One of the limitations of Magic/Service Desk Express is that you can’t sort on a free text field i.e. a column of data type ntext. More often than not this isn’t an issue and can be resolved by a variety of solutions. However, recently I had a complaint from a self-service customer because when viewing their incidents in self-service they couldn’t search their tickets.
My immediate reaction was that they could double click the column they wanted to search and enter the search criteria. However, that only works on fields other than ntext fields and calculated fields. If your organisation either doesn’t have a detailed category/subject tree or alternatively you have, for example, an other category that gets used a little more than it should, a customer with a lot of tickets (open or closed) can have a significant challenge in finding the correct ticket in question.
So a solution then:
Using DB Admin create a new field in the incident module of type text, allowing 255 characters (or less) and null. Call this field something like “Client Ref Text” as shown below:
Then using self-service customisation, add the field to the incident form such that users can enter their choice of reference text that will help them find the record in the future.
Additionally, you can modify the pop-up (Select all incidents) such that that field is in the list. Now they can double-click on that column and search using SDE/Magic’s built in functionality.
I would suggest that you also add this field to technicians incident form (making it read-only) and to their popup such that should a client quote this reference text as opposed to the incident no, the ticket can still be found.
As always, all comments/suggestions welcome.
JOATIT 