Hello Everyone,
Thank you for using the Community.
Please help us to help you, by including as much information around your query as possible.
For general information on using the Communities, such as "How to respond to threads?" see Communities: Welcome to the new CA Communities.
Posting Suggestions for CA Service Management Community
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The Posting Rules (SIMPLIFIED)
* Always add product name and version to your post.
* Tell us what your AIM is.
* Describe THE PROBLEM/QUERY. Clearly.
* Tell us WHERE in the product your query relates to.
* Add SCREENSHOTS to give context.
* English is the board language.
"Would someone understand my question, if they are NOT familiar with my specific system and business?"
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The Posting Rules - Useful Additional Information
ENVIRONMENT DETAILS
* Product name. << Always!
* Product version. << Always!
* Key relevant environment factors for the issue:
- Database type and version. Local or remote?
- Operating system type and version.
- Browser type and version.
- Mail system details (POP3/SMPT, mail software type).
- Note - CA Remote Engineer and other diagnostic logging should only be provided directly to CA Support, and not CA Communities, as they will contain client confidential information.
* Relevant architecture details.
- Are servers remote? Firewalls? WAN?
- Is virtualisation involved? (VMware, Hyper-V)
- Is clustering involved?
QUERY DETAILS
* Brief description. An overview. << Always!
* What are you expecting or would like to happen?
* What is happening instead?
* Business need: Describe business end you are trying to accomplish. Without referencing specific product functionality, if appropriate.
* Business urgency: When do you need it by? Casual query or desperate plight?
TROUBLE-SHOOTING
One approach if there is a problem, is to try and identify the key "object" and "deviation" and then to ask the What, Where, When, Who, and Frequency style questions.
Even a partial list will help to describe the problem to other community members. Sometimes the questions are meaningful, and sometimes not, depending on what the "object" and "deviation" specifically are.
Begin with "Query Details." Then drill down to:
WHAT:
What is the object?
What is the deviation?
WHERE:
Where is the object located?
Where is the deviation located?
WHEN:
When was the object?
When was the deviation.
WHO:
Who uses the object?
Who experiences the deviation?
EXTENT/FREQUENCY:
Is the object shrinking/stable/growing?
Is the deviation shrinking/stable/growing?
The "IS NOT" sieve. Then revisit the whole list above and ask where that same condition "is not" occurring. In Service Desk Manager, that typically falls into cases like this:
* Other users
* Another installation
* Prior to a point in time/change
Turning the above into a one paragraph long, problem overview, may help someone come to the case more quickly.
Finally, what have you tried, and what happened?
I'm not suggesting that you perform the deep dive for every, or even most queries that come to the Communities - but do parse through the list and ask the key question:
"Would someone understand my question, if they are NOT familiar with my specific system and business?""
OTHER RESOURCES
CA Technologies Support. Via support.ca.com or your local centre.
Good for product specific queries, questions regarding documentation, error messages, break-fix scenarios.
CA Technologies, Services, Architects or CAT Business Partners.
Good for on-site assistance, business planning and procedures, feature choice, architecture design and out-of-Support items such as customisation, undocumented procedures. (Plus more!)
Support.ca.com and MyCA
Good for self-service, including installation media, patches, searching across all published documentation for Problems, Solutions, documentation, knowledge documents etc. Also the place to go to log issues via the web. Has a "Chat" feature to message on-line engineers quick queries.
Global Communities
Here, of course. Good for interacting with other users, administrators, CA Technologies staff, Business Partners and whichever interested parties are online.
Happy posting and trouble-shooting!
Kyle_R.
Message was edited by: Kyle R
Major update of the original post, since moving to the new forums.
Changed title from "Help us to help you! *** POSTING SUGGESTIONS ***" to "Communities: Posting Suggestions for Service Management Community." so that it fits better with the rest of the Community.
Removed these prior status updates:
UPDATE: 24th Dec 2012.
* Please use English as the main language on this board. With dozens of languages among our customers, it will be too confusing otherwise!
* Please remove large email reply chains from posts, as it needlessly obscures content.
UPDATE: 7th Jan 2013.
* A screenshot is usually very helpful. It shows everyone exactly what you are seeing.
UPDATE: 22nd Feb 2013.
* See thread How do I know my ServiceDesk Version? if you need assistance identifing which SDM version you are running.
UPDATE: 25th Feb 2013.
* Moved thread "My Post is unanswered/Needs further responses" to here.
* Retitled some posts so that tree view is more readable. Content untouched.
UPDATE: 20th Aug 2013.
* If contacting CAT Support, use the CA Remote Engineer tool. Please don't post that content to this Community.
UPDATE: 16th Jun 2014.
* Message was edited by: KYLE R. Corrected formatting when moving to new Communities platform.