SWSD September 15th: More Features for Enterprise Service Management (ESM) – Duplication of Service Providers, Ticket Forwarding Customization & Reporting, and More

Streamline and Simplify Expansion Into Other Departments with Duplicate Service Providers  
IT teams are not the only teams who receive and manage requests; many teams across an organization, like Accounting, Facilities, Legal, Human Resources, and Marketing, regularly receive and manage requests from both internal and external customers – and would benefit from their own service management setup. Having multiple service providers is possible with Enterprise Service Management (ESM) within SolarWinds Service Desk.  

Setting up these individual service providers has now become much simpler with the release of the service provider duplication feature. Any enabled or disabled service provider, including the IT service provider, can now be duplicated with the ability to check or uncheck what settings are brought over into the new service provider being set up, helping new departments to hit the ground running with their service management. See Duplicate a Service Providerfor more information. 

Pinpoint Areas for Optimization with Better Reporting for Ticket Forwarding 

With multiple service providers, it’s not out of the question that tickets for certain incidents can get submitted to the wrong department. The agent of the receiving service provider can simply forward that ticket to the correct service provider. But, when there are heavily repeated instances of forwarding, that can be an indicator of process confusion for the end-user, which can slow multiple teams down.  

Today, we’re releasing analytics in reports for ESM ticket forwarding. This report shows how many tickets are being forwarded to or from a specific service provider, helping organizations understand where a lack of understanding may be occurring. Organizations can then make adjustments to help clarify processes, further improving efficiencies. This new report is available in addition to the information in previously available widgets. For more information about templates see Ticket Fowarding Breakdown 

Standardize Processes Across Teams with Ticket Forwarding Global Settings Enhancement 
We received a lot of feedback about ticket forwarding enhancements, and we’re happy to announce the release of the most requested feature enhancements! 

With these new enhancements, organization account owner can now check or uncheck two options in their settings that will help streamline ticket forwarding and improve ticket data sharing across service providers, leading to more efficient collaboration. The two settings are:

  • Forward ticket with public comments – if checked, any comment from the existing ticket thread that is denoted as public will be forwarded to the new service provider, keeping valuable context of previous conversations. 
  • Require agent comment to be entered after selecting Service Provider for ticket forwarding – if checked, a comment summarizing the issue from the current agent must be provided before the ticket can be forwarded to the new service provider, helping understand the reason for forwarding and streamlining a path to resolution. 

This feature is available to both incidents and service requests, but it should be noted that service requests will be forwarded as incidents and any service catalog items previously assigned will be disregarded upon forwarding. For more information about updating these settings see this month’s Release Notes.   

Reminder: Do you have more questions about your Enterprise Service Management setup, or questions around switching from ITSM to ESM? You can join us for any of our upcoming ESM office hours and get all your queries and questions answered. View and book your slot here. 

Other notable enhancements 

  • Jira integration enhancement - a new field for mapping 
  • API documentation enhancement: Detailed guidance on the layout=long parameter  

Read the full release notes 

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. 
See what else we’re working on. 
Have a feature request? Upvote or submit your request here.  

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