ServiceDesk 4.4.79 Update 10/05/10

NSA is the National Service Alliance, an organization formed by a consortium of leading servicers in the CE industry to perform a package of services that, in some respects is, is similar to those performed by ServiceBench and ServicePower.  At any rate, member servicers have the need to regularly upload certain elements of data concerning job status to the NSA server.  This new export is meant to facilitate that.  It's accessed via the Export Customer Data form (Alt-F3). 

Presently, the export is configured to create references solely to jobs that are setup with "COSTCO" or "SONY" as the underlying client (it's possible in the future we'll need to make this client-filter customizable, but for now it's hard-coded).  It will also be necessary, at present, for you to manually upload/ftp this file to NSA (we'll create a self-FTPer as our next improvement). 

Please also note that, while the dialog asks you to specify a name/path for the main output file, the process will actually build that file, plus two others.  NSA wants three files in total: the main one, plus a second that details parts-on-order, and a third that details parts-used.  You'll find the added files named similarly to the main one, and in the same folder location. 

Yesterday it came to my attention you could have the following scenario:

For a particular date and zone, you have slots open for AM and/or slots open for PM, but none allocated for All-Day.  A call-taker wants to book a job for all-day.  As he attempts to do so, he gets a warning that indicates no slots are available. 

The above is thinly rational -- in the very technical sense that, indeed, no specifically-designated all-day slots are available.  But, as a matter of practicality, if I have morning or afternoon-specific slots available, I ought to be able to book all-day without the system complaining. 

This is, obviously, a really basic matter, and considering how long the Zone-Scheduling system has been in play it seems pretty shocking that it never prior came up -- so shocking that when it did come to my attention yesterday, I felt determined to address it immediately.  As part of the improvement, I rebuilt a great deal of the underlying program code (what with flowing pipes, and all, it's very complicated stuff) and improved the overall dialog that results when an overbooking situation exists.