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.

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.