ServiceDesk 4.7.130 Update 03/20/16

Forgive me, but I think a lot of folks are gonna like this one. 

Like a lot of things these days, it was not exactly my idea. 

Janice Salman called from Just Press One.  She runs a call-center with a crew of CSRs, handling calls for a growing number of Rossware clients.  She said the quantity has now reached more than 30, and it's getting tough for her CSRs to keep track of the particular details (details that are needed to guide each customer conversation) that vary for each particular client.  She wondered if I could suggest a feature in ServiceDesk that, as a ServiceDesk instance comes up for any particular client, would volunteer the particular details of which a CSR needed to be reminded in regard to that client. 

Well, I couldn't think of anything existing that seemed to be a super fit. 

So, I came up with something, and I think it's a tool that will prove very useful to many of you, whether you have Janice's team taking calls for you or not. 

In a nutshell, this is a feature that allows you to add a Notice section (aka "Bulletin Board") to the right of the Callsheets in your standard ServiceDesk interface.  Here's is an example of what it might look like:

Of course, I only created a bit of imaginative text, in the above, for the purpose of this illustration.  It's solely to provide a notion of some of the kinds of things you might want to do.  You could use your Bulletin Board for anything you might like.  You can use any color of text you want (or any combination of colors).  You can can use any font and any font size.  You can use any desired formatting.  The general idea is it's a new space, that you can make all yours, and you can change it as often (or as infrequently) as you like. 

You might notice, in the above, you can have hyperlinks in your Bulletin Board.  If a user simply double-clicks on such a link, the system will immediately open the target.  (Please note these must be in the explicit-face-text, SD-Link-acceptable format; embedded hyperlinks will not work in this context or in any other direct-within-ServiceDesk context.)

To implement this new feature is easy. 

To start, open a text editor that is capable of saving in .rtf format (stands for RichTextFormat).  WordPad is a good choice, and it's automatically present in every Windows computer.  Compose the text that you want, and format it in whatever manner you want (i.e., color of text as wanted, type of font, font size, underlining, bold, italics, etc.).  Then save your document in a particular name, in a particular file-format, and to a particular location.  Specifically save to the sd\netdata folder on your server, in .rtf format (happily that is the native-save format for WordPad), and with this filename:

ThisCompanyBulletinBoard.rtf

That's all you must do. 

ServiceDesk will see the file there, will expand on its right-side to show your composed text, and will show it.  It's that simple! 

Of course, any time you want to change what's shown in the Bulletin Board, just open the file again, make any edits you want, and save.  Again, it's that simple.  If you decide you do not want to have a Bulletin Board displayed any more, delete the file, and ServiceDesk will respond.  

A few notes:

1. If any user's desktop window does not have sufficient width for the expanded view, that user will of course not be able to see the expanded view.

2. After you've added the file, deleted it or otherwise changed it, it may take up to one minute before ServiceDesk sees the change and adapts its view accordingly (the reason is it only checks for such changes on a once-per-minute basis). 

3. As you may note in the illustration, the general background color in the Bulletin Board will be configured to display in the same color as you've picked for ServiceDesk itself.  So as to assure your text is readily visible, please be sure to pick font colors that are a good contrast with whatever you have picked for that background.  It's true that from within your text editor (WordPad or similar) you may potentially pick a particular font-background color for particular text, but for most purposes that tends to look less elegant and read less well (i.e., as compared to a transparent background). 

4. Regardless of as just stated, it may sometimes be beneficial to selectively pick other-than-transparent font-background colors.  One purpose, for example, could be found in the fact WordPad (if that's the text editor you are using) insists on automatically adding standardized hyperlink formatting to any url that's typed.  In other words, it underlines the text and makes it blue (as in IAmHyperlinkFormatted).  As you can see in our first illustration some distance above, this blue color may be a poor contrast from your background.  A sensible solution (at least in this particular circumstance) could be to change the font-background color on this particular text to something non-transparent and contrasting, such as you see done here.   

1. You'll likely notice that, in addition to adding a font-background color for the hyperlink, I also spiffed up some other formatting elements, as compared to the first example.  Basically, you are similarly in control of formatting -- in terms simply of how you set it up from within WordPad (or similar), and in terms of what will ultimately fit within the canvass provided (if you're putting in a lot or of large text, you'll have to simply see by trial and error whether it fits in the space we've provided for you). 

We hope you'll love this feature.  Please let us know.   

Recently it came to our attention that claim submissions to ServicePower with AIG as the expected-to-pay party were being rejected, owing to absence of indication as to whether it was a "sealed-system" repair versus a normal repair.  Upon inquiring with ServicePower, we learned the expectation on AIG claims is for a particular field in their claim format (specifically, it's the field they title "EIA or MFG Repair/Fault/Defect Code 1" to be populated with the code "8002" to denote that it's a sealed system repair, or "8001" to denote that it's a normal repair (why they do not tell us these things in advance is anyone's guess). 

Anyhow, with knowledge of this expectation, any of y'all could have made your AIG claims sail through just fine, simply by typing that "8001" or "8002" code into the particular box of our on-screen NARDA, as needed, before transmitting your claim.  To be clear, it is this yellow-highlighted box (as shown with assistance of the Translation-ToolTips) that, on ServicePower-formatted claims, is translated into that particular ServicePower field:

Regardless, rather than putting you to the trouble of having to type, we'd much prefer to automate.  So, we've now coded so that if you check the on-screen NARDA's dedicated "Sealed System Repair" checkbox, as shown with yellow-highlighting here:

. . . and if it's on a claim being submitted to ServicePower, with AIG or ServiceNet configured in the underling JobRecord as the paying party (and if you have not otherwise placed any text of your own into that box) -- if all that is true -- ServiceDesk will behind the scenes populate the needed claim field with the needed "8002" code.  Correspondingly, if that "Sealed System Repair" checkbox is not checked (but the other factors all remain true), ServiceDesk will behind-the-scenes populate the needed claim field with the needed "8001" code.  It should make successful submission of these claims into being once again a simple matter.  

Ken Owen from Service Care in Birmingham, AL pointed to the need for this.  It arises, he said, when it's discovered days or weeks after the job was prior completed and "put-to-bed" that the wrong party was claimed against.  Perhaps you claimed against Lowes, for example, and now it turns out you need to claim against Whirlpool.  When you need to flip the party-info sections around and/or do a QET-insertion within a current job, it's simple.  But those automation facilities were not formerly available in the Archived-JobRecord context.  Now they are.