Workflow Soluiton

We're in the mist of upgrading to Service Desk 7 and I have 20+ workflows that need to be converted to use Service Desk components in place of Altiris Helpdesk ones. This is a daunting task and I'm going through the Service Desk components and they don't seem to be as fleshed out as the Altiris ones are and more limiting. I've been trying to reverse-engineer the Service Desk workflows to better understand how to best approach this.

Has anyone started to convert their workflows that used Altriis Helpdesk 6.5 to Service Desk 7 yet or know if there is a guide out there to help with this process? Even just getting started like how to create a ticket in Service Desk would be good.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Help Desk and Service Desk components are largely web service components. Help Desk comps talk to the aexHD web service and interact with the Incidents DB on the SMP, and the SD comps talk to the assorted SD web services on the SD server and interact with the ProcessManager database.

You can start by playing with the IncidentManagementService in IIS on the SD server, and observe what happens when you invoke the services. Because some of the methods take complex inputs, you'll probably need a copy of VStudio handy to invoke the methods properly.

Hi reecardo,

That's exactly the issue. These Service Desk components are not as user friendly as the Altiris Service Desk components and figuring out what to pass into them by looking at the IncidentManagemenService workflow can be difficult. I'm also trying to get the hang of all the Process Manager components as well as we never used Process Manager. I managed to create incidents in Service Desk but then realized this may not be what I now as it will go through the Incident Management workflow and the custom workflow in parallel.

I just wished there was more documentation on how to integrate and configure these components to work in Service Desk as I imagine more and more people are moving to it. Also the components do not have any documentation to them and most of the time you need an example to look at to figure it out.

I'm with you on this one.  We've been using the HD components in our 6 workflows to create, edit and close tickets for 3 years.  Now we're moving to Service Desk and truthfully I'm lost.  It was fairly easy to do before but right now I'm thinking that I'm going to have to just send an email to my Service desk to do what I want.

Let me tell you that it hasn't been very fun converting my workflows over. You have to look at tickets a lot differently as the tickets are no longer static but are workflows. For example, if you had a workflow using Helpdesk 6.5 that created a ticket and then went to an approver to approve, it would be be different in Service Desk. When you create a an incident in Service Desk it goes through the Incident Management workflow so if you were to create a ticket, you would essentially have two workflows running in parallel (Incident Management and yours) which may not be what you want to do.

What I've done is kept my workflows separate from the Service Desk one but integrated it into the same Process Manager so that they look like incidents but they're really not. That way my workflows run alongside the Service Desk and you just have to modify some of the reports to look for these workflows.