Traffic Lights – Calls On Hold

A while back I posted an article on how to implement the traffic light concept in Service Desk Express (http://www.joatit.com/wordpress/?p=69). When I implemented this for our contracts the immediate response was “Great but…Can you make the tickets on hold go a different colour?”

Isn’t it nice to be able to say “Of course!” Here is how:

(CASE WHEN (SELECT "STOPTHECLOCK" FROM "_SMDBA_"."_UDSTATUS_" WHERE "SEQUENCE" = "BASE"."SEQ_UDSTATUS:") = 1 THEN 'On Hold' WHEN GETDATE() > "RECOMMENDEDFIX_DATE:" AND GETDATE() < "DUE_DATE:" THEN 'Warning' WHEN GETDATE() > "DUE_DATE:" THEN 'Critical' ELSE 'Normal' END)

Hope it helps. As always, please keep the feedback coming. It makes sure that what I am posting is of relevance and interest to the people reading.

Email Conversation – Mandated Subject Lines and Signature Blocks

So I am finally coming to the end of a piece of work I am doing for one of our contracts and there was a genuine need to mandate a phrase at the beginning of every email from the Service Desk and also include the signature block of the user sending the email. Whilst the solution to doing this wasn’t exactly rocket-science, I thought it might save one of you guys the trouble if I posted my solution:

Mandated Subject Line:

So the first challenge was to mandate a phrase in the subject line. So by way of an example, let’s say that you wanted to make sure that the subject of every email sent by any staff member, started with “Service Desk Notification:” What I did was to create a simple client-side business rule (CSBR).

Conditions

On Data Change – <Any Field>
Expression 1	Comparison Operator	Expression 2	Logical Operator
{SUBSTR,1,26,{TR,Subject} SS}	NotEqual	Service Desk Notification:	None

Actions

Method	Module	Form
Populate Current Form	Email Conversation	Email Conversation

Field Name	Value
Subject	Service Desk Notification: {TR,Subject}

So basically, when ever a field is changed on the form (handles when a user doesn’t bother entering a subject), the rule checks to see if the first 26 characters of the new subject is “Service Desk Notification:”. If it is not then the rule appends the new subject to the words, “Service Desk Notification:”

Signature Blocks:

The second challenge was to automatically insert the signature block of the user sending the email using a standard IS Service signature block. The solution to this was a lot easier than I had imagined. I created another CSBR:

Conditions

On Save
Expression 1	Comparison Operator	Expression 2	Logical Operator

Actions

Method	Module	Form
Populate Current Form	Email Conversation	Email Conversation

Field Name

Value

Body

{TR,Body}   Regards, {DB,Support Staff,Full Name,”Login ID” = ‘{MAGICUSER}’ DB} IS Service Team T: {DB,Support Staff,Phone,”Login ID” = ‘{MAGICUSER}’ DB} F: {DB,Support Staff,Fax,”Login ID” = ‘{MAGICUSER}’ DB} P: {DB,Support Staff,Beeper,”Login ID” = ‘{MAGICUSER}’ DB} E: mailto: {MAGICUSER}@mydomain.com You can track the progress of any of your tickets by visiting our Self-Service portal (http://servicedesk) and clicking on the link to My Tickets.

On save, the rule essentially goes and gets all the details from the Support Staff table for the user sending the email ({MAGICUSER}) and creates and appends the signature block. 

And that was it.

Making Training A Little Different

I have recently completed a project where we provided a training environment (application and database server) on the same physical network as the production environment. We put in place a scripted backup and restore for each Friday night such that the training environment has a sensible up-to-date set of training data.

The fear however, was that given that our users had shortcuts to both environments, there was a risk that someone might log into the wrong system and not realise. Consequently, we needed a way of differentiating between the two environments which we accomplished via cascading style sheets as shown below:

Production:

Training:

Achieving this is very simple:

Open default.htm from the C:Program FilesBMCService Desk ExpressApplication Serverhtml directory and replace the line:

<table style="height:99%;width:100%;background-color:0069A5;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" border=0 bordercolor=yellow ID="TableLogin">

with:

<table style="height:99%;width:100%;background-color:FF0000;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" border=0 bordercolor=yellow ID="TableLogin">

Save the file. That sorts out the Login page which isn’t a great deal of use if your organisation is using “Windows Authentication!”

Open Merlin Theme.css from the C:Program FilesBMCService Desk ExpressApplication Server directory in notepad. Scroll down until you find:

.navLEFT
{
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #2188c9;
BORDER-TOP: #ffffff 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #196697 1px solid
}

and replace with:

.navLEFT
{
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #FF0000;
BORDER-TOP: #ffffff 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #196697 1px solid
}

and similarly find:

.navBODY
{
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #2188c9;
}

and replace with:

.navBODY
{
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #FF0000;
}

Save the file and you have the desired effect.