What's Happened to the Org Structure Page?

[will.good]

Hi,

Not sure if I have missed something but the Org Structure page in our admin section looks totally different to the one in the successdemo instance.

In ours we canonly see one of our teams and our companies and departments. When looking at companies or departments we cannot see who is in these groups either?

There is also no way to search or filter anymore?

e.g. this is the one from the success demo

 

and this is what we have?

[Keith Stevenson]

@will.good
Thanks for the post. This is controlled by a system setting named, which you can find and change in admin

system.groups.mode

and documented here

https://docs.hornbill.com/esp-fundamentals/core-capabilities/organization-and-teams

KInd Regards

Hornbill Cloud Team 

[will.good]

@Keith Stevenson Thanks Keith

I feel I can see clearly again back in Legacy Mode

[Gerry]

@will.good

This is one of the greatest challenges we face when trying to make improvements, people really dont like change once they are used to something 

Not sure how this would have come about on your instance, you, or someone else must have changed that setting! 

This is why we have the "Legacy" mode by default for all existing instances, so we don't throw our customers off, for all new instances this would be defaulted to the simpler of the three models.  This was done because many customers and even our own internal people find the flexibility at the full hierarchical method of defining OU's and teams is very complicated to deal with, people will set things up, not because they need to, but, because they can... and that can often lead to problems later on.  So we have simplified it, many customers only need a single OU (their company) and a simple list of teams, so there is an option that allows for that, and limits the UI so they are not distracted by all the things they would otherwise be able to do.   Of course, if you (or any customer, or our consultants or support teams) read the  docs and understand the modes and guidance, the idea is, each customer can make an informed decision about how they want to represent their organisation within Hornbill.  That way, adopting the complexity level is a choice, its not imposed by us, and simple use cases do not have to be burdened with complexity they don't need. Thats at least the theory. 

This change was rolled out the middle of last year, so its taken a while for someone to even mention it

 

[will.good]

Thanks @Gerry

I think my biggest problem was how odd it felt to navigate - we were on the hierarchical view I think, and it wasn't intuitively clear where I could find our service teams.

The Legacy view has clearly defined areas for Teams and Organisations, but it was quite confusing (and I didn't manage) to find where Teams were managed.

But appreciate the explanation - I'm all for change but it just felt too drastically different from what I was used to!

[samwoo]

Good morning,

We've been using Hornbill since 2015 if I recall correctly, so our Orgs are set up the legacy way, and therefore we are currently using Legacy mode, but what would happen if we switch to one of the other modes? Does it change the entire functionality, have a major impact?

The reason I asked is that our current Organization configuration is a mess at best, so I would like to explore the possibility of simplifying it if possible.

Thanks

[Berto2002]

Yes if interest as to how/whether I can try it out safely.

[Gerry]

I see there is a bit of confusion here so let me see what I can do to clarify.  The setting which some have discovered was not "officially" released.  Its purpose was to simplify the user interface around teams and organisations as we have a lot of customers who do not need the complexity of setting up a hierarchical structure, when a simpler list of teams will suffice.   This was a change made to the platform where we introduced two "simpler" modes of operation.  As it turns out, neither of these two simpler modes are usable when using Service Manager because Service Manager relies on the OU's to provide visibility controls of services, and various other things. 

If the three new modes, only the most comprehensive mode is usable, and the goal here was to make the UI more intuitive than the current (legacy) view. 

So the first BIG and IMPORTANT thing to know is, this is a UI only change, it does NOT change any of the underlying data structures in the database, it works on the exact same data as the current Legacy Mode, so you can switch between the Legacy mode and any other mode. 

All that being said (you knew this was coming)... I would suggest you not look at these modes just yet, because, after looking at the SM use-case two of the three modes are not useful for you anyway.  

What we have done is removed the two modes and improved the third mode which I believe much better represents the hierarchical nature of the groups structure and should make things easier and more intuative to administer. 

So, in the next release of Core/Platform (in the next week or so, you should see a button like the on the page).  This allows you to switch to the new view so you can try it out, if there are issues or something thats not working for you, you can just switch back.  Basically, it should just be an improved admin experience, nothing different, nothing taken away or changed apart from the fact there is now a tree-style control representing the hierarchical data that makes up the groups and teams.  

Here is a screen shot showing you what the new view looks like.