With the first half of 2022 behind us, we would like to take the opportunity to provide you with an overview of some of the key new features that were recently released during the second quarter of 2022.
As an organisation, we would like to thank all of those who have provided feedback and suggestions for new features. We have and continue to take into account our clients ideas, in addition to our pool of thoughts internally. Overall, we’re making sure everything you need is all in one place.
New Features
1. Ticket Driven Service Statuses
Service Statuses can be determined based on tickets that have a related service set. The impact a ticket will have on the service status is determined by the ticket’s ITIL ticket type. Change request tickets will set a planned maintenance status and problem tickets will set a fault status. The start date and target date fields can be used to determine the start and end dates of the status. If they are not set, the date of when the ticket is logged and closed will be used.
You can also use the service update note field at the ticket level to update the public message for the status. The ticket must have the ‘Update Service Status’ field set to true to impact the status of the related services. If there are no applicable tickets to use as a status, the OK Status will be displayed. The setting to enable ticket driven service statuses can be found in Configuration > Services under the service status configuration group.
2. Added extra tiers of FAQ list groups
You can now have a maximum of 4 tiers of FAQ lists.
In configuration>knowledge base> FAQ lists, any list that is configured to be a group can be selected as the parent of any other, up to a maximum depth of 4 tiers. Any FAQ list at the lowest tier cannot not be a group. You will also be prevented from making a group, a child of itself. These extra tiers will be then be used when navigating the knowledge base.
3. Approval Process Improvements
You can now change the visibility of fields in approval processes on the end-user portal depending on if you are approving or rejecting.
4. Workflow Automations
A new type of action in workflows is now available called “Automation”. Automations essentially replace and build upon “Timed actions”. Automations execute immediately in the background and are optimised for this purpose, whereas timed actions are better optimised for doing an action after a specified interval of time.
Automation actions allow you to choose a quick-action to do and specify criteria for it to start. The automation will trigger when the conditions are met within the workflow step when a ticket is updated. Automations can be chained together to complete one after the other. Automation progress can be viewed by enabling the “Show the Automations tab on the Ticket Details Screen” option within the ticket type settings. This will show an additional tab on tickets that have at least one automation started, where progress can be seen and any failed automation can be restarted. Failed automations will automatically retry up to 3 times.
Workflow step rules for automations and timed actions have been brought more in line with ticket rule criteria. A few other minor workflow setup improvements have been made. Automation actions have improved system use action compatibility compared to timed actions. Quick actions involving the Azure integration are due to be added within the next few releases to provide a full automation of creating a user account in Azure as well as other use-cases. NHServer version 13.41 is required for auto-retry functionality and for starting an automation after emails are received.
5. Workflow UI Improvements
The workflow configuration screen has had a minor UI update, and a number of small improvements have been made such as being able to edit actions via workflow configuration, and visibility of timer action names and condition counts within the diagram and action list.
6. Knowledge Base Enhancements
The portal’s KB screen can now be used in the Agent app
Set “Agent app KB area view” in Config > Knowledge Base to “KB Tree”.
This will change the Knowledge base area in the Agent app to be same screen as the self service portal’s kb screen, with the FAQ list tree on the left, instead of the usual search screen.
7. Reporting period options can now be added to dashboards
Some new configuration options have been introduced for in-app dashboards.
“Reporting period” allows you to choose a reporting period for all reports on the dashboard. This overrides the report level reporting period. This defaults to “inherits from reports”.
“Reporting period visibility” allows you to show a filter to change the reporting period at the top of the dashboard. The reporting period will default to the value chosen for reporting period at dashboard level.
8. CMDB Diagram Improvements
Improvements have been made to the dependencies tab of assets.
A new component is now used which makes it possible to show relationships that include multiple parent assets on a single child. Sibling assets are now also shown on the diagram.
Relationship types can now be given a colour, and the links are shown in that colour on the chart. Relationship types can also be toggled on and off.
A horizontal and non-hierarchical view can also be toggled.
9. Login screen customisation options added
Within Config > Integrations > Halo API > View Applications, you can now customise the order of login options on the Sign-in screen on a per-application basis.
The agent web application, default self-service portal, and mobile application will also now show here to allow customisation of their login screens. Here, a login method can be also be set to show or hide, including the Halo credentials. Halo credentials can also be made into a button instead of showing the form by default. The labels of buttons can also be altered.
10. Improvements to Jira Integration
Several improvements have been made to the Jira integration. These include:
- Changed the way data is sent and retrieved from the Jira API.
- You can now link multiple Jira issues to a ticket in Halo. The Jira details are no longer displayed on the ticket details pane. Instead, a tab now shows with all linked issues. Double-clicking the linked issue will open the issue in Jira.
- An issue can be designated as the primary issue in Halo. The primary issue’s ID number will be displayed in the third party ID field in list views throughout Halo.
- You can manually link issues to a ticket in Halo. Clicking the below button will open the Halo search screen. The search screen allows you to search for issues in Jira. You can search via issue key or via the issue summary. It is also possible to filter by issue type.
- The setup screen for the integration has been changed to accommodate other new features of the integration.
- You can now add comments to Jira issues by adding the ‘Sync to Jira’ field to an action and setting it to true to sync the note of the action to Jira.
- You can now create halo tickets from Jira issues using webhooks by creating a webhook with event Issue – Created. This will also map across the status and custom fields mapped in the integration configuration.
- The issue description can now be set when creating a issue. This field allows the use of dollar variables.
- $-JIRAISSUES variable now available. This produces a table of all linked issues, including a clickable link to open each issue in Jira.
11. Scheduled Emails for Composite reports
It is now possible to configure an email schedule for composite reports via the new ‘Scheduled Emails’ tab on the composite report configuration screen. This is configured like standard report scheduling, except you can only email the pdf, and you can choose a customer in the schedule configuration.
In order to generate these reports on a schedule, the charts in pdf reports have been modified to generate server-side instead of client-side. The pdf renderer has been upgraded to facilitate this. You can also see a creation log for composite report schedules via the setup screen.
Improvements to scheduling for standard reports have been made to allow the same chart to show in pdfs that show in the client.
12. Service status history can be shown in the portal
This new setting can be found in ‘services’ within the configuration tab. When enabled, the previous 20 statuses of the service will be displayed on the service details screen in the self service portal.
New Integrations
Upcoming Developments
For more information:
If you would like to learn more about future developments, check out our roadmap here.
Want a more in-depth discussion of specific features, or simply have a question? Feel free to reach out to your customer success manager or Contact us, and we’ll get back to you shortly.
