Will changing the names of Services in the Service Portfolio cause any issues with pre-existing tickets?

[Adam Toms]

Hi all,

We're looking at ways to optimise and enhance the experience of logging tickets through both employee portal and the agent portal in Service Manager.

Our service headings have to remain quite business wordy, due to the nature and complexity of the services that under pin our catalogue items.

I've now got the approval to put the change I'm proposing in place, but before I do this are there any issues with changing the names, what happens to pre-existing tickets etc?

An example is we're moving from Mobile Communications to Mobile Communications e.g (Android) (iOS).

Any advice before I plan this change would be most helpful.

Kind Regards

Adam 

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Adam,

Each request record in the h_itsm_requests table has two fields relating to the service.  h_fk_serviceid and h_fk_servicename.  Changing the name on a Service does not update the h_fk_servicename field on a request.  The Service ID will be used in most places to get the full name of the service. For example the Service Name column on the request list or the Service Name within the Information Panel on a request will correctly show your new service name.

One of the things to look out for is if you are using the h_fk_servicename field within any reports or BPM workflows.  New requests would hold the new name in this field and the old requests will keep the original name, so you would have to account for that.

[Adam Toms]

Thanks James for your response on this.

I believe this unlikely to cause us any real problems then, but I think I will do a couple of services as a test, before implementing on all.

Thanks again.

Adam

[Berto2002]

It will cause an issue if any of your workflows reference a Service Name. For example, we have Decisions with Expressions based on the names of Services and we log new Requests from within workflows that point to specific other Service names or Catalog Items

[Adam Toms]

Thanks @Berto2002 I can see that would cause an issue in that scenario, we don't tend to use those components but it's certainly something I will double check. Unfortunately project work has pushed this down the list of priorities for me to complete this month. But would hope to pick this back up in July, and I'll certainly keep those points in mind.

[Adam Toms]

Hi all,

I just wanted to follow up on this as I made the edits over the course of the weekend, last weekend.

Implementation went smoothly, and our email routing rules automatically picked up the name change, which I was pleasantly surprised about, and we'd not broken the automation of various jobs we have configured in iBridge and ITOM.

Whilst I appreciate different members will have configured their instances differently, I hope this feedback and this information will prove useful for anyone else, who might be contemplating a similar amendment.

Many Thanks

Adam