enhancement Enhancement: Change Calendar View for Customers/Contacts

[Berto2002]

I want to be able to share a change calendar view to my customers so they know when the IT changes will affect them. This will help us cut-down on email notifications.

Because our systems are almost always available, our organisation management want to know when they won't be; so we initiated comms for MI's and comms for changes (we use the Request UI to send templated comms to email addresses representing O365 groups which align with Subscriber lists). However, of course now we get the feedback that we send too many emails!

One part of that solution was to request Hornbill give us an option to update people via something other than email which applies to Updates and the UI manual send:

But another part of the solution could be to give people a place to see planned service outages and impacts then they could opt out of emails and just get in the habit of checking there. You know, like publish our forward schedule of change to our customer stakeholders, kinda a new idea, right...? I know there is a Service Availability feature but that tends to be a "right now it's down" thing rather than "we're planning this for 6 weeks' time".

Almost everything is in place except the Change Calendar is restricted to Full licenced Service Manager users only. The request is for:

1. A Change Calendar view that is configurable to be made available on the employee and customer portals
2. Any given Change will be visible if the User who is looking is in the Subscriber Group for that Service
3. We can control what information is revealed by checking boxes or selecting fields. For example, scheduled date/time is obvious but HB customers may have different ways of capturing and reviewing impact/disruption information. We would opt for a customer-facing piece of text likely to be stored in a custom field for example. Others may want to reveal the impact score from the assessment or a binary outage yes/no option. Some customers may also want to reveal contact points and others not
4. There should be a core field in the Change Request configuration of customer visibility for the Request

I hope others also think this is a useful suggestion.

At the moment, we are stuck with trying to get a Power BI version of this going but because the Subscribers are not integrated it looks like the best we can do is reveal all changes with a custom value representing customer visibility and let people figure out themselves which will affect them.

 

[NPaul]

+1, this would be really helpful

[samwoo]

Great idea, +1

[HGrigsby]

++1 for this please.

Thanks

Helen

[Berto2002]

Any more?

[Sam P]

+1 and if was available as a Home Page Widget that would be even better  

[Martyn Houghton]

++++++1 for us as well, especially the visbility on the both the employee and customer portals.

[David Paler]

+1

[Berto2002]

This seems popular