Removing invalid contact/Asset associations in Helpdesk

Helpdesk 6 has a feature that automatically associates assets to contacts. This is good in many ways in that it makes logging calls potentially quicker, and encourages people to select affected assets - which is useful further down the line when it come to issue anaylsis, fix and ultimately reporting.

Associations are generated through three main mechanisms - calls logged by a contact against an asset, primary user of an asset from login data, and assigned ownership in asset management. With the exception of the asset ownership association, any association made remains in the database indefinitely. This can be very annoying and confusing. For example a system used for a short period of time suddently becomes associated to the contact even though it may never be used by them again... And there is no manual means to remove the associations.

This sets out to address this.

The attached file contains:

• A couple of reports which display associations and more importantly associations that are potentially no longer valid
• A notificaiton policy which runs once a month that deletes 'expired' associations

These basically look at the association between asset and contact and check these against the number of logins into the asset by the contact in a past period or number of incidents raised by the contact against the asset in the a past period. Both periods are defined by parameters and are set to to 2 and 4 months. If no incidents have been raised against that asset in the period or the asset hasn't been logged into the association, it will be deleted by the policy. This helps keep the list of associated assets clean, with no risk - associations can be restablished through the normal methods.

Just import and adjust parmeters to your needs....

Incidentally I did create an extension to the report which enabled you click on a specific association and for it to be deleted.... if you want to know more come back to me.

Hope this is of use...

Steve