get the timeline. 

Specifically I have an area which is stopping use of Hornbill and wants a download that includes the timeline history. We've established that if you print a ticket as a PDF that gives a very tidy view for a single ticket, and this is the best I've found so far, but we are not aware of a way of scaling to a rather larger number of tickets, whether macro based or other. 

Another approach would be a download which links timeline and request data. The response to that seems to be that the system isn't designed to do that, and it isn't really feasible. I can see timeline entries in h_buzz_activities, but not how to link them and it looks a messier way of doing it. I get that you want people to use the system but surely there have been people who have exited Hornbill who have wanted to do something comparable ? I don't think attachments are a big deal here, but I'm sure they will have been for someone. 

Thanks

Richard

[Gerry]

@RIchard Horton

Quote

• While it would be nice to think everyone will keep using Hornbill forever there will be scenarios where people don't and will have a need/desire to take an extract of their ticket data

When you say "extract their data" who's data are you talking about? the support technicians or the customers?  

In either case what is the purpose of the extraction.  

Hornbill is a system or record and as a general rule customers seem to want to keep all data forever.  The problem with extraction is, the data around tickets is highly integrated with many other related data areas and while some data is denormalised, most is not, so an extract would from from a lot of different related data sources. The data is also NOT flat, its quiet hierarchical by nature, so extracting the data into what form? Can just put into a spreadsheet and as you have probably observed there are a lot of GUID's and other such non-people-friendly references and pointers.  

I am keen to understand the use case here, once the data has been extracted for a user/customer - what do you want to do with that data?

 

Thanks

Gerry

[RIchard Horton]

This is for a (very small) team of analysts, so it is any ticket that has come into their queue. We don't reassign between queues so it's a straightforward question to identify the tickets (all non cancelled ones)

As for what they really want ... always the challenge to work that one out, isn't it ! My take on it from what I've been told is that they are interested in two things, what I think of as request head information (the customer, category, description, status, when raised and resolved, that sort of thing) and the timeline (specifically emails that have been received and sent). I get that this is not what you expect people to do in normal operation, but wanting an extract as part of an exit strategy seems a standard sort of thing ? As mentioned in my question you do have a feature that gives then (print a ticket into a PDF). I reckon that if I could get 1 such PDF per ticket that would suffice - it would allow them to stick them all in a folder and search for key words which is the sort of thing they do. It wouldn't give them a spreadsheet view, but they could separately have a bare bones spreadsheet if they wanted. 

Does that make sense ? Apologies for the delay getting back to you, Gerry. Despite that I am interested in finding a solution I can apply now. Other areas are happy by the way, but it would on a more general level be reassuring to know there is such a route available. Previously when I've moved from one SM system to another it's not been a problem to get such a download. Maybe you also get questions about porting data into other systems. I'm not asking about that, just about something that can be cross-referenced until the ticket history is no longer of value. 

[RIchard Horton]

Any thoughts on this one ? 

Thanks

Richard