The latest NU Service release includes the following change and new features:

Changes in Web Desk

• The size of the details box on the service request and incident ticket windows has been increased
• If an incident has been caused by a change, it can now be linked to the causing change record. This can be done from either the incident ticket or the change ticket.

New Processes

• Change Management Process
  The Change Management process will provide IT Staff with a means to record all changes to live services, systems and components, with varying levels of approval according to the type and level of change. Benefits include more control, more visibility and better tracking of this work.

• Problem Management Process
  The problem management process will provide IT staff with a means to log and track work on issues with IT Services that require investigation to determine underlying root causes of one or more incidents; it enables the logging of possible causes and workarounds, giving visibility of these to other NU Service analysts.

Change and problem tickets (including any associated task tickets) that are assigned to you will be listed within your Analyst dashboard (just as service requests and incidents are listed).
To access the new functionality and relating dashboards, see shortcuts for Change Management and Problem Management at the bottom left corner of Web Desk.

Process guidance notes will be made available here:

Change Management
Problem Management

Training
Training in how to use the new functionality will be available from the IT Service Training Team (an email will follow with details of how to book)

• General awareness presentations on 5th September
• Hands-on training available from 12-4.30 on 19th Sept and all day 24th September

We will be upgrading to the current version of NU Service on Tuesday 17^th June between 17:00 and 20:00. This upgrade allows us to take advantage of system fixes and will provide us with the scope to introduce improvements using new features.

Please ensure that you save your work and are logged out of the system by 17:00 on Tuesday 17th June and do not log back in until you receive an email notification advising that you may log back in. We anticipate that the system will be available for normal use by 09:00 on Wednesday 18th June.

The release includes the following changes and amendments

Changes/Bug Fixes within Web Desk

Analyst Dashboards:

• The attributes to show the date of the last update and who this was by have been added to the My Open Tickets gadget on the Analysts dashboard.
• The attributes ‘Customer ID’ and ‘Name’ have been added into the children collection that shows on Parent Tickets
• There is now a shortcut named ‘All Tickets I Am Watching’. This page contains both of the gadgets (which were previously displayed as separate shortcuts) ‘Requests I am Watching’ and ‘Incidents I Am Watching’. These gadgets now also have additional attributes: Description, Customer ID and Name.
• The ‘Service Affected’ attribute on Service Requests is now populated whereas previously this was displaying as a blank on some queries.
• The Analyst dashboard no longer updates automatically. This ensures that Analysts stop receiving Shibboleth timeout errors. The page will update after Analyst interaction or by pressing F5.

Searching:

• The functionality to search across incidents and service requests at the same time has been added.
• The functionality to search via the logged on behalf of user has been added.

Email:

• Alternative Email address and phone numbers can be added to a ticket. These are only stored against that ticket instance and the alternative emails are added as CC recipients.
• A warning line has been added to customer facing emails: “Please note that only replies from Newcastle University email addresses will be accepted; replies from any other email address will be rejected.”

User Friendliness:

• Some of the ticket windows (after being Saved) were overflowing off the screen width ways thus introducing the need to use a horizontal scroll bar. This has been fixed, ensuring that the window width fits to one page.
• All ‘Assign to Me’ actions (for the various stages of each of the processes) produce an “Are you sure you want to do this” confirmation pop up box.

Changes/Bug Fixes within Self-Service

Functionality:

• The carrying through of the on behalf of user from tickets logged in self-service has been fixed. Previously this was not pulling through to the ticket record as it should.
• If a user has a ticket logged on behalf of them then it now appears in their ‘My Open tickets’ gadget in self-service whereas previously it did not.
• When a customer adds a note whilst the ticket is at a status of ‘With Customer”, the ticket is automatically brought back from customer. This includes a customer replying to an email.
• For Service Requests submitted via self-service, the ‘Top Level Service Item’ attribute was not being populated. This has been fixed.

Read Only aspects:

• The graphs on the How We’re Doing page in Self Service now shows historic data providing more complete results.
• The Contact Us and Out of Hours Help gadgets on the Contact Us page have had text updates to inform customers that calls are being recorded.
• A read only gadget on the IT Support page of Self Service has been created to show tickets awaiting initial assessment. Gadget name: Awaiting Initial Assessment.