ServiceDesk 4.7.85 Update 06/20/14

If your office has more than just one ServiceDesk station, you may find yourself wanting to know (and perhaps monitor) what systems are turned on and running at other stations.  This is particularly true if your office is running multiple utilities, such as SD-MobileLink and/or SD-CyberLink, for example, or any of several others.  Until now, there has been no way to directly monitor this, except by checking directly at other stations to see what is running there.  Now we have a method. 

To use the new method, go to your About ServiceDesk form (it's the first option under File Functions in the main menu, or a handy keyboard shortcut is Shift/Ctrl-A).  There, you can simply move mousepointer over the textual area that indicates when the Auto-Archive last ran:

In response, there will be an immediate pop-up, looking something like this:

To put it another way, this method is similar to invoking a Windows ToolTip (i.e., float your mousepointer over something), though this is a more elaborate ToolTip than is typically the case. 

As you can see, this one provides a ton of potential information regarding what's running within your system, and where, and how currently. 

The current release of ServiceDesk is configured so that each instance posts more information (regarding what is turned on and where), than before, so as to make more such information available here (where posts were done in older versions, the information as available to show you will be more limited, as in the case above regarding the WipAlert feature being turned on at the desk of Karie Spaet).

Also, each of the relevant utilities must be updated to do their own postings of information, for showing in this report (in other words, until and unless you are running a utility that has received this updating, it will not do the posting that's needed for this report to see its information).  We will be updating each of these utilities, for this purpose, within the next following few days. 

This one was driven by some servicers wanting to improve their metrics as measured by certain third-parties, such as Whirlpool.  Among other measures of concern are days-between-dispatch-and-first appointment, and days-between-dispatch-and-completion.  The direct matter of concern is, when you make it easy for a consumer to reschedule, they tend to do so with more frequency than otherwise.  

So, say on Monday you get a third-party dispatch that's scheduled for two-days hence (i.e., Wednesday).  If you in fact fulfill that appointment on Wednesday, it will be fairly good for your metrics.  But suppose on Tuesday you use the SD/CyberOffice feature to email the consumer a reminder, with request to click on hyperlink to confirm they will be there on Wednesday.  Your consumer gets the email, clicks on the hyperlink, and sees this as the interface:

Your consumer sees the offered re-schedule button and thinks: "Ahhh, maybe it would be more convenient to pick another date."  So, he or she clicks on the button, and picks a date two weeks out.  Now, because of that one incident, your metrics are caused to significantly suffer (I was going to type "shot to hell," but we should not use that kind of language in a professional blog).

So as to make this kind of scenario less likely, we were asked to make an option to eliminate the reschedule button.   We figured most people will likely want to maintain the button for COD customers, so we configured the new option, within Settings form, as follows:

As you can see, you are basically allowed to have the Re-Schedule button taken away for all your jobs as associated with High Volume Clients (aka "HVCs," these are the parties for whom you have setup QuickEntryTemplates, and for whom you have created two- or three-letter HVC abbreviations within their templates). 

If you wish to use this feature, just go to your Settings form (Ctrl-F1), and invoke the sub-settings window for appointment reminders by clickong on this button:

Then, check the indicated checkbox option (i.e., as illustrated two items above).  In result, the confirmations interface as seen by your consumers (specifically, those where the paying party is setup as a High Volume Client, and for all invitations as sent after you've made this change) will look like this:

We hope you like it.