Using RITM vs Catalog Tasks

[JimmieOdelius]

Hi.

I'm wondering how people are "supposed" to work with catalog items.

• The request itself DOES NOT send out information by email to the caller/requester/initiator.
• The request item DOES send out information by email to the caller/requester/initiator.
• And finally the Catalog Task DOES NOT send out information by email to the caller/requester/initiator.

I've currently designed my workflows so that our technicians will only work with catalog tasks, but this prevents customer conversation.

A solution for this could be to use the request item record instead to work with the request but this makes it hard when the request has to be worked on from different assignment groups etc. making a workflow useless.

One solution could be to work with the request item as well as create catalog tasks when other assignment groups need to work on the request. This prevents customer conversation from these "sub-tasks" however as well as we need to teach the organization different work procedures depending on what kind of ticket they are working on which makes this solution not so pretty.

Has anyone here had this issue? How did you solve it?

Ideally we would only work with catalog tasks and simply ignore the request item and request and let the workflow handle them when it's time.

[JimmieOdelius]

Yeah. This issue I noticed already. I'll have to think of a good way of handling it in our organization. Thanks for the heads up and for your help in your other posts as well.

Regards

Jimmie Odelius

[Mike_Bk]

If there are no fulfillers/groups assigned to the RITM, can an email notification be created to alert the fulfiller that a comment has been made on the RITM? (if you added requested_item.comments to the SCTASK level) 

Or should a Business Rule be created to assign the same group/user to the RITM as the what is assigned to the SCTASK?

[Slava Savitsky]

Yes, it is possible to configure an email notification like that.

[tim_harris]

Hi Jimmie,

You have stumbled upon a common topic related to the SN Service Catalog (Catalog Items Specifically). The whole REQ >> RITM >> SC TASK relationship can get very confusing to end users. Most of people working in the system tend to just want one record. I am still working out how we do this in our instance based on feedback from my user base, but here is what we have currently:

• I hid most references to Request as it confuses users.
• The only thing available on the RITM record is Additional Comments.
• I created notifications for additional comments on the RITM record as well as an inbound action to capture email responses.
• I wrote a business rule to post additional comments from the RITM record to all open sc task additional comments (this is so the customer comments show in the activity log). Note that I do not have notifications for additional comments on the sc_task as all of this is covered in the RITM notification.
• I replaced the comments field on the sc task form to contain the request_item.comments.
• I created notifications and inbound actions to communicate work notes on the sc task.

There are still improvements to be made but for now this has us in a much better place than we were before.

Thanks,

Tim

[Brad Tilton]

Having done a ton of catalog implementations over the years, Tim's solution of having customers interact primarily with the RITMs is probably the most user friendly way to go about customer interaction through the catalog.