Although COVID-19 has significantly changed our business environment and vacation plans, everyone is still taking some days off every now and then. Until today, whenever an agent was away, all of the new work items assigned to them would wait for their return. In some cases, admins would set up automation rules to reassign work items per agent while on leave, however, this was a repetitive and time-consuming manual task.
Starting today, agents can set up their Out-of-Office (OOO) notifications and the automatic reassignment of work items by themselves - quickly and easily. This enhancement helps you and your team ensure that your service delivery and business continuity are not interrupted during an agent’s planned absence.
Status visibility
The Out of Office status will be visible throughout the platform anywhere an agent can be mentioned or assigned:
- Index/details page
- User profile popup
- User page (under setup)
- User @mentions
Examples:
Figure 1: An Out-Of-Office indication shown when assigning a work item to an agent that is away
Figure 2: An Out-of-Office indication shown when hovering over an agent’s name in the Incident Index page
Automatic notifications and reassignment
When a work item is assigned to an OOO agent, it will automatically be reassigned to the selected agent specified in the OOO settings section. In addition, an automatic reply will be added as a comment in an incident - whenever a requester comments on it while the agent is away. Lastly, an automatic reply will be added as a comment to the relevant work item, whenever the OOO agent is mentioned.
Setting up “Out of Office” status
Note: Agent permissions are based on the role they are assigned to. Access to the reassigned record is based on the new assignee’s permissions.
- Go to My Account/Settings and scroll down to the “Out of Office” section.
- Fill out the relevant dates (‘End Date’ = the last day of your absence).
- Optional: choose the desired assignee to forward all of your new work items (incidents, tasks & approvals).
- Optional: add an OOO message
- Click ‘Activate’ when done.
The OOO status will be deactivated automatically at the end of the calendar date specified by the agent. Should you want to disable it ahead of time, you can do so manually by clicking the ‘Deactivate’ button.
As we continue to improve the SolarWinds Service Desk, we appreciate your feedback. Let us know what you think about these enhancements and which additional customization capabilities you would like to see added.
