Best Practice for Users and Technicians to Communicate for a Requested Item?

[johnnyw]

Since we have the REQ/RITM/TASK structure in ServiceNow that prevents the end user who submitted a REQ/RITM to communicate with the task assignees out of the box, what is the best way to configure the Service Catalog to allow end users who submitted the request (Requested For/Opened By) to communicate with the Assigned To or Assignment Group of the tasks and vice versa?

We have had this issue since we went live and have been instructing users and ITIL analysts to always add comments to the RITM and to add people to the RITM's watch list.   This is a hassle and isn't a feasible workaround to functionality that seems obviously necessary that wasn't included OOB.

I've read posts about creating BR's to add Task Assigned To/Assignment Groups to the RITM watch list.   I've also read posts where people tried creating BR's to copy Task Comments to the RITM comments and vice versa.   Most of those discussions don't have a clear solution that seems to work flawlessly.

What was your solution?   Please share!

(We are on Fuji)

Thanks,

Johnny

[johnnyw]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for sharing.   I tried the solution you had and it seems to be working!   I need to do some more testing, but this looks good so far.   I was wondering if you also worked out anything for approvers to get notifications of the same comments?   In some of our workflows, we have approvals and would also need to have those approvers get the notifications that someone has commented.

Thanks,

Johnny

[Brendan Hallida]

Hi Johnny,

Glad you were able to get it working.   It is still working flawlessly for me.

regarding the approvers, since we have the event parm 1 contains recipients, you may be able to add something in there.

That is referenced in the business rule, I am just not sure how it would be done.   This may assist, however, Re: What is Event Parm 1 and Event Parm 2 in Email Notification?

But it is confusing, as the business rule has 3 gs.eventQueue statements.

Cheers,

Brendan

[johnnyw]

Hi Brendan,

In case you need a solution for the notification to approvers some day, I found a solution in this thread:   Event Fired with Mail Notification

1) Create event in event registry.   ( Go to System Policy | Registry   )  

Name: ritm_approver_email Table: sc_req_item  

2) Create a business rule that fires an event onChange of the comments field.

Name:BR-FireNotificationEventToApprover

Table: sc_req_item

Filter Condition: Additional Comments Changes and State is not Closed Complete, Closed Incomplete, Closed Skipped.

Tick the "Update" to indicate it should run on an update.

Script:

(function onAfter(current, previous /*null when async*/) {

var approver_array = [];

  var gr = new GlideRecord('sysapproval_approver');

  gr.addQuery('sysapproval', current.sys_id);

  gr.addQuery('state','=','requested');

  gr.query();

  gs.log('count: ' + gr.getRowCount());

  while (gr.next()) {

  approver_array.push(gr.approver.toString());   <--- I updated this line

  gs.log('what is approver array' + approver_array);

  }

  // Name of Event, Current Record, Parm 1, Parm 2.

  gs.eventQueue("ritm_approver_email", current, approver_array, approver_array);

})(current, previous);

3) Lastly, set up a notification that sends on an event, select event   ritm_approver_email.   For recipients of the email, select Parm 1 or Parm 2.   That will send to all approvers.  

Thanks,

Johnny

[Kalaiarasan Pus]

We have suppressed REQ number from the users to avoid confusion and keep the things simple. For this, we also have modified the cart a bit to supress the REQ number from the user when the request is submitted.

We also have the business rule that updates the comments/state changes of task   on RITM comments.

[johnnyw]

Hi Kalai,

I finally have some time to revisit this.   Can you elaborate on your solution and share if there are any drawbacks with it?

Thanks,

Johnny