Highlight row or add symbol in agent workspace if record has unread comments

[Dominik11]

Hi all,

I need a solution for our agents to see (without using the "updated" or "updated by" column) if there is a new !!unread!! comment on a ticket in agent workspace.

The best would be to have a new column that shows a mail symbol in front of a record, if there is a new comment  .

Colour highlighting is not a good idea because we already have a few colour highlighting rules in place, the more, the worse.

Do you have an idea?

Best regards

Dominik 

[John VanBruggen]

I am not saying that something can't be built that could accomplish this, but it would take a bit of work.  There isn't really a mechanism in ServiceNow that will track a record as read, like your email client would do.  The best solution that I can think of would be to have a flag that is set to true when a record is updated by someone other than the assigned user.  Then, you could have a UI action (button) that the user could click to mark it as read.  This would set the flag to false.  

It doesn't appear that you have an option of using an icon.  Unfortunately, icons are not supported in ui formatting of Agent Workspace.  Thus, your only option would be to use a color coding.  Or.. create a new list that will show just unread records.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/madrid-servicenow-platform/page/administer/workspace/task/config-field-styles-agent-workspace.html

[John VanBruggen]

In the standard UI, it is definately possible to do the icon.  A list could be added to a dashboard for viewing.

[Bhavana Reddy]

Can you please elaborate how this can be done please?

[DirkRedeker]

Hi

As John wrote, there seems to be NO option for an Icon (yet) in Workspace Lists. But Colors may be an option OR

You have a separate field, which holds the last "read time" of the ticket AND another field, which sets a date each time a comment is added (with a BEFORE UPDATE Business Rule).

To check, if the comment was read may be done by another BR (Query/Display) OR by using a button (UI Action) as John wrote.

You need to ask the following question to yourself:

When do I want to mark the Comment as read? Just as soon as the record is opened (leverage a Business Rule), OR as soon as the user actively acknowledges (using a UI Action), that he/she has read the comment?

Furthermore, you need  to ask the question:

Do I want to track for each user, if the comment was read (which will need additional data to store), or just to know if SOMEONE read the comment (which would be enough to go with the solution from above)?

As soon as you have a clear answer to that, your solution can be chosen from the options above.

Let me know, how you want your system to behave if you need some more details on that.

Let me know if that answers your question and mark my answer as correct and helpful.

BR

Dirk