Major problem with requestors vs affected end user concepts: Visibility and licensing

[AdminMC]

PROBLEM

In ServiceDesk, "Employee" access has only visibility available on the tickets where the connected user matches the affected end user.

This limitation are disturbing the logical means of “request” and “requestor”, because the requestor seems to be the most important contact to be informed about the evolution of a request.

 

CAUSE

Employee access has limited visibility in this way per program, and can not be altered by data partitioning or any other configuration option of ServiceDesk, except by mark employee access with “license consumer”.

 

CONSIDERATIONS

- The Requestor is NOT an analyst who works fully with ServiceDesk, but one client / employee, who requests services for another person or contact.

- The Requestor is the one who should be better informed about the progress of their requests, since precisely by concept, a request belongs to the Requestor.

- In certain areas, the Affected End User does not exist in the company:

o New users for whom registration is required

o Users for whom access is denied for having ceased to belong to the company

o Fictitious contacts for tickets that deal with work center things (works, purchases and others)

 

NEED

We ensured that all people in our organization with access type employed, work with ServiceDesk only and exclusively as clients, requesting services or communicating incidents.

However, it is really necessary for the Requestors to be able to keep track of the tickets, since in many cases the End User Affected is either not in the company or is not a person as such.

These Requestors doesn’t use the tool as analysts, so it does not seem appropriate to include them in the licenses as analysts.

 

Other tools are compatible with this way of working and allow both affected and requestors to track their cases without needing to consume a license.

 

Are there any possibility of do this with CA ServiceDesk? Or are we supposed to migrate to any other tool that support this?

It is painful for us to be forced to abandon CA SDM, the tool in which we trust, we have evolved and we are experts now, due to an issue of unclear conceptual licensing.

[Grant Bruneau]

Hi,

 

I think all you need to do is add a stored query to the Employee role which shows the user incidents which they have requested.. Here's an example query.

 

requested_by = @cnt.id AND active = 1 AND type = \'I\' AND status != \'RE\'

[Jon_Israel]

Hi Carlos,

The employee interface does not allow for scoreboard queries specifically  (although you may be able to add something custom there) - However, that may not work as employee users are "unlicensed" - which excludes them from being able to see tickets which they do not own.  You would have to make them licensed users in order to see other users' tickets.  For the role of these folks within your organization, what you are describing is really the role of an analyst and not an employee.  You would have to create a new analyst role which would be licensed - and then you can set them up to be able to see other users' tickets.

Hope this helps explain.

Jon I.

[Grant Bruneau]

Hi Jon,

 

I just tested by adding this scoreboard query to the Employee role and it worked fine.. Even for unlicensed users.

requested_by = @cnt.id AND active = 1 AND type = \'I\' AND status != \'RE\'

 

You add scoreboard queries to the employee role the same way you do with any other role, the queries are just displayed differently and show up below the "Look up my existing tickets" text.

 

[Grant Bruneau]

I take that back.... Our employee role is marked as Licensed....  Please disregard my suggestion as it only works when the employee access type is Licensed.

[Jon_Israel]

Hate to say it ..... Told Ya So   LOL

No worries - like i said, it can be done but it will need to be for licensed users only. 

Hope this helps you guys out.

Jon I.

[AdminMC]

Hi Jon

i know that is a limitation of product and there's no hope to fix it, but i disagree with you on the "concept role" that i've described. The role that have my users are not analyst. They are clients, because they are the main person that request the actions and should be informed on the status, but they are responsibles of other people.

In my case, i am team manager at work, i have two people in my team that are not allowed to request access to any resource (folders, mail boxes, apps). I am suppose to request acces to them, because they are my responsability and the company wants me to be in charge ot them. They are not allowed to request, for example "I need access to the folder 'repository of software' in order of my work", but i am the person to have to request "grant access to the folder 'repository of software' to Marc Jacobs in order to his job".

Then, the affected end user should be Marc Jacobs, and i'm the requestor. In order to the use of servicedesk, i'm NOT an analyst because i do nothing with my requests, except to create and be informed os its closure. And this is the functionality of a final user.

 

An analyst, i think is a person that make actions during the life of the ticket with the aim of complying with it...

 

But finally, as Michael Mueller says, i will create an idea, in order to encourage CA to modify this limitation. It will be ok if the final user is allowed to see the tiquets he is involved, as affected user or as requestor...

[Michael Mueller]

Hi.

I can understand your point.

 

As the requestor is playing a kind of deputy role for other users, which might not yet exist, or don't have access to the sytem yet, there is a conceptual problem, when using the affected contact as the main contact for a ticket(regarding notifying and granting access) and excluding the requester from access of those tickets, even though he is the primary contact.

 

As far as I am aware of , for a non licensed user there is no way to bypass this restriction.

Even though I don't have a solution for this other than that your deputies will get an analyst role, as Jon already suggested. Other customers are doing exactly this, the amount of deputies also knwon as key-users, is of course much lesser than the amount of employees, which might fit into your license considerations.

I encourage you to create a new idea in this community, so our product management gets aware of this supposed conceptual weakness.

 

Regards

.............Michael