For the last release of the year (and my last before leaving the team), we wanted to put in a lot of good stuff that people have been asking for, as well as addressing the higher impact bugs that have been identified (or introduced) recently. We’ve focussed on really improving the user experience and made some changes that we hope will make your life easier and enhance the goodwill of the season.

Incidents and service requests

• You will now be able to see the ticket reference number and customer’s name when adding a note, sending a notification, putting a ticket with customer or resolving/fulfilling an incident/service request. This has been one of our most requested enhancements (which wasn’t possible before we upgraded in the summer). It’s worth noting that this information will only appear when working on new incident and service request tickets.
• Previously incident and service requests tickets could only be assigned to another group by analysts who were in the group to which the ticket was currently assigned. We know this caused a lot of headaches when tickets were accidentally assigned to the wrong team and couldn’t be recovered. To address this, any analyst can now assign any ticket to another group, as long as the ticket isn’t assigned to an individual.
• The size of the text areas on a few of the windows have been increased in response to specific requests.
• Some ‘quick open’ service requests have been added to help the CRS team deal with the pace of working with many students face-to-face.
• We’ve fixed a bug which meant that child tickets of major incidents weren’t being resolved automatically when the major incident ticket was resolved.
• There had been some (very few) cases of incident and service requests losing their assignment during an assignment action with the result that they ended up assigned to no-one. This should no longer occur. We’ve also taken this opportunity to tidy up the assign to another group window.

Dashboards and views

• The ‘Last Updated By’ and ‘Last Update’ fields on the main analyst dashboard were not working if tickets were updated by email. This has now been fixed.
• The ‘Current Queues by Team’ view now has an additional filter, ‘Current Assignee’, so you can see current tickets assigned to individual analysts.
• Some cancelled tickets were showing up in views of current queues; this should no longer happen.
• Some minor nomenclature issues have been fixed and tidied up.

Problems and changes

• It is now possible to import SOPs from a spreadsheet. If you have many SOPs to enter this is likely to save you a considerable amount of time. Talk to me or Lisa if you’re interested in using this functionality.
• Closed changes were appearing in the ‘Scheduled Active Changes’ gadget of the ‘Active Changes’ dashboard. This has been fixed.
• If someone (other than the problem or change owner) adds a note to a problem or change record the owner will now be notified.
• When an emergency change is submitted for approval the content of the email has now been changed so it can be easily identified as an emergency change (and therefore not requiring the usual CAB approval).
• Attachments can now be added to root causes in the problem management process.

Self-service

• End users reporting an incident through self-service can now add attachments at the time they log the ticket. Previously the end user had to wait until their ticket had been triaged by Service Desk to generate an incident or service request ticket. They could then go in to the new ticket to add the attachment.
• We’ve put in some behind-the-scenes functionality to enable future improvements and automation to the process for procuring software licences and requesting installation.

This purpose of this release was to make some quick improvements to the change and problem management processes which were introduced at the end of August, based on feedback received since then. We’ve also made some small enhancements to the service request functionalilty.

Service Requests

• It’s now possible to change the privacy of a note on a service request ticket after it has been saved. Previously this was only possible on incidents.
• Some ‘quick open’ templates have been added to enable the Service Desk and Cluster Room Support teams to record common requests more quickly.
• It is now possible to link service request tickets to change records. This can be achieved from within a service request ticket, by creating a new change or attaching an existing change.

Changes

• It is now possible to link change records to service request tickets. This can be achieved from within the change record, by creating a new service request or linking to an existing service request.
• A search facility has been added to the list of SOPs (standard operating procedures), accessed via the ‘Change Management’ shortcut group.
• Additional search options have been added to the ‘Search All Changes’ functionality. For example, you can now search on ‘Date Implemented’.
• It is now possible to cancel a change ticket (from the ‘open’ status).
• It is now possible to edit the attachment title field and remove an attachment from a change record.
• The ‘Service Affected’ field was not populating within the ‘Analyst Dashboard’ for change records. This has been fixed.
• It is now possible to create a child change throughout the change management process. Previously this action was not available on closed changes.
• A title is no longer required when adding ‘change detail’. This field had no value and created an unnecessary extra step.
• Names are now listed within the dropdown list on the ‘Assign within Group’ window. Previously only the analysts’ IDs were shown.
• There is a new dashboard for the members of CAB to show changes awaiting CAB approval and recently approved major changes.

Problems

• Previously problem records that were at a status of ‘Known Error’ or ‘Known Error with Workaround’ were not showing in dashboards. This has been fixed.
• It is now possible to reopen a problem ticket after it has been closed.
• In the problem management process, the size of the text boxes to add workarounds and possible cause details has been increased.
• Names are now listed within the dropdown list on the ‘Assign within Group’ window. Previously only the analysts’ IDs were shown.
• It is now possible to search on the ‘Related Reference’ attribute when using the ‘Search all Problems’ functionality.
• Attachments can now be added to possible causes in the problem management process.
• There is now an optional ‘Component’ field on the main problem record. This attribute is included in the search query.

Please continue to give us feedback.

We will be deploying an update to NU Service that will include some fixes and enhancements on Tuesday 7^th October between 17:00 and 20:00.

Please ensure that you save your work and are logged out of the system by 17:00 on Tuesday 7^th October and do not log back in until you receive an email notification advising that you may log back in. We are aiming for the release to be completed by 20:00 on the 7^th October and no later than 09:00 on 8^th October.

Details of the release will be posted on this blog.

The latest NU Service release includes the following change and new features:

Changes in Web Desk

• The size of the details box on the service request and incident ticket windows has been increased
• If an incident has been caused by a change, it can now be linked to the causing change record. This can be done from either the incident ticket or the change ticket.

New Processes

• Change Management Process
  The Change Management process will provide IT Staff with a means to record all changes to live services, systems and components, with varying levels of approval according to the type and level of change. Benefits include more control, more visibility and better tracking of this work.

• Problem Management Process
  The problem management process will provide IT staff with a means to log and track work on issues with IT Services that require investigation to determine underlying root causes of one or more incidents; it enables the logging of possible causes and workarounds, giving visibility of these to other NU Service analysts.

Change and problem tickets (including any associated task tickets) that are assigned to you will be listed within your Analyst dashboard (just as service requests and incidents are listed).
To access the new functionality and relating dashboards, see shortcuts for Change Management and Problem Management at the bottom left corner of Web Desk.

Process guidance notes will be made available here:

Change Management
Problem Management

Training
Training in how to use the new functionality will be available from the IT Service Training Team (an email will follow with details of how to book)

• General awareness presentations on 5th September
• Hands-on training available from 12-4.30 on 19th Sept and all day 24th September

The latest update is a full upgrade of the system, and it includes new features that give us a platform on which to build future functionality. There are some changes in this version which we want to make you aware of:

1. In-ticket searching
Analysts now get the option to search stored information directly from a ticket (this is currently restricted to ticket information but will in future also include knowledge articles). To use this, highlight some on-screen text on which to search, then click the magnifying glass icon.

Please note: If no text is selected the entire content of the ticket will be used as search terms, which will bring back a lot of results! Under certain circumstances using this search functionality without any text selected can result in an error.

The search results will open in a new tab or window (depending on your browser settings) so that you can browse the search results whilst continuing to work on the ticket in your original tab or window.

2. Re-opened information for service requests
Service requests that have been reopened by a customer will now contain the relevant information in a “Request Not Fulfilled Collection”.

3. Change in the number of tickets displayed
You may notice that more tickets can be displayed within each section of the analyst dashboard (depending on how many tickets are in the queue).

4. Known issues and workarounds
1. Using NU Service with Internet Explorer in compatibility view will present the self-service dashboard to analysts without the option to ‘Switch to Web Desk’ (the standard analyst view).

• Please note that Chrome is the recommended browser for NU Service.
• If you prefer to use Internet Explorer, switching off compatibility view will resolve this issue.
• Note: On the managed desktop, IE has compatibility view switched on by default, as it is required for certain SAP processes.

2. Using NU Service with Internet Explorer 8 gives a security warning that some of the content is not delivered securely and by default asks whether you want to view only the content that was delivered securely. This occurs when loading every page.

• The content and functionality is not affected regardless of whether you choose ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.
• There is no security risk.
• If you see this and and find it annoying, it is possible to change the settings to stop IE8 asking about it.