ServiceDesk

We are working on rolling out ServiceDesk 7.5 SP1.

Our organization doesn't see the benefit in using the Impact\Urgency matrix to calculate the Priority level or fully utilizing the SLA processes because they want me to make Incident Management act like we had in Altiris Helpdesk where whatever Priority Level is selected, I had Incident Rules to set the ticket Due Dates. As a result we are only using the Resolution Milestone/Late Escalation in setting up the SLA Levels. That works OK in Incident Management but there is a kicker to the story.

They want to completely separate "Incidents" from "Requests" so I had to build a separate Request Management system for this that doesn't utilize Incident Management at all. The problem with this is I'm not sure how I can easily create entries into the SLAProcess table for these custom requests. What I'm doing for the requests is setting the Due Date in the Task setup of the Dialog Workflow components which writes the request Due Dates to the DueDate column in the Task table. That works fine but ...

The problem I'm running into is reporting when trying to use the report builder inside of ServiceDesk to create a report similar to the Task Viewer report where it shows a user all Incidents and Requests where they are assigned to a task. I have to have a separate Due Date column for Incidents (pulling the LateDate from the SLA Process) and a separate Due Date column for Requests (pulling the DueDate from the Tasks). It works but I'd like just one Due Date column.

Is there an easy way to have the custom request processes write to the SLAProcess table so I can use that as the definitive source for Due Dates? I tried using the Set SLA component but have kept running into errors trying to get that to work properly. Any other ideas you might have are welcome too!

Thanks

The only way to take advantage of the SLA functionality of Workflow would be to build your Request object as a Process Data class and then also create an Automation Library generator for this new Request object type. Once you've done this you'll have the ability to create rulesets, email templates, & SLA settings for this new data. Now the automation library is going to be tied to the ServiceID you specify, so you'll need to make sure that you set it to be the ServiceId of your Requests workflow project. 

There was a video available on Connect, by Jason Short I believe, that walked you through doing this.

I thought I had it setup correctly because each request is populating into the ReportProcess table. I'll take another look at that video and see if I missed something. Thanks TGiles!

As long as you've got a Global Logging Component enabled in your project an entry will be properly generated into the ReportProcess table. Unfortunately just having that entry doesn't provide use of SLA. If you still have some questions or would just like someone to review your steps to make sure you done everything correctly feel free to contact support.

Kind of an aside, but you could get things both dates in one column another way. If you used a data profile (described here), you could use a simple SQL case statement in the view you create.