The purpose of this release was to fix some minor issues and make quick improvements based on wishlist items.

Change – Addition of pipeline tickets to the self-service portal

Functionality has been added for analysts to see Pipeline tickets raised in their name on the Self-Service portal.

Change – Modification to ticket history

The Incident, Service Request and Change Management processes have had the entries for the ‘View Ticket History’ amended to correctly show line break formatting and no longer stretch the window. This change does not apply retroactively, but going forward all additions to the ticket history will no longer display as a single block of text or stretch the window.

Change – Addition to mark the parent/child relationship on change tickets

To assist analysts with identifying if a change ticket has a parent or child, the relationship has been added to the main change window in the ‘Change Attributes’ section.

Change – Addition of Component fields to ‘Standard Change’ and ‘Emergency Change’

In the same way as for a normal change, Standard changes and Emergency changes now have a component drop down that is populated based on the service selected, with an additional free text component field that will appear when an ‘Other’ component is selected.

Fix – Analysts can now delete a SOP template from any part of the SOP Template creation process

Previously the ability to delete a SOP template had been missed from some statuses of the SOP Template, this has been corrected so that a SOP can be deleted at any required time.

Change – Service Owners can now request further information be applied to a SOP Template at any approval stage

Previously this functionality was missing from a SOP Template that had been approved and subsequently reopened for editing, this has been corrected.

Change – Service Owners will now receive an email notification advising them that a SOP template is awaiting their attention

This is to aid Service Owners in understanding when a SOP Template sits with them for approval/rejection/more information requested.

Change – Add ability to add notes and attachments onto closed and cancelled changes

These actions were previously missing and have been added to all types of change (Normal, Standard and Emergency) at all closed and cancelled statuses.

Fix  – Pipeline tickets Associated Service field fixed

Previously the associated service field, populated using all requestable items in NU Service, this has been amended to populate using only the top-level services. This fix reduces the number of pages from 15 to 2 when selecting this field.

Fix  – Ticket action history corrections for Change Management

• Starting Peer Review
• Returning change to change the owner
• End Peer Review
• Submit For Approval

Previously both the ticket history for starting peer review and returning a change to the change ower showed as a note, both have been correctly labelled within the ticket history with appropriate information included. Ending Peer review would incorrectly label the person performing the action as the ‘Last Updated By’ user rather than the change owner; this has been corrected. Submit For Approval was simply missing any ticket history; this has been added.

Fix – CAB Review time now updates correctly

An issue where the ‘CAB Review’ action wasn’t populating the requested review time for the CAB meeting has been fixed.

Fix – Addition of character limit on SOP Template titles

A SOP template title can only contain 100 characters, any more and the SOP itself will not be able to be created due to a system limitation. This has been clarified on the window by explicitly stating the maximum character limit.

Fix – Incorrect time shown on actions ‘With Customer’ and ‘Back From Customer’ in Incident Management

The time zone for these action was incorrectly set to ignore Daylight Savings; this has now been corrected.

Fix – Amend text for Minor Changes in information box to remove reference to CAB approval

Minor changes in the ‘Approved’ status would have reference to CAB approval in the information box; this has been corrected.

Fix  -Transfer a minor change to the new process as awaiting change detail

When transferring a change ticket from the old process to new, Minor Changes at the ‘Approved’ status moved to a state where they couldn’t be revised.  This has been corrected and all now Minor changes can be amended/revised via the ‘Amend Change Detail/Date’ action.

Fix  – Start the clock on reopened incidents

An issue was identified and corrected when cancelling an Incident in the ‘With Customer’ status and then re-opening the ticket did not restart the clock, prohibiting further use of the ‘With Customer’ and ‘Back From Customer’ actions.

The purpose of this release was to fix a couple of minor issues and to make some quick improvements based on wish list items. We have kept the contents of the release light to ensure we could fit it in before the upcoming work on the change management process.

Change – added ability to ‘Add Note’(s) and ‘Add Attachment’(s) to a task that is created within a problem ticket.

We have added the functionality for users to be able to add notes and attachments to individual tasks with problem tickets. This is intended for use where specific tasks may involve more complex solutions, workarounds or updates than a simple single ‘details’ field.

Please be aware that the notes and attachments that are logged against specific tasks are not shown in a collection on the main problem ticket window; this is an intentional design decision following the reasoning that the notes and attachments pertaining to the problem as a whole would quickly become cluttered with task notes and attachments.

In order to see any notes or attachments related to a specific task, simply select the task from the ‘Task Problem’ collection on the main problem window, and the relevant notes and attachments will then be visible in collections on the task itself.

Fix – formatting of specific system email notifications, as follows:

• The email sent to Change approvers within the Change Management process.
• The email sent to the assignee of a task within the Problem Management process.

Following the update of emails to an HTML format in a previous release, a couple of emails were displaying the full HTML code rather than the intended ‘neat’ version. These have been amended and will now display correctly, with the ‘link to ticket’ functioning as planned.

Fix – formatting of the SLA emails has been improved and a hyperlink to the associated ticket included.

Previously, SLA emails for both Incident Management and Service Request Management had been only slightly amended to conform to the newer HTML format. We have modified these emails to use the same format as all other analyst system emails, including descriptions of the ticket and a link to the ticket in question.

Fix – the formatting of specific sections of the Service Request ‘View Ticket History’ will be displayed with improved legibility, as follows:

• Notes
• Back from Customer

As per many other actions within processes, the ‘Add Note’ and ‘Back From Customer’ actions within the Service Request Management process have had the entries for the ‘View Ticket History’ amended to correctly show line break formatting. This change does not apply retroactively, but going forwards all additions of these types will no longer display as a single block of text.

Fix – the URL link to the Campus Map that was available on the Contact Us page of Self Service was no longer returning the correct page. This link has now been updated.

Since the move of a portion of ncl.ac.uk to sharepoint, the old link was returning a ‘page not found’ error. This has been fixed to link to a current PDF version of the campus map.

Fix – for user friendliness and consistency with other processes, upon loading a New Incident ticket, the cursor focus is on the Raise User field. Previously this was going to the ‘Logged on Behalf Of’ field.

This release focuses on work to streamline the Self-Service portal in NU Service, simplifying the options available to end users.

Included in this release:

Change – removal of the ‘2^nd layer’ within Self-Service. Users will now only be presented with a single screen before being able to either log a ticket with the Service Desk or browse the Service Request catalogue

Change – simplification of queries showing a user’s currently open and recently closed tickets. Users will now see a single query here, instead of 4. Tickets that require a user’s interaction (‘With Customer’) will be placed at the top of the list, with tickets with no interactivity (triage) placed at the bottom.

Change – removal of unused links and dashboards. A number of links have been removed from the shortcut bar at the side of the Self-Service portal, as these don’t serve any real purpose that isn’t fulfilled by another area of the intranet.

Change – additional free text fields on end user Triage window. There are 2 additional fields on the Triage window for end users (‘Log a Ticket’). These are for the machine name and location respectively. When these fields are completed, they will propagate through the entire life of the ticket and be visible to analysts.

Change – addition of fields in end user Incident/Request windows. There are additional fields on the action windows for Incident and Request Attachment, Cancellation and Note windows that show the ticket number and summary, in order to help users identify the ticket they’re performing the action on.

Fix – alteration of the date format in ‘View Ticket History’. The date format had previously been locked to the US format, but a fix has been applied so that dates in the Ticket History for both Incident and Request will now be in the UK format.

Fix – first field selected in ‘New Incident’ was not raise user. The first field selected automatically when selecting ‘New Incident’ used to be ‘Logged On Behalf Of’, this has been altered so that the ‘Raise User’ field is now automatically selected.

Fix – SLA email content was displaying incorrectly. Since the revised HTML formatted emails, SLA emails have not displayed as intended – these emails have now been altered to match the correct formatting style.

We are hoping to do a NU Service release on Wednesday 6th December to provide some system fixes and introduce some improvements to Self-Service.

If our testing (this week and early next week) exposes something unexpected then we may need to postpone our release date.

Further information to follow.