BMC Remedy and Service Desk integration

[Anon Anon]

Hello!

 

I have a request from customer: Customer would like to use their ticketing system which is called BMC Remedy to open tickets in our system via email.

When they are opening their tickets in Remedy system, they enter some data in fields, and then they have option to also send this data to some email address.

So, they will send email to Service Desk email address and open ticket that way.

Subject from customer looks like this:

mStart INC000000023313

The body of email is not important. I had idea to fill in fields in Service Desk with predefined information about affected area, group, etc. regarding the email from which customers system is sending us email.

The body of email should be all writen to description of ticket.

 

Now, we also want this to work backwards. When someone makes change in Service Desk (log comment, update status), the email should be sent to BMC Remedy and written to their ticket.

The only important thing about their system is that email subject sent from Service Desk to email address of BMC Remedy is the number of ticket, etc. "Re: %INCxxxxxxxxx%"ž

Then their system takes the information from email body and writes it down to ticket as log comment.

 

Can anyone help with this, is it possible?

Do you have some example how can this be achieved? I would appreciate any help you have.

[Giedrius Bekintis]

Hi, the BMC system shoul sent you email with predefined keywords in body e.g. (%STRING5=%INCxxxxxxxxx%), so you can store external number and use it in replay emails. Anyway i would not recomend email approach for integration, since you can end in infinit loop, information can be delayed and etc.

[JEROME MAYER]

Completely agree with Gutis, as email don't have any reception validation and rely on SMTP relay outside of your control. those can be delayed or dropped any where.

Web services and ESB framework that can handle queuing, error handling, etc must be privileged for system to system integration.

/J

[Anon Anon]

Thanks for your insight.

Is it possible to somehow just receive email with subject like "mStart INC000000023313", there is body in this mail which does not matter. Then, use this subject or email address from sender as a filter to automatically open and fill in fields of ticket?

Example, Service Desk detect email with subject line "%INC%", it recognizes this is email from mstart organization, and opens ticket with mstart as affected end user, fill in area, group, etc.?

So this would just be one way opening ticket, without returning emails with demanded subject to customer.

 

Do you maybe have some document with integration via web services and ESB framework, since I don't have experience with that.

How complicated it is, and how much time would it take to integrate it this way?

 

Regards,

Stjepan

[Giedrius Bekintis]

Hi, no you can only provide keywords in email body, subject can be used only to filter what kind of ticket should be created. Check this topic for more information

CA SDM Text API Interface - CA Service Management - 14.1 - CA Technologies Documentation

[Legacy User]

You can only provide keywords that are defined in ServiceDesk for it to 'understand' and be able to process the data on the incoming email correctly.

 

I would also like to echo my two cents as far as this integration is concerned. While you can open\update tickets via email, the fact that you are constantly trying to send data between two systems to keep them in sync, using email is not a good choice. Rather try using webservices instead.

 

Kind Regards,

Brian

[JussiValkonen]

I've seen this too many times: Organizations start doing things with email integrations just because they're scared of something they're not familiar with and email looks warm and fuzzy to them as they think they understand it. Then they end up in trouble with the lack of flexibility, transport times or even get a never-ending mail loop started, The end result is that they or their SD admins end in trouble and sometimes they don't even see the damage they do.

If you really need to stick with email you could get away with hacking the text_api.pl to process the input and inject a custom keyword before the keywords are processed but if you're not happy with learning new technologies then chances are Perl will scare you perl [sic] white