Client Management Suite

Large companies often have employees with the same name. In the sample case shown here, "John Doe" will be used, but there might be three Bill Smith's or two Sun Li's. One of challenges is knowing which is the correct name to use, so that the appropriate person gets the assignment or task.

Such was the problem discovered when attempting to reassign an incident in Servicedesk. As you can see in the screenshot below , there is no way, after searching for "John", to be able to tell which "John Doe" is the correct one to have the incident assigned to. One of these might be the CEO, who would have no part in IT incident work, and the other is the correct one. How can you tell?

There are a few different methods to resolve this. If one of these users came from Active Directory, a change to the name to define him as "John Doe1" could work. The same could be used for the Servicedesk Portal users accounts. Since email address is a key field in Servicedesk, and must be unique, there is a way, with a small modification of the SD.IncidentEscalation workflow, to cause the listed users to display both their display name and their email address, making it very easy then to determine to which is the correct user to reassign the case. This will assure that the CEO does not get the case assigned to him!

There are a few assumptions made here. First, you are comfortable working with workflows and Workflow Designer, publishing files, etc. Second, that you wisely backup all existing projects prior to doing this.

Steps to Make the Change

1. Open up the SD.IncidentEscalation project in Workflow Designer.
2. Find the "User Specify Escalation/Assignment" Form Builder Component. This is show in the screenshot below.
   

   

3. Double Click on the "User Specify Escalation/Assignment" Form Builder Component.
4. Find the Users/Groups White selection area in the lower right of the form as shown below. Double-click on that area.
   

   

5. Double-clicking this ListSelectComponent brings up the Edit Component screen. Under the Data Section, there is a Item Format: option. Click the ... (ellipsis) on the right side of that, as shown below.
   

   

6. You will see, in the right white window the "_select_list_item_DisplayName" variable listed. In the large white work area, click to the right side of the existing value, then place a comma (,) and then a space, then over on the left, expand the _select_list_item_ variable.
7. Drag the TargetName variable out to the right of the space you left there. It should look like the screen shot below.
   

   

8. Click OK, then OK, then OK
9. Now, in the left window, right-click on "Model: Primary" and select "Publish Project> Publish Application to Server" and follow the prompts. Make sure that you publish to the correct Servicedesk server (If you have more than one)
10. Now you can test by opening up an existing incident, and attempting to reassign it. You should have similar results to what is shown below.
    

    

You can also see how this affects groups. If the groups have a email address defined, it would show up as well.

While there are certainly other methods to work around this, this is a simple method to differentiate between like-named users.