Knowledge Base – update

It has been decided to wait until the next release of the LANDesk system before we implement the Knowledge Base, as this will give us more flexibility in how we manage knowledge articles.  Until then we will use the existing knowledgebase in the CMS, linked from the new Self-Service pages in NU Service when it goes live later this year.

We will contact knowledge owners again when we start working on preparation to transition the existing knowledge articles to NU Service, and in the meantime please continue to use the CMS to manage your service-related information.

Please contact any member of the Service Process team iss-service-process@ncl.ac.uk if you have any questions or comments regarding this.

NU Service – the next phase: Knowledge and Self-Service

You will be aware that the IT Service website, re-launched in August last year, provided us with a dedicated area of searchable knowledge, centred around our current Service Catalogue. It was always the intention that this knowledge would eventually be used to form the basis of a Knowledge Base underpinning Self-Service in the new ITSM system, NU Service.

The next phase of the NU Service project is the architecture and development of the Knowledge Base and Self-Service elements. A very high-level overview of activities is detailed below. Dates are still to be confirmed.

 •Taking an extract of the current IT Service website knowledge base data from the CMS (proposed date: 9th September)

•Formatting this data for the new NU Service Knowledge Base

•Data upload into NU Service

•Involvement from Service Owners and knowledge owners (ISS web editors) to review knowledge articles (communications around this to follow)

To help us plan the smooth transition of this data, please could Service Owners and ISS web editors advise of any planned or likely changes to information in the IT Service website knowledge base (currently updated via the CMS, Terminal Four), which may take place between 9th September until the end of November 2013. If you are aware of any potential changes please contact the Service Process team (iss-service-process@ncl.ac.uk) before close of business on 6th September 2013.

Although it would help if there were as few changes as possible (ideally none) to the source information in the CMS during the stated period, should essential changes to knowledge be required, we would be grateful if you could do the following:

 •Execute the change in the CMS as you would normally

•Email the Service Process team with the update(s) made

Further information about how knowledge articles with be created and updated in the future will follow, in the meantime if you have any questions or queries please feel free to contact the Service Process team (iss-service-process@ncl.ac.uk).

Release Notes 17th July 2013

The following issues have been addressed in the update deployed on 17th July 2013:

   1. The sizing on the Service Request and Incident resolution screen has been increased to allow more text to be added.

   2. The content of the SLA breach emails is now more meaningful.

   3. There are some new and amended categories:

  • Staff Email Advice
  • Service Availability and Maintenance Messages
  • Undergraduate Admissions Processing-Data Transfers

    4.  Amendment of Support Group combination for the following:

  • Cat 1 = Research Applications and Cat 2 = My projects Proposals and Support Group = Finance Costing and Pricing

     5. Non-ISS analysts can now view their own team’s tasks

     6. Non-ISS analysts can now log tasks to the relevant ISS teams without the unexpected error occurring.  (NOTE: when fixing this we have discovered another 2 issues. (a) If an incident or service request ticket is assigned to a non-ISS team and has a task that is assigned to an ISS team, then the Non-ISS analyst working on the ticket cannot see that there is a task assigned even if it is a task that they have created.  (b) Under normal circumstances, an incident cannot be resolved or a service request fulfilled until all outstanding tasks are completed. In the above scenario, the ‘resolve’ or ‘fulfilled’ action is available to the Non-ISS analyst whether or not the tasks assigned to ISS teams have been completed.)

      7. When you watch a Service Request and select the “Requests I am watching” option, you can now drill into the Service Request.

      8. Once a ticket has been assigned to another group you can now view the details of the assignment within “Assigned to another Group collection” tab.

      9. When a ticket is “With Customer” you can now add a note which will be emailed to the customer.

     10. When notes/tasks have been added to the ticket the email notification content provides the latest updated information.

      11. If a ticket is unfulfilled or unresolved the ticket will be automatically reassigned back to the support group that last owned the ticket.

     12. When you add a note to a ticket you will no longer receive an email to confirm the note has been added.

     13. Dashboards are now working for the Directorate group.

System update planned for 17th July

We will be deploying a release with some system updates and issue resolutions first thing in the morning of Wednesday 17th July.  Please log out of the system by no later than 7:30 a.m. on that date and do not log back in until notified that it is safe to do so.

Once the update has been installed we will post a summary of the changes on this blog.

 

June 2013 Update

We are now into phase 2 of the project which includes User Self Service and Knowledge Management. We are continuing to work with the consultants on the design and configuration.

In parallel we are working on the issues and wish list items and plan to implement a release in the next few weeks. As usual we will post release notes to notify you of what to expect from the release.

 

Release notes 20-06-2013

The following issues have been addressed in the update deployed on 20th June 2013:

  • Improvements to the display of the main dashboard (tidier)
  • Improvements to the search queries
  • Emails to Analysts now have more details within them and a hyperlink to the ticket within the system. The emails that have been updated with this extra content include:
    • Emails for changing the assignment group of a ticket (“Assign to another group” and “Assign within group”)
    • Email to notify that a Major Incident has been declared
    • Emails when adding a Task
  • A bug has been fixed which was preventing attachments over 2MB from being accepted so the limit is now 4MB

Another recent system update includes a fix to the nightly data imports…..

  • For a period the nightly data imports were not running therefore we were running the imports manually as a temporary work around. We now have the nightly data import running as expected.

Release notes 30-05-2013

The following issues have been addressed in the update deployed on 30th May 2013:

  • Right click to complete a task has been disabled
  • Ability to complete a task that is assigned to someone else has been removed
  • Dashboard queries:
    • In “My Open Tickets”, “My Team’s Unassigned Tickets” and in “All Open Tickets For My Team” the “Ticket ID” has been renamed to “ID” throughout 
    • In the “My Open Tickets” and “My Team’s Unassigned Tickets” lists, the “location” column is now labelled “Location”
    • The refresh on the Dashboard is set to 5 minutes. (NOTE: to make sure you are seeing the latest information, refresh/reload the page by pressing F5)
  • Removed ‘Email sent in error’ from history pane and the notifications tab 
  • Changed the label from “Raise User” to “Note created by” within the “Add Note” action (there was some confusion about the function of this field)
  • Amended spelling of ‘Raise User’ in ‘Add assignment’
  • Changed email notifications show to “group” as lower case; fixed some formatting issues with Email Notifications (e.g. line breaks)
  • If a member of staff responds to a MI email, it now adds a note to the Incident rather than send an email stating ‘your email could not be processed’
  • Once a ticket is logged, the ‘Raise User’ now cannot be amended 
  • Amended spelling from ‘Fullfilled’ to ‘Fulfilled’ when you select in the Fulfilment details screen
  • ‘Send date’ flag on certain system generated emails was showing as 13th December 2007 – now showing the actual send date
  • Expanded the text box on ‘with customer’ screen

 

With Customer notification

If you select the action With Customer, enter the details into the details box and select Save and Close this will send a notification to the customer to notify them that the ticket is on hold and they need to respond. It will also display the information you entered into the details box.