ServiceDesk 4.7.100 Update 02/03/15

Among Rossware clients are many ambitious, creative and ingenious people (if you wish to know, we're pretty proud to be serving such a bunch). 

Anyway, Matt Janoweicki and his team at Ace Appliance (Toledo, OH) began a few years ago in building a treasure trove of extremely professional videos, each showing the complete sequence of steps as involved in replacing a particular part.  They put the whole trove online (and it continues to be fast-growing) in a website called appliancevideo.com, and are now making a serious business out of the enterprise. 

Recently, Matt and his team asked if Rossware might be interested in making some integrated ties into those videos.  It seemed like a good idea, and so now has been done. 

In fact, it's been done for both ServiceDesk and SD-Mobile. 

The link from within ServiceDesk is via the PartsProcess form (F8).  To open the "how to" video as connected with any part number, just do a Alt/right-click on that part number:

That action will immediately query the appliancevideo.com website for any videos it has as associated with that part number.  The website will display with any such videos selected. 

If you forget the above-described mouse/key action, don't worry.  It's another of the tricks that's described in the contextual "cheat-sheet:"

As in the case of other contextual cheat-sheets, it's accessed by right-clicking in any otherwise non-operative portion of the form (e.g., for the F8 form it's easiest to right-click in the colorful label area at top). 

For information about how to use the new link from within SD-Mobile, refer to the SD-Mobile WorkDiary.

The PartsPick form (Ctrl-Shift/F8) was designed as an onscreen venue where you easily see each item that needs moved to/from a tech, and check-off such movements as have actually occurred. 

It's a very powerful tool, and we designed with a philosophy engineered toward enforcing conscientiousness in the user.   In other words, we did not want users to simply look at the surface of items for which movement was expected, check-off whatever was moved, and ignore everything else.  We wanted to assure users stayed really on top of the whole list of expectations, paying due attention to each and every item. 

To achieve this purpose, we made it so each item of expected movement must be toggled in each session.  Specifically, it must be toggled to red (to indicate movement is indeed occurring) or to grey (to indicate that item is being deliberately left as-is for the time-being). 

Overall, that's a good purpose, but some users routinely were in a situation where the system expected a large list of items back from the tech, which they were deliberately leaving with the tech pending an expected (but not yet scheduled) future appointment.  It was rather a nuisance to have to manually toggle-to-grey each of these items, each time, before any other movements could be registered.  So, we added an option.  It's referenced in the text when you click on the "Record Movements" button, but without all items toggled as per expectation.  Historically, that click would produce a message that simply told you you must toggle all items.  Now, it adds a little paragraph:

That added paragraph is there to guide you to the newly-added option.  Follow it's prescription, and you'll see this:

If you choose the first option, obviously, you'll get the result it promises.