Forthcoming Service Portfolio improvements questions

[Berto2002]

I have three specific questions about the forthcoming improvements which I have seen listed in the roadmap for service manager as per the screenshots

1. REPORT. We have started work on a report which brings together service portfolio items with various fields like owners domain and status; along with linked assets & the supplier details for that service linked through a custom field. Before we spend further time developing this report, we would like to know more about the service configuration report hornbill are planning to deliver and whether we would be best waiting for this as it might serve our purposes
2. TEMPLATE. We are going to add a significant number of new services to our portfolios. At the moment the default options which are set when one creates a new service are not as we would like them. Examples include the Connections settings, default SLA, feedback options, etc. I would like to know if there will be any kind of template capability when the new service portfolio is released so that we can specify how the default new service turns out when it is created
3. GLOBAL SETTINGS. Some variables in a service portfolio are ones that we would want to be identical for all of our services (same examples above). Once we get a large number of services, any changes to those configurations items (as we evolve new features and requirements over time) need to be done by manually opening up every single service and finding and changing and saving the altered field. We would like to know whether there will be any capability for global settings to be applied either to all services or services through some kind of filter system like service domain or service category

Thank you.

[Gerry]

@Berto2002

Its quite hard to be very precise here because things are quite malleable right now. We have a clear understanding of what we would "like" to do, and if we could just make the changes it would be done in a month or so.  The problem is, this is a critical area of the product and we have to make sure that we make the update/migration as painless or as automated as possible, thats difficult with 100's of different configurations out there, so ultimately we have to find a good compromise.  So my answers here, given we are talking about futures are subject to change!   None the less...

REPORTING: This is a bit different to what you are doing, this relates to the fact that each service can have a "configuration" for each request type, and likely most customers will have the same settings broadly for incident for example, for all services. The report we are talking about is to facilitate a customer-by-customer understanding of this configuration, because it will be important to understand this when considering working with the revised portfolio scheme.   What you are doing in relation to a service report, I think will still stand so I would encourage  you to continue with  that, it might need a tweak later on, but thats about it I would think.

TEMPLATE: We will be taking a different approach here which should remove the need for the template you talk of.  In essence the request types will be removed from the portfolio, and they will be configurable independently. you will be able to create as many variations of "incident" configurations as an example, each can be given a name, you will then be able to associate a request type to your service request(s) as required. 

GLOBAL: The same applies as above.  We would expect most customers would have a relatively small number of "request types" configured, which will by used by a much larger number of service request items within your portfolio, this will eliminate the need for common global settings. 

IMHO the whole configuration of requests and of the service portfolio will be vastly improved and simplified when we have completed this work, the challenge as I said is how we facilitate the migration of existing configurations to this new configuration layout, we still have quite a lot of work to do in that regard. 

Hope that gives you some guidance. 

Gerry

 

[Berto2002]

Thank you. Sounds great. Looking forward to it.