Major Incident workbench — the Collaborate tab

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Major Incident workbench — the Collaborate tab

    The Collaborate tab in the Major Incident Workbench is designed to facilitate communication during major incidents by managing conference calls and participant interactions efficiently. This tab allows users to view and manage communication tasks centered around conference calls, enhancing collaboration among incident management teams.

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    Key Features

    • Add Communication Plans: Users can create new communication plans or add tasks to existing plans by using the Add and Add Call options.
    • Manage Participants: Modify the list of recipients for a communication plan through the Manage Participants option.
    • Initiate Conference Calls: Start a call by clicking the Initiate button, with tasks changing status based on the nature of the calls (one-time or recurring).
    • Active and Inactive Participants: View participants' statuses during calls, with options to join ongoing calls or add new participants.
    • Call Management: Conference leaders have control over the call, including muting/unmuting participants and ending the call.
    • Messaging and Notifications: Send messages at the incident or plan level, view activity streams, and initiate calls directly to group members.
    • Integration with Communication Tools: Features for integration with Twilio and Microsoft Teams for enhanced notification capabilities.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing the Collaborate tab, ServiceNow customers can streamline communication during major incidents, ensuring that all participants are informed and engaged. This contributes to a more organized response, quicker resolution times, and improved coordination among teams. Customers can expect a more efficient handling of major incidents through enhanced collaboration tools and functionalities.

    The Collaborate tab helps you to view information about communication tasks that have conference as their communication channel. It also allows you to manage the participants in a conference call.

    Figure 1. View of the Collaborate tab
    The Collaborate tab

    Like the Summary tab, you can add a new communication plan by clicking Add. You can create communication task for an existing plan by clicking Add Call. For more information, see Add-communication-plan-from-mim-workbench. If you want to add or remove recipients from a particular plan after the plan is saved, click Manage Participants.

    To initiate a conference call, click Initiate. If the communication task is a one-time task, then after the call is ended, the status of the task changes to Complete. If task is recurring, the status of the task changes to Open and it displays the number of times the conference call is initiated.
    Note:
    When you add a user group to the conference call, the group itself is added to the call, and the escalation hierarchy is automatically followed once you start the call. Set the com.snc.iam.conference_call_follow_on_call_escalation property to true. For more information about the property, see System properties for On-Call Scheduling.

    Under each task, the Active participant section displays the active participants and the Inactive participant section displays the inactive participants.

    If the call is in progress, the itil user, who has access to the workbench, can join the conference call by clicking Join Call. The participants can also add another user to an ongoing conference call by clicking + Participants. The conference leader can end the conference call by clicking End Call. The conference leader can mute, unmute, or kick an active participant by hovering over the active participant and clicking Mute or remove an active participant.

    Under the Work Notes & Activity section, you can send connect message at incident or incident communication plan level. You can also view the activity stream.

    To initiate a call directly to the group members, click Start a call.

    Start a call

    To start a call, populate the sn_major_inc_mgmt.notify_webrtc_number property with a valid notify number that has voice capability. For user who is already in an active conference call, Start a call is disabled. You can mute or unmute all the participants using the Mute All and Unmute All options. If you activate the Notify - Twilio Direct Driver plugin (com.snc.notify.twilio_direct), the active participants are highlighted in green.

    For information on how to send a Microsoft Teams notification from major incident workbench, see Send a notification from Major incident management workbench.

    For information on process flow for slack communication, see Process flow for Slack communication.

    For information on how to add a collaborative communication task, see Add a collaborative communication task.