Following the release, we’ve spotted a small anomaly where the ‘print report’ icon isn’t present in Incident tickets – the link still works, however.  We’ll update this post once we’ve fixed this.

This release focuses on the work done to include the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering (SAgE), and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) as analysts in NU Service.

This functionality will be switched on (without the need for further system downtime), on Monday 3rd July, the go-live date for SAgE and HaSS IT Support to begin using the system.

Further information will follow on or before Monday 3rd July regarding system handling/ticket routing as a result of this work; this is similar to the changes made for adding NUIT staff in the Faculty of Medical Sciences.  This will include the renaming or removal of  some Service Request and Incident categories following on prior discussion with Service Owners.

For further information on guidance for ticket logging see the internal SMO web pages.

Included in this release:

Change – addition of ‘SAGE IT SUPPORT’ and ‘HASS IT SUPPORT’ groups within NU Service, including bringing all IT Support analysts/technicians on to the system as Analysts.  This will give analysts the same analyst view that NUIT enjoys, along with dashboards to show tickets from end users in individual schools.

Change – addition of ‘Machine Name’ to the initial ‘Triage’ window. This has been put in to aid the Service Desk by providing a field at the first possible point to record the machine name of an end user.

Change – addition to the Ticket History of the Service Request ticket type to record the fulfillment details of a ticket that has been ‘Fulfilled on Creation’

Change – emails generated by the system have been changed to HTML format.  The text of emails that are sent to customers has been reviewed and amended to simplify the language used, making them more ‘user-friendly’, e.g. replacing the use of the word ‘ticket’ with ‘query’.  We’ve also added the name of the customers school or department to notification emails for NUIT analysts; this should help if you would like to set up Outlook rules to sort your NU Service emails into specific folders.

We are hoping to do a NU Service release on Tuesday 27th June to provide some system fixes, introduce some improvements and perform the system work to on-board the Faculty Science, Agriculture and Engineering (SAgE), and the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS).

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.

We have upgraded to the latest version of the system; it includes new features that give us a platform on which to build future functionality. There are some enhancements in this version and some known issues that have been fixed which we want to make you aware of.

Fixes to Known Issues:

• Attempting to select ‘Assign To My Group Instead Of Suggested Group’ or ‘Assign To Me’ when creating a new Incident ticket without having first selected the ‘Impact’ and ‘Urgency’ will no longer cause an error message to appear at the top of the screen.
• When adding a task, the ‘Assigned Support Group’ for that task will now show up in the ticket history.

We will be upgrading to the current version of NU Service on Wednesday 14th December, the work will begin at 17:00. 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 Wednesday 14th December and do not log back in until you receive an email notification advising that you may do so. We anticipate that the system will be available for normal use by 08:00 on Thursday 15th December.

The work to move NU Service to its own database server has been successfully completed. Many thanks to all those involved, both in the testing run-up to the move and also the move itself.

We are hoping to see a measure of performance improvement from this move, and this step is vital in positioning us to better deal with any future performance issues. We can now work to diagnose any database related issues in way that wasn’t possible before, such as altering settings on the server that we couldn’t do when the server was shared with other services.

We look forward to hearing any and all experiences of how NU Service is performing on its new server, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Service Process team.

NU Service will be undergoing maintenance this evening, Tuesday 8th March, between 17:00 and 22:00 (GMT).

The maintenance will cover the move of NU Service to its own database server as mentioned in a previous post.

Please ensure that you save your work and are logged out of the system by 17:00 (GMT) on Tuesday 8th March and do not log back in until you receive an email advising that it is safe to do so; we anticipate that the system will be available for normal use by Wednesday 9th March, 08:00 (GMT).

Many of you will be aware of ongoing issues with the performance of NU Service.  We wanted to update you as to progress in the work to try to address this issue.

We’re currently working to move NU Service from the current shared database server to its own database server. The move will take all components of NU Service, including our Test and Development databases, and put them onto a new virtual server.  We are hoping that once this is achieved, that performance will improve as a direct result, however if it doesn’t we should be in a better position to better diagnose the issue, for example we could alter settings on the new server which isn’t an option on a server that is shared with other services.

This work is being led by Application Support, in collaboration with Service Process and Infrastructure, and input from LANDesk.  It’s already underway with some work done on the TEST and DEV systems, and we’re now in a testing phase.  Unfortunately we cannot predict how long this will take, but once we are happy that everything is working as it should we will be able to plan the next stage which will be the actual database move.

All updates will be posted on the blog, so please keep any eye out. In the meantime, the Service Process team is happy to field queries and comments on NU Service.