Motadata ServiceOps 7.2 Release Notes

A release is a collection of related authorized changes to an IT service that are tested and introduced into the live environment together. Our Release Management module helps organizations to plan, build, test, and deploy controlled releases into their IT environment. Effective release management enables organization to add value by,

• Better tracking and managing change and deployment activities.
• Automatically notifying stakeholders at every phase of the release process.
• Faster change delivery at optimum cost and minimum risk.
• Assuring that users can use the new or changed service in a way that supports the business goals.
• Improving consistency in the implementation approach across the business changes, service teams and end users.

Our Purchase Management module helps organization to streamline and automate IT Purchases efficiently by managing complete life cycle of a Purchase Order from a single window with a structured delivery and approval process with following key features:

• Comprehensive product catalog management of different vendors products with price, warranty and maintenance details.
• Easy creation of purchase order by selecting required product from catalog and associating it with the relevant technician to create ownership.
• Make purchase approval effortless with automated approval processes.
• Communicate with vendors on placing orders, locating Purchase Orders, statuses, invoices, and payments.
• Record invoices and payment details in the purchase order for future reference.
• Automatic conversion of received items into IT assets with asset reconciliation capability to remove duplication of IT assets.
• Keep tabs on vendors’ turnaround times for processing purchases to prepare for future purchases.
• Reports to analyze Purchase trends, track supplier contracts, manage organization IT budgets and to monitor the health of supply chain.

Chat is very critical to help-desk solution, It empowers requester’s with a convenient communication channel. Requester’s can get instant resolution by initiating a live chat session with support engineers, which leads to better user satisfaction. It also simplifies ticket resolution for technicians.

Using our chat channel,

• Enable end users to initiate a Chat session to raise a new ticket or follow up on an existing one.
• Allow end users to share files, screenshots, and other relevant resources as attachments within the conversation.
• Supports auto-responses to end users with customizable Welcome and Missed chat messages.
• Support Chat console to view pending, ongoing or missed chat to support engineers.
• Enable support engineers to quickly create tickets from chat conversations, transfer chats to other technician and close chats.
• Chat also supports internal collaboration between support engineer.
• Keeps the record of conversions in the form of chat history.

• This feature is useful for better collaboration between support team and product/solution delivery team. It provides operational ease to support team in reporting issue or inquiry related to product/solution and to view updates on the reported issues.
• With pre-integrated JIRA, by entering few configurations details integration will start working.

• This features helps to optimize managed software license requirement by tracking software usage on all installations. IT teams can analyze the software usage pattern and decide about its renewal, upgrade or purchase of additional licenses.
• In a way this feature reduces the manged software license cost by installing right software on right employee machine.

• Charts capability is added in reports for better visual analysis of data and trend identification of services.
• For tabular and matrix reports by selecting required columns for charts, along with the row data, important summary can be viewed in the form of chart. Same view support is also extended in exported/downloaded reports.

• Now with fresh product installation, pre-build service request templates for various business services such as HR, IT, Travel are available. Organization can start using them with minimal customization efforts, as per their needs.

• Support of API/Lookup Fields, System Managed Fields and Dependent Fields are added in custom fields framework, in order to mitigate the advance integrations business requirements without changing product code. This reduces major implementation time in the projects.
• API/Lookup Fields capability can used for key entities which are managed by the third party applications, but need to be validated/fetched at the time of request creation.
• System Managed Fields are reference fields information which are pushed into the system along with the request creation using REST client. These details are non-editable and used for reporting purpose and for reconciliation of records between two applications.
• Dependent custom field allow administrator to configure or impose rules on the field selection that are dependent on each other. Dependent custom fields are hierarchy fields that is dependent on the user’s choice in the previous level.

Application master fields such as Location, Department, Priority, Urgency, Impact are now enabled at the time of service request creation. Till now these fields were available for updating after service request is created.

• At the time of request creation, additional information of the requester will get automatically populated in the request based on field mapping of user and request entity. This will help in improving operational efficiency of the technician as well as reduce data entry errors. Also from implementation point of view this will save lots of customization and workflow configuration time.

• In addition to existing bulk operations now support of resolving multiple request in one go is provided. This will reduce operational effort in resolving same type of the requests.

• Archived requests are removed from the active requests list as they are considered as a separate entity with unique search options. This feature will automates the archival of old or closed requests and auto purging of the same from the application. This activity, when done periodically, helps ensure optimum performance of help desk solution.

• Automation workflow support is now extended for Asset module for performing any post process after any changes on the Asset or for field enrichment of newly discovered/added assets. Only event workflow will be supported for Assets.

• Support of automation workflow execution for Users (Requesters/Technician) based on various events performed on them or by them. Such feature is very useful in integrations with helpdesk solution as well as integration with other enterprise applications.
• Only event workflow will be supported for users.

• A webhook (a web callback) is a way for an application to provide real-time information to other applications. In the automation workflow support of “Run Webhook” action capability is added which come handy when you want to trigger an action in an external application or tool.
• By following some basic configuration steps in workflow actions, integration between two applications is possible, which saves integration time in solution implementation.

• Approval workflow capability is added for Knowledge module. Before publishing any new document or any changes in the existing document approval will be shouted from approver and after approval only, document will be published to view by relevant members.

• Approval workflow configuration for “Multi Approval Decision Type”, an additional option of “Last Approval” is added. This option will be selected by default on any new approval creation.
• If Approvals are created with this option then decision of approval which was created last will be considered as final decision for the item.
• For Multi Approval Decision Type with Any one option, in case of multiple approval request is created for a release or a change then on approval of first approval request, remaining approval request will be marked as ignored.

• Support of changing super admin user of the application instance is added. User having super admin rights can perform this operation by selecting a technician from eligible technician list.

• Application already supports catalog management for products, vendors and Manufacturer, but till now it was only possible to add/update single record in the catalog.
• Now with this new change, support of adding/updating these catalog items in bulk is possible using csv files, which will bring operational ease in maintaining catalog items.

Support of adding new custom task types is provided in the application for better categorization of assigned activities, more relevant to the business needs.

• For the privacy compliance its mandatory to ask for user confirmation before taking Remote Desktop session of the user machine. But in some cases technician need to bypass this step on some machines which is not being used by individual users such as connecting windows servers for maintenance activity.
• For such use cases a new agent for Remote Desktop is published which can be installed on such machine and technician can take Remote Session without asking for confirmation.

• In the asset discovery process for both agent based and agent less, some improvements are done in order to fetch license related information from windows machine.
• Details of “Activation Status” computer property are fetched, which indicates weather the installed OS copy is licensed or not. In addition to that in agent based discovery support of fetching windows OS license key is added.

• Till now Reports Download and Export was possible in PDF and XLS format, now in addition to that support of csv format for report export and download is added.

• At the time of configuring report export schedule support of selecting Technician or Technician group is added, so that user do not need to manually type in or copy paste their email address.

• In the exported report emails, user will have report download URL instead of report file attachment. Using this URL users can download report file on his/her machine. This will reduce load on email server, in case of very large report files.

• In Asset Report configuration, during column selection, support of searching columns from property fields or component fields is provided for operational ease.

– In addition to existing reports, 12 new pre-built request reports are added for viewing performance details of different technicians and technician groups.

In request tabular reports support of solution and diagnosis fields is added. In request summary reports support of notes and collaboration details is added.

• In existing Request REST APIs, support of Assignee and Technician Group fields is added for create/update operations.

• During new installation at the time of company registration support of selecting preferred time zone is provided.
• This will be an optional parameter, if not selected then default UTC time zone will be taken into consideration, as company time zone.