Customer visibility of human tasks

[Kelvin]

I have been working on some new Human task in Business Processes and have noted that they are sent to customers when the timeline is updated. On most nodes you can set the visibility to just team however I cant seem to find an option for this.

As you can imagine some human task would make no sense to customers.

[Steve Giller]

1 hour ago, Kelvin said:

On most nodes you can set the visibility to just team however I cant seem to find an option for this.

A Human Task is not specific to Service Manager, they are part of the Platform and can be used in any application or created as standalone items, so having a Visibility option would not be relevant and could cause problems if trying to post to a non-existent Timeline.

The guest.servicemanager.request.timeline.showActivityDescription setting determines whether the description of an Activity is posted into the Timeline on completion within Service Manager, and I would imagine that the reason your Customers are seeing the updates is because you have automatic notifications of Customer-facing updates turned on for that Service, and that your default visibility is set to Customer.

[Kelvin]

@Steve GillerThank you that makes sense. For us turning guest.servicemanager.request.timeline.showActivityDescription to off will work.

[Kelvin]

@Steve Giller So I have turned that setting to off. resaved the BPM just in case but it is still posting activity to the timeline. Can you or anyone else confirm if this is correct or a defect
Thanks

[Steve Giller]

7 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

Can you or anyone else confirm if this is correct or a defect

This is correct - the setting is specifically for the description; the fact that it has been completed will still be posted and if the default visibility is set to Customer this will trigger any automatic notifications.

[Kelvin]

@Steve Giller thanks for confirming.

Personally I think this needs to be reviewed as our customers are receiving content like
 

Request SR00346150 has been updated with the following:

Task '{"Clinic Change progress", "urn:sys:entity:com.hornbill.core:task:TSK20230427000074"}' was completed by 'Kelvin Southgate'
* Outcome: Info Required
* Comments to customer (only when more info required): info

This makes no sense to the customer and then we get an email back to ask what this means, we are also already receiving phone calls when customers review the request and see this content in the timeline.

 

We want to leave Customer visible timeline update emails on for transparency and this normally get quicker responses than just hoping they will review their tickets etc.

[Kelvin]

Interestingly in a following node we have

 
 

This not not trigger an update email to the customer, even though visibility is set.

[Steve Giller]

There are a number of reasons for a notification not to be sent (including something not working) but this would be impossible to diagnose at a distance.

Your comments regarding Task Completion visibility have been raised internally and are being looked into - this will involve a number of teams so I can't give any timeframes but I'll endeavour to post back here with the outcome of the discussion.

[Kelvin]

17 hours ago, Steve Giller said:

There are a number of reasons for a notification not to be sent (including something not working) but this would be impossible to diagnose at a distance.

I will log this into another post. thanks