Hi Folks!

This time I'm here with yet another tech tip that will enable you to effectively utilize ServiceDesk Plus.

In one of our customer's environment, I found that they were using a huge list of 60+ Incident Templates. It is well constructed and simple, however, the IT hasn't published it to the Requesters (users). They feared if it is published to all users, they might be confused with such an elaborate list of templates as not everyone has to see all of it. If everyone has access to all the templates, then It is a risk as the users might end up choosing wrong templates to report issues and that will lead to a lot of housekeeping to be done, to weed out and co-ordinate. I was a taken aback when this problem was described and I felt the customer's point of view was absolutely right.

I had a solution running in my mind and I was confident that this would fix it. The solution I suggested to the customer was to create Users Groups! yes, you heard it right.

As you all know, User Groups can be created based on the criteria Department / Site / Email-Id / Job Title / Name. This will allow the customer to handpick the templates and assign them to different User Groups. By doing so, they can show only the templates that are relevant to the right set of users. 

The best thing about using User Groups is, it is completely private. End users will not know that there are multiple groups and different choices of templates. For them, it will be personalized to their needs.  

Also,

Adding to the above benefits, User Groups also offers selective announcements. If you want to notify a certain set of users about an outage or a weekly or monthly maintenance activity, then you can just create an announcement and publish it to the relevant User Group and that will reflect in the users self-service portal.

The customer implemented this solution with which they could roll-out self-service portal with confidence and the users started to make use of the self-service portal which aided in a significant reduction in the support call volume.

If you are someone who has been reluctant to publish the templates for the same reason, then I hope this tech tip would be of help to you.