ServiceDesk 4.4.82 Update 10/18/10

One of our newer users (David Lange from Oak Valley Appliance) doesn't like to type in dates (can't blame him really), and noticed a few places the system could have (but did not) provide a date-picker calendar.  We have now added the accommodation to those locations, as follows:

In the UnitInfo form's Purchase Date box:

In the Hibernate form's Sleep Until . . . box:

And, in the PartsProcess form's Date Expected box:

This last context has always had the "date-hence" option (type "3d" for example, and the system inserts a date 3 days in the future), but for some situations the calendar is likely to be easier.   

This one is also from David Lange.  Turns out (we did not know this), LG evidently has a method via which you can upload a file specifying the items you wish to order -- as the simplified means of creating an order.  Since we're always fond of any means for creating labor-saving automation, we quickly created an option to create an order file in LG's format. 

The above option is obtained, from the PartsProcess form (F8), by selecting items to order in the standard fashion, then hitting Enter to proceed with the order.  

Some three-plus years ago (see announcement accompanying Rel. 4.3.11) we introduced our Hyperlink feature: the ability to have in-text links in a variety of ServiceDesk venues that reference other objects (picture files, text files, websites, etc.).  You can drag and drop and create such links, and a simple double-click on any such link (once it's created) opens the object for you. 

In general, the system creates files for the objects as linked to a subfolder of the \sd folder on your server.  The subfolder is called HLinks (thus, if ServiceDesk is installed on your server's c: drive, the full path for the folder would be c:\sd\HLinks). 

As time has passed, some of our users have accumulated tens of thousands of files within their HLinks folders.  Typically, most of these files are images of tickets as created by SD-Mobile.  Regardless, when a large a quantity of such files are of images, a potential issue is born.  It's because many image viewers (the programs that open such a file and display the image for you) do something behind the scenes, when asked to open a particular file.  This "something," evidently, involves surveying all other image files within the same folder.   Where there many thousands of them, the opening operation can become rather (perhaps even unbelievably) slow. 

With this release of ServiceDesk, you can now create subfolders within your HLinks folder (as many as you like, and named in whatever manner you like), and move some portion of the files into each.  If it was us, we'd likely use a strategy such as making a subfolder for each past year (labeled as such), and move all the files as created within that year to that subfolder. 

Naturally, even prior to this release you could have created such subfolders, and moved some portion of the file population into each.  The difference with this release is that, prior, ServiceDesk would look for a file only within the root level of the HLinks folder.  From this release forward, it will look both within the root level, and within immediatesubfolders it happens to find there. 

Please notice the emphasis, above, on the word "immediate."  ServiceDesk will not look to subfolders of subfolders.  If you bury files in hierarchy that deep, ServiceDesk will not find them.