In this quarter’s update, we are excited to announce a series of new features aimed at improving your ITSM and ESM processes. Our latest enhancements focus on increasing agent productivity, ensuring data security, and providing clearer insights for better decision-making.
Key updates include Service Availability Tracking, Intelligent Event/Alert Management, Tailored Dashboards, and several enhancements to knowledge management, email handling, and approval workflows.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this quarter.
New Features
1. Service Availability Tracking
With Service Availability Tracking, customers can monitor uptime performance and analyse service reliability against set targets. The feature tracks downtime in detail, leveraging tickets that are linked to a service to log downtime against a service, with the lifecycle of the ticket assumed to be the amount of time the linked service is ‘down’. This provides actionable insights and fostering a proactive approach to service improvement. Visibility into availability metrics builds trust with end-users and ensures compliance with SLA commitments.
2. Intelligent Event/Alert Management
The new Event Management module provides another way to handle events by automating ticket creation and updates based on customisable rules. This feature allows for highly tailored responses to incoming events, minimising manual intervention and ensuring critical issues are addressed promptly. With detailed logs and flexible reprocessing options, customers gain full transparency and control, enabling efficient resolution workflows.
3. Tailored Dashboards for Team-Specific Insights
The ability to assign default dashboards per team ensures that users see relevant data and insights as soon as they log in. This tailored experience boosts productivity, ensuring each team focuses on their priorities, from service desk operations to asset management.
4. Article Creation with Canned Text
The ability to use canned text in article draft descriptions, resolutions, and notes enables customers to standardise content creation, saving time and ensuring quality. This feature promotes consistent, professional communication across articles, enhancing the self-service experience for end-users.
5. Simplified Feedback-to-Ticket Logging in the Knowledge Base
With this new feature, tickets can be automatically generated when providing negative feedback on knowledge base articles. Combined with the optional comments field, this setting ensures customers can provide detailed, actionable feedback, fostering continuous improvement in knowledge management, enhancing end user satisfaction.
6. Time-Sensitive Welcome Emails
The “Days until Welcome Emails Expire” setting enhances security and clarity for onboarding processes. Customers can ensure that welcome emails remain active for an appropriate timeframe, reducing risks of outdated or misused credentials. This simple yet impactful feature streamlines account setup, ensuring a smooth start for end-users.
7. Agent Idle Timeout based on Licence Type
The ability to set idle timeout periods per licence type provides flexibility in agent management. Customers can optimise idle timeout settings to align with the roles and responsibilities of different user groups, improving productivity and ensuring system resources are effectively utilised.
8. Bulk Emailing at action level for Streamlined Communication
Bulk email functionality simplifies communication by allowing customers to send mass updates to service subscribers or distribution lists with a single action. This feature ensures efficient, consistent, and timely communication, particularly during service disruptions or planned changes.
9. Customisable Asset Searching Method
The new Asset Search Method setting offers customers the flexibility to prioritise search performance or precision. Whether searching for substrings or matching terms from the start, this feature ensures asset searches are tailored to the organisation’s specific needs, boosting efficiency in large Configuration Management Databases (CMDB).
10. Enhanced Purchase Order Approvals
This enhancement allows customers to leverage Opportunity/Ticket approvals for Purchase Orders, offering a more robust and consistent approval process. By mirroring functionalities used in opportunities/tickets, businesses can apply detailed, fault-tolerant approval workflows, ensuring compliance and efficiency in procurement management.
11. Option to not allow New Tickets via Mail per Mailbox
Customers can use this setting to designate specific mailboxes for internal communications or monitoring purposes, ensuring that only valid requests are processed. Subsequently, ensuring the alignment of organisational policies with restricting ticket creation to approved channels. By reducing noise and unqualified ticket creation, this helps avoid unnecessary noise, maintaining focus on actionable and relevant issues while keeping workflows streamlined.
12. Virima Integration is Now Available
The Virima integration brings powerful asset and service mapping to HaloITSM. With vivid diagrams powered by Virima, customers can visualise application dependencies and their association to tickets, improving issue resolution and root-cause analysis.
Service mapping also highlights critical relationships, enabling better impact analysis and service delivery. This integration empowers IT teams to optimise operations and enhance decision-making effortlessly, supporting Halo’s Service Automation Framework.
Want to Find Out More?
For further information and to see all new features, click the question mark in the top right of your screen, then select ‘Show Release Details’.
To find out more information about future developments, look at our roadmap here!
If you’d like to speak to one of our team about specific features, or have any more specific questions, please contact your Customer Success Manager or feel free to contact us and we will get in touch as soon as we can!
