Order services for portal?

[Lyonel]

Hi, when setting up services, we can select a category ("Request Category Level") which is great (as we can now filter easily on the service portal ). Go forward, when setting up catalogue items, you can order then easily by drag & drop. This is also great for sorting them in a very specific way, giving us the ultimate flexibility. But such feature does not exist for services... Would it be possible to have a simple "Order [int]" field for services? That would allow us to order them the way we want rather than only rely on alphabetical order?

[Melissa Gurney]

+1... This would be very useful and is also a question we have raised. Ordering the services alphabetically does not work for us as it forces some of or most used services to the bottom, which are then effectively "hidden" beyond the "Show More" button in the portal. We did try to number the services, but as soon as we hit number 10, the order was thrown out (e.g 1,10,11,2,3,4,5 etc.). We now have had to order our services by labelling them A, B, C, D etc. which is not ideal.

It would be great if we were able to order these services as we choose.

Thanks,

Melissa

 

 

[samwoo]

Hello,

I agree as well. It's been mentioned a few times before and something Hornbill are aware of. We've had to add > < to our top services

Example of what our some of our Services look like to the user on the Service Portal (there are many more):

Quote

 

> Access Request <

> Laptop / Desktop Computers <

Application Requests

Other Requests

1. Service Desk

 

It's the current workaround on our side until there is a solution for it.

Thanks,

Samuel

[Guest Ehsan]

@Lyonel, @samwoo and @Melissa Gurney,

Thank you for your posts!

We certainly appreciate that the ability to order your Services enhances a User's experience while managing Services through the User App or accessing them through the Portals. With that in mind, I pleased to let you know that we are aware of this requirement and we are currently reviewing and investigating this.

Thanks,

Ehsan

[Lyonel]

Thanks @Ehsan for the acknowledgment! Keep us posted please?

[Guest Ehsan]

@Lyonel - Sure! We will post an update in this forum thread when this requirement is progressed. 

Ehsan

[TSheward_SGW]

+1 for this feature.

Thanks,

Tom

[James Ainsworth]

I'm looking at some of the requirements around providing the ability to order the Services in the portals.  The suggestions here point toward manually setting the order of the services in a similar fashion to that of the Request Catalog Items which can be dragged into your selected order.  There are a few challenges with manually ordering Service.  The way the Service Portfolio has been designed, not all services will always be visible to all users.  Any service that is not visible to the user doing the ordering may be excluded from the ordering.  For some customers that have hundreds of Services, manual ordering may also be too granular and time consuming. We also need to keep in mind that not all services are visible on the portals and wouldn't need to be included in the ordering.

We could consider a new role for a Service Portfolio Manager who would be given the rights to see all Services, but we would have to be very careful with this as some services such as HR may contain sensitive data.  This user may not be able to see any more than the names of the services,but they could influence the order, either manually or by setting an automatic based ordering. 

Another consideration is to provide some preset order options to the customers on the portals.  It may be the case that customers would prefer to set their own ordering as the most important service as seen by a customer could be different from one customer to the next.

We could also look at giving this control to the user that sets up the portals in Administration.  We could provide some default ordering options such as Most Subscribed or Most Active.  This would not provide the granular level that manually setting the order of each Service, but it would make sure that all Services are included as part of the ordering.  The downfall of this is that the order of the services may change each time a customer visits the portal, which could be confusing.

I would be interested to hear more feedback on your requirements for this feature.

Regards,

James

[Keith]

@James Ainsworth Speaking for myself I have no desire for customers to be able to order the services themselves with the exception of possibly within the favourites tab. Allowing them to do so more generally may be too confusing both for them and for support staff supporting them.

A simple ordering value/flag set by an admin or service portfolio manager would suffice with services not subscribed to or not visible in the portal being omitted. I would suggest any values not be restricted to single digits (1,2,3) to allow for new services to be inserted without having to renumber everything ie. 10, 20, 30 with a new service being entered at 25 for instance.

Hope this helps.

Keith

 

 

 

[Lyonel]

Same as @Keith 

I would rather keep it simple, just like with CIs. And I am more than happy to leave it to the admin (in possibly a new screen) to order services manually.

Another option could be to use similar mechanics to the FAQs? Sorted by number of views? (Just an idea! Not my preferred choice)

 

 

[Martyn Houghton]

Not sure how sustainable/scalable manual ordering of service subscriptions would be, given that a coworker/contact could have services linked to them explicitly, as well as inherited from their team/organisation. The combinations could very quickly become enormous.

Would it not be better to have certain standard order by options for the coworker/contact in the portal to have and for them to have the option set as their default order? I.e. order by name (both ascending and descending), number of active requests, number of request on hold, number of requests awaiting feedback etc.

You could also then added a different tab similar to Favourites called Recent, which orders them by the order they last access the service via the portal, i.e. like your list of documents in Word when you open it?

Cheers

Martyn

 

 

 

[Keith]

Hi @Martyn Houghton,

Your suggestions for sorting are exactly what we are trying to steer clear of. Sorting by name just doesn't work as often the more important services come way down the list, even beyond the point of the dreaded "more services". 

We would like to have very specific services ordered i.e. Password Reset, Desktop Support, SAP etc. 

Perhaps we could have an the kind of numbered ordering I mention previously in addition to your sort options with settings to hide unwanted sort options and set a default.

Regards

 

Keith

 

[Martyn Houghton]

 

@Keith

 

I see what you are trying to achieve in terms of having a hidden primary name which is perhaps numerical in nature, i.e. 001 Password Reset, which the list is sorted on but never displayed, as the display value is the Service Name. If current Service Name field was duplicated into a Service Display Name and the portal/live app changed to display this, but still sort by original service name field, I think this would allow you to achieve what you are wanting to do, without the need to all customers to set up ordering values straight away. Also if when setting up a new service the display valued defaults to the Service Name to save on having to re-enter it again if you do not need to order it initially.

I presume you could sort of achieve this now by using a false translation of some kind, but that would be a pain to administer as well.

I presume you are looking to group the services numerically in order to allow space for optional services to slot in that say a manager or team leaders may have?

Cheers

Martyn

[dwalby]

How about showing the services that the user/users department is subscribed to at the top, followed by the globally available services available to all? 

Alternatively, is it possible to administer user's favourites globally? 

[Keith]

On 12/2/2017 at 8:17 PM, dwalby said:

How about showing the services that the user/users department is subscribed to at the top, followed by the globally available services available to all? 

Alternatively, is it possible to administer user's favourites globally? 

That wouldn't work for us. The majority of our services are open to the entire user base which would mean no change to what they have today. 

[dwalby]

Have there been any further development or thoughts on this @James Ainsworth @Ehsan?

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @dwalby

We do have a change for this so we do plan to have a look at this.  It is however still in our backlog and not scheduled for development as of yet. I will continue to update once we have progressed it.

Regards,

James