IT Service Management

SMO team blog

IT Service Management

NU Service release notes – 27th June 2017

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.

 

NU Service Planned Release

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.

NU Service system upgrade notes – December 2016

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.

NU Service system upgrade

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.

NU Service release notes – 7th November 2016

This release focuses on fixing a few issues that have impacted the performance of NU Service, following some time spent performing a healthcheck of the system.

Some of the changes are in the background processes, however there are a few modifications to processes and queries to be aware of.

Change Management

Change: We have altered the way that appointments are handled within the Change Management process. Analysts should add appointments to the Change Calendar as normal, but following this if needed there is a new action available at both the ‘Open’ and ‘Approved’ status, called ‘Delete Appointment’. This is to be used either to simply remove the appointment from the change calendar, or to modify the timings (to modify the timings of an appointment, simply delete the appointment then re-create it with the correct timings).

NOTE: Deleting an appointment when a change is in an ‘Approved’ state will take the change back to ‘Open’, and approval will have to be sought again.

Change Calendar

Fix: A modification has been made to the Change Calendar, meaning that entries will not appear to be duplicating.

Fix: The Calendar gadget on the ‘Active Changes’ dashboard will now populate correctly when the dashboard loads.

Queries

Change: Following advice from a LANDESK consultant, we have removed the ability to search by ‘Details’ or ‘Description’ from the following ticket search queries:

  • Search All Tickets
  • Search All Incidents (previously Incident Search)
  • Search All Requests (previously Service Request Search)
  • Search All Changes (previously Change Search)
  • Search All Problems (previously Problem Search)

Ticket History

Change: We have enabled line formatting in certain entries in the Incident and Request Ticket Histories, content will now correctly include line breaks.

NU Service – Release

UPDATE:

The release below did not go ahead, and has been rescheduled for Thursday 27th October 2016, from 17:00 – 20:00.

ORIGINAL POST:

NU Service will be unavailable on Tuesday 25th October between 17:00 and 20:00 for the purpose of planned system maintenance.

Please ensure that you are logged out of the system during this time period.