DRYiCE SX R6

This release of DRYiCE SX includes enhancements in the Consumer Portal, Service Board, Work Item Board, Fulfillment, Incident, Problem and Change processes, Asset and Config Board, Rules Board, Service Desk Board and Foundation.

With this release, we continue to respond to our customer’s need for operational agility with a frictionless self-signup process, more configurability, robust and transparent approval processes, optimized workflows, and enhanced catalog management capabilities thereby driving user efficiency and productivity. Towards this end, we have brought in new functionalities, which are put forward in this release note.

Consumer Portal

• The ‘My Services’ section can now be enabled or disabled on the home page by the super admin thereby enhancing the configuration capability of SX
• Introduced a capability to configure auto rejection of pending approvals, triggered from a ‘Request for Change’ ticket, based on a specified amount of time. The time limit for auto rejection can now be configured based on business need. This would remove queuing up of unattended approval requests in the system for a long time
• A self-signup feature has been introduced using which a new user can register on SX, and post approval by the user admin, can login on SX. The initial registration process generates an inactive user on SX. As soon as the user admin activates the user and assigns required roles, the user can start using SX. This feature gives more flexibility to the user in the signup process
• A 'Refer back' functionality has been introduced for fulfilment and request for change (RFC) type of approvals so that the approvers have an additional option of referring back the ticket with the appropriate reasons from the ‘My Approval’ page and the requester has the capability of resubmitting the ticket after providing the relevant information from the ‘My Request’ page. This functionality will reduce the rejection rates of approvals thereby improving efficiency
• A dissatisfied user can now reopen an incident by clicking the link on the Incident feedback email and being redirected to the 'My Feedback' page
• A change approver will now be able to see the change type and change plans while approving a change request from their ‘My Approval Page’ thereby allowing them to swiftly take an informed decision by considering all the relevant information that is presented along with the approval request
• When the order now page is first loaded, the default value in the ‘Order Value’ field will be the minimum orderable quantity that has been configured for the service
• A super admin will be able to configure external hyperlinks from the foundation portal to the home page of all users of a company allowing them to access external applications and link
• On the ‘My approval’ page an approver will now be able to see the approval details for all the referred back change and service requests, including approver name, time of approval and status providing them with all the required information on the approval

Work Item Board

• A new field ‘Hop count’, capturing ticket reassignments, has been introduced on the Fulfillment, Task, Incident, Problem and Change forms. The initial value of the ‘Hop Count’ field will be '0' and will increment as soon as the assignment group changes. This would help to determine the number of hops and if required, improve the accuracy of assignment rules thereby improving the total turnaround time of tickets
• A new field 'Task Type' has been added in the task module. This field will be auto-populated based on the module (fulfillment, incident, problem or change) from which the task has been created so that the support users can identify tasks based on the 'Task Type'.
• Additional filters have been added on the task work Item board enabling the support users to filter the tasks associated with fulfillment, Incident, Problem or Change tickets thereby reducing their task discovery time and improving efficiency

Service Board and Consumer Portal

• From the service board, a catalog manager can now enable or disable the ‘Ordering Information’ section on the user’s ‘Order Now’ page thereby enabling the catalog manager to publish services for which users will not have to fill out the ordering information section separately
• While configuring a ‘Numeric Spinner’ type of question in the questionnaire for a service from the service board, the catalog manager will be able to configure the range between minimum and maximum values of the numeric spinner field. An end user will be able to select values between the specified range while responding to the question. This has enhanced the configurability of the questionnaire associated with the offerings
• For an 'Incident' type of service in the service board, a catalog manager will not be required to configure the pricing. The consumer will not see the 'Price' label on offering details page for such offerings

• The calendar control feature has been enhanced with 3 configurable options i.e. Show All Dates (User will be able to select any date from the calendar). Restrict back date selection (User will be able to select only current and future dates from the calendar). Restrict future date selection (User will be able to select only current and past dates). The catalog manager will be able to configure a calendar control with any of these properties while configuring a service questionnaire on the service board thereby enhancing the flexibility with which services can be configured

• A catalog manager can configure a new type of service offering that the consumer will only be able to order if at least one of the available optional components is selected. This feature will allow the catalog manager to configure important optional components of a service and will require the users to read through all the optional component details before placing the order

Service Board

• A catalog manager will be able to publish a service without having to mandatorily configure corresponding price thereby further simplifying the process of configuring and publishing services that need not have an associated price
• While configuring a new service or modifying an existing service, the catalog manager will be able to copy questions from the service board thereby improving efficiency of the catalog manager in case several parent questions need to have the same dependent questions
• The "Preferences" section within the service board has been provided based on the ‘Ordering Work Item’ Type (Service Request or Incident) thereby improving its relevance. Only ‘Hide Service Contacts’, ‘Hide Self Service Actions’, ‘Hide SLA’ and ‘Language Restricted’ flags will be showcased in the ‘Incident’ ordering work item type of service while all existing ones will be available for a ‘Service Request’ ordering work item type
• Under the approval section of a service in the service board, the values in the 'Value' drop down field within the 'Add Criteria' section will be populated based on the values selected in the 'Key' dropdown field. This will enable the catalog manager to configure criteria on approvals based on available ‘Key’ and corresponding ‘Value’ combinations
• A catalog manager will be able to configure the quantity range (max and min) for any offering in the service board so that while requesting that offering, a user will be allowed to specify a quantity for that offering within the given range only
• A new field, “Language Restricted Availability” has been introduced in the “Preferences” section of the service board. It dictates whether the published service will be visible or not in its default language to users with language preference other than the service item’s base or translated language
• If the ‘Language Restricted Availability’ flag is set to “Yes”, the service will be visible to only those users whose preferred language is same as the default language set for the service or any of the other languages that the services have been translated to
• If the ‘Language Restricted Availability’ flag is set to “No”, service will be visible to all entitled users
• The “And & Or” operators have been introduced in the approval section of ‘Service Board’ which can be used to define additional approval criteria while configuring services. For similar qualifying criteria the “OR” operator is applied by default and for different qualifying criteria the “AND” operator is applied by default
• An audit log has been introduced in the service board that will log all the changes related to service item details form carried out by the catalog manager, so that all these details can be referred to for an audit at a later date
• Upon clicking on the 'Ordering information' form for the first time in the service board, the catalog manager will be redirected to the 'New Group' form by default so that the catalog manager can form the question group first and then assign questions to that group thereby improving catalog manager’s experience by allowing them to tag the questions to the relevant groups
• A catalog manager will be able to configure the advance notice period and frequency of reminder notifications for expiring service subscriptions as per their choice. The consumers would receive the notifications as per the configurations done by the catalog manager, reminding them of expiring services and renewing them on time thus improving the overall user experience by minimizing the chances of service disruption

Fulfillment

A fulfiller will now be able to provide 'Resolution notes' while fulfilling a request. These 'Resolution notes' will be saved in the 'Activity Journal' so that they can be viewed by the requester. They will also be useful for auditing tickets

Incident Management

• A critical incident proposer will be able to propose a critical incident even without knowing the right critical incident manager as the CIM field has been made non mandatory
• A critical incident manager will be able to accept or reject a proposed critical incident only if he/she is the designated critical incident manager (CIM) assigned on the ticket. This will allow the critical incident manager to take the responsibility for the approval or rejection of the ticket
• The parent child relationship between incidents has been configured in such a manner that once the parent ticket is fixed, the status of child tickets is automatically marked as 'Fixed' thereby helping in accurately tracking and updating related tickets
• The parent child relationship in incident tickets has been enhanced so that all updates that are posted on the parent tickets are automatically updated in the corresponding child tickets thereby reducing the amount of manual effort required to keep all related tickets updated with the latest information

Problem Management

• Once a problem team is created, it will be displayed under the new 'problem team' icon on the 'problem edit' page so that anyone looking at the problem ticket can discover the problem team assigned to the ticket
• A problem manager will be able to apply any of the following closure reasons while closing a problem ticket – ‘Closed disqualified’, ‘Closed solution investigation withdrawn’, ‘Closed not implemented’, and ‘Closed implemented’. These categorizations would help to perform future analysis
• The SLAs on 'Root cause identification' and 'Completion' events of a problem will be displayed in the ‘SLA progress’ icon on the ‘Edit problem’ page to monitor the progress of problem tickets

Change Management

A new 'Class' field has been introduced on the change form to capture the class of the impacted CI on the Change form

Asset and Config Board

• From the Asset/Config board, an asset manager will be able to relate a CI of class 'Service' with any of the service offerings that are either deployed or suspended to establish a CI-Service relationship. The asset manager will be able to configure this relationship by using the new ‘Relate Offerings’ icon located on the left-hand side of the Asset/Config board
• The users with access to the Asset/Config board will be able to export data in csv format, for further analysis

AMS Board

• The feature to export AMS report has been enhanced and additional fields will now be part of the csv report so that all the information related to the rules is available in the downloaded file. The following additional fields will now be part of this report: Component, Impacted CI, Class, Weight, Assignment For, Assigned Company, Assigned Group

Foundation

• An app admin will now be able to enable or disable notifications for an instance or of individual tenants in a multi-tenant environment, from the foundation portal thereby enhancing the app admin’s control over notifications
• An app admin will be able to configure upto a maximum of 10 advertisements so that the advertisements displayed on the consumer portal do not get cluttered

Service Desk Board

A service desk user will be able to reopen a fixed incident on behalf of a consumer.

Admin

An administrator of a ‘Company’ will be able to view the instance availability information for all the CI's that are being monitored and that are mapped to the company thereby enabling the admin to monitor the health of the instance

Following is the list of bugs that were fixed as part of this release.

Consumer Portal

• Fixed an issue on the ordering page where the correct error message was not getting displayed when a user typed restricted values in a type ahead field on the provide information section and clicked on ‘Submit’ button. The message was corrected from ‘‘Please fill all mandatory fields’ to ‘Please select a value from the suggested values’
• Fixed an issue on the consumer portal where ‘Approved timing’ was displayed incorrectly on the ‘Approval’ section of ‘My Approvals’ page
• Fixed an issue on the My Approval page where the date format was not consistent between the approval list view and its detailed section on the right-hand side of the page
• Fixed an issue on the My Approval page where 'Order submission time’ was getting displayed incorrectly
• Fixed an issue related to user login where multiple users were getting login errors

Service Board

Fixed an issue related to the service board where the catalog manager was able to deploy or publish a service without any component associated with it. Now, the catalog manager can publish a service only if it has a core component associated with it

Fullfilment

Fixed an issue on the fulfilment board where when a fulfiller was trying to fulfil a ticket, an incorrect system message ‘please select group individual’ was getting displayed even though the individual was already selected on the fulfilment form

Incident Management

Fixed an issue on the incident item board where the critical incident manager was not able to accept incidents as critical from the hamburger menu

Change Management

Fixed the issue on ‘Change Board’, where 'Service' and 'Requestor' fields were enabled in edit mode when they should have been in the read only mode

Foundation

Fixed an issue in the user module of the foundation portal where the status of the user in the list view did not correspond with the status displayed under the edit view

DRYiCE SX™ accelerates service delivery by seamlessly aggregating catalogs creating single system of engagement.

For product-related inquiries, please reach us at support.dryice.ai@hcl.com