For the last release of the year (and my last before leaving the team), we wanted to put in a lot of good stuff that people have been asking for, as well as addressing the higher impact bugs that have been identified (or introduced) recently. We’ve focussed on really improving the user experience and made some changes that we hope will make your life easier and enhance the goodwill of the season.

Incidents and service requests

• You will now be able to see the ticket reference number and customer’s name when adding a note, sending a notification, putting a ticket with customer or resolving/fulfilling an incident/service request. This has been one of our most requested enhancements (which wasn’t possible before we upgraded in the summer). It’s worth noting that this information will only appear when working on new incident and service request tickets.
• Previously incident and service requests tickets could only be assigned to another group by analysts who were in the group to which the ticket was currently assigned. We know this caused a lot of headaches when tickets were accidentally assigned to the wrong team and couldn’t be recovered. To address this, any analyst can now assign any ticket to another group, as long as the ticket isn’t assigned to an individual.
• The size of the text areas on a few of the windows have been increased in response to specific requests.
• Some ‘quick open’ service requests have been added to help the CRS team deal with the pace of working with many students face-to-face.
• We’ve fixed a bug which meant that child tickets of major incidents weren’t being resolved automatically when the major incident ticket was resolved.
• There had been some (very few) cases of incident and service requests losing their assignment during an assignment action with the result that they ended up assigned to no-one. This should no longer occur. We’ve also taken this opportunity to tidy up the assign to another group window.

Dashboards and views

• The ‘Last Updated By’ and ‘Last Update’ fields on the main analyst dashboard were not working if tickets were updated by email. This has now been fixed.
• The ‘Current Queues by Team’ view now has an additional filter, ‘Current Assignee’, so you can see current tickets assigned to individual analysts.
• Some cancelled tickets were showing up in views of current queues; this should no longer happen.
• Some minor nomenclature issues have been fixed and tidied up.

Problems and changes

• It is now possible to import SOPs from a spreadsheet. If you have many SOPs to enter this is likely to save you a considerable amount of time. Talk to me or Lisa if you’re interested in using this functionality.
• Closed changes were appearing in the ‘Scheduled Active Changes’ gadget of the ‘Active Changes’ dashboard. This has been fixed.
• If someone (other than the problem or change owner) adds a note to a problem or change record the owner will now be notified.
• When an emergency change is submitted for approval the content of the email has now been changed so it can be easily identified as an emergency change (and therefore not requiring the usual CAB approval).
• Attachments can now be added to root causes in the problem management process.

Self-service

• End users reporting an incident through self-service can now add attachments at the time they log the ticket. Previously the end user had to wait until their ticket had been triaged by Service Desk to generate an incident or service request ticket. They could then go in to the new ticket to add the attachment.
• We’ve put in some behind-the-scenes functionality to enable future improvements and automation to the process for procuring software licences and requesting installation.