In my previous post (New Starter/Leaver Process – Part 1) I described, diagrammatically, a new starter business process that could be implemented in Service Desk Express as shown below:
In this post we are going to lay the foundations to build this process (by populating some necessary data) and then in the final post in the series we will complete the business rules.
Categories/Support Subjects
We need to add a couple of Categories /Support Subjects as shown below:
| Subject ID | Description | Parent Subject ID |
|---|---|---|
| ZZ | zzBusinessRules | |
| ZZNS | New Starter Process | ZZ |
| ZZNSEX | AD/Exchange Account Request | ZZNS |
| ZZNSWS | Workstation Request | ZZNS |
Now obviously it goes without saying that you don’t have to have the same categories as me. The reason I name Business Rules as zzBusinessRules is to shove them down the bottom of the Category Tree out of the way.
Groups
In my example I am going to have a centralised System Admin Group (SYSADMINS), Desktop Team (DESKTOPS), and HR Team (HR) who will do my induction process. Again, if you are following this you can call your groups whatever you want
CI Types/Inventory Catalogue Items
Whenever I write these posts I am always keen to make the example something that has a reasonable degree of complexity about it. Many technical examples are based around the equivalent of the Hello World application, and from bitter experience this CAN be more frustrating than useful. So in my example here, I am going to assume that we are using the Asset Management modules as well. So we’ll need the following CITypes/Inventory Catalogue Items:
| Part # | Description |
|---|---|
| STDWS01 | Standard Workstation |
| STDLT01 | Standard Laptop |
| STDMB01 | Standard Mobile Phone |
| STDBU01 | Standard Operating System/Applications Build |
| STD3G01 | Standard 3G Card |
Standard Configurations
We are then going to create two standard configurations as shown below:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| STDST | Standard Static Configuration |
| Consisting of… | |
| STDWS01 | Standard Workstation |
| STDBU01 | Standard Operating System/Applications Build |
and
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| STDMB | Standard Mobile Configuration |
| Consisting of… | |
| STDLT01 | Standard Laptop |
| STDMB01 | Standard Mobile Phone |
| STDBU01 | Standard Operating System/Applications Build |
| STD3G01 | Standard 3G Card |
Standard Configurations User Defined Function
As anyone will tell you, when, as a developer, you hardcode stuff you invariably come to regret it (unless you have already left the organisation that is). I want to be able to send my supervisors a dynamic list of Standard Configurations that he/she can select from such that if that business decides at a later date to have a Non-Standard Mobile Configuration we can cope with it without the need for any code changes.
Alas, out of the box Service Desk Express can’t send a list of anything to anyone. This is where we need a little SQL help in the form of a User-Defined Function (UDF). Below is a link to a function I want to use to send out part of my email which can either be run yourself against the SDE database or given to your SQL DBA to run against the SDE database:
If you haven’t used user-defined functions in SDE then you might find this post helpful.
Summary
So that is all the preparation work done. Now all we have to do is build our business rules to use all this stuff and that is what I will document in the third and final post in this series.
JOATIT 