October 22, 2008 Minutes

[Angelo3]

We held our monthly Southern California LUG meeting yesterday and have five (5) attendees. I demonstrated two custom applications for the group - our Issue Tracking (i.e. Bug Tracking) application, and our attempt at incorporating a Global Search function within the application. I demo'd the Search function first.

Basically, our Search Function is a module that sits alone on the left-hand NAV. We may change this, but for now, it's good where it is. When selecting the application, the user is presented with a simple form (3 fields). The first field is the text string the user wishes to find. The second field is a drop-down list that will limit the search to the modules associated with the selection chosen. For example, if the user selects Knowledge-Base from the drop-down menu, then only the Knowledge Base is searched. If the user selects Global, then all modules (except for the system modules) are searched. The third field allows the user to limit the result set to a specified number.
The group liked the feature and asked how it had been done. I offered to post the code on the forum for other users.

The second application was our Issue Tracking application. This application in integrated with the ITIL-Change and Release Management modules in that all issues that have passed quality assurance testing can be assigned to Change Requests, and subsequently to future releases. The application mimics other Service-now modules. ICW has customized it to suit our needs, but the information we capture can be modified to fit the needs of other firms wishing to utilize the application. Because some of our applications are vendor-provided, we allow vendors to use the module to track software defects discovered during testing that the vendor is obligated to correct. We control access to vendor records by utilizing Contextual Security. Vendors have access only to those records that match the vendors' company information. ICW employees, by default, can view all vendor information without restriction.

Lastly, the group discussed Outlook/Exchange and Service-now email integration. There was a lot of discussion about the need for the envelope icon on the Incident, Problem and Change form to utilize either the GAL or the sys_user table within Service-now. Having this feature available would allow the user to select the person from the list, allowing for automatic routing of the email to the desired recipient. Currently, the user is forced to type in the user's external (i.e. Internet) email address in order to use the feature. I told the group that I have my developers actively working on this feature, and that once I succeeded in developing the functionality, I would make it available to the Southern California Group.

The meeting ended at approximately 5:40. The next regularly scheduled meeting will be held during the third week of November.