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SCSM 2012 Assign User with Exchange Connector 3.0

Answered SCSM 2012 Assign User with Exchange Connector 3.0

  • Friday, May 04, 2012 8:12 PM
     
     
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    I've been looking at is the ability to assign an incident request to yourself by using the Exchange Connector with an update workflow of some sort, but i'm getting nowhere fast.

    The idea is an incident request gets created and it's first assigned to a team of analysts, which all get notified of the new request, and then one of them replies to that request maybe with an acknowledgment keyword that also fires a workflow which in turn assigns the request directly to that person.

    I can start with one template used to create the request (from using the portal), and then it get's flipped to using a different template when an email update comes in, so i can catch any changes there.

    Is this basically impossible? Or does it require heavy developer type stuff?

    Andrew

     

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  • Friday, May 11, 2012 5:52 PM
     
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    All working now using multiple exchange connectors and impersonation.
    • Marked As Answer by Andrew France Friday, May 11, 2012 5:52 PM
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  • Wednesday, June 06, 2012 10:56 AM
     
     
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    I too am looking to provide this same capability.  I have a workforce that is quite mobile and I too assign work via Support Groups.  When the support group is assigned an incident, an email is sent to all of the members of the support group.  I would like the analyst who is going to take the incident to be able to reply to the email with a keyword like [assign to me] which will change the assignment to that technician. 

    I am just getting my feet wet with the capabilities of SCSM and am very interested in this idea.  Would you be able to expand upon how I would be able to accomplish this with the exchange connectors and impersonation?  Or even point me in a direction where I can do more research on this?  Thanks in advance for all your help.

     
  • Sunday, June 10, 2012 9:12 AM
     
     
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    Hey Vasfam,

    This was easily achieved in the end by creating some new mailboxes, here's how I did it...

    Our main (workflow account) mailbox is helpdesk@ and as you say there are no keywords for assignment in the connector. However something new in 3.0 is the ability to use impersonation. So I created some new users specifically for user assignment with their own mailboxes, these were named hd-<username>@, and hidden so normal users couldn't accidentally use them, each support analyst has their own "assignment" mailbox. Then the workflow account was given impersonation privileges on these accounts, this is vital for this to work.

    Once this is done, add a connector in SCSM for each mailbox you have created, and make sure impersaontion is ticked. Now here's the bit which will handle the assignment, each connector can point to a different template for incident creation and update, create some templates that each set the assigned user to a different member of your team, and then point each "assignment" connector to it's appropriate "assignment" template.

    Now when an email comes in for a new incident, a member of your team only needs to forward it to their "assignment" email address, the connector will pick it up, and the template will set the assignment. A manager could also forward an email to a member of their team's assignment mailbox, if an analyst hasn't picked it up. IMPORTANT, the ID must be in square brackets in subject!

    I have made this a little simpler by adding mailto links in the body of the new incident email body, as it's in HTML.

    Depending on your environment this method can require quite a few mailboxes, connectors, and templates. But on the flip side, as you're triggering different templates for each connector you can introduce other forms of information which are not possible by using one connector. For example department assignment, problem category, or urgency level. 

    I hope this makes sense, if I've left anything out let me know :-)

    Also, if you have a very mobile workforce I would take a look at the mobile app from Derdack, it's not something I know anything about but looks very good on their website. 

    Regards - Andrew

     
  • Saturday, June 23, 2012 10:22 PM
     
     
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    In case this is of use to anyone, i have created a blog post here showing the steps i took to achieve this
     
  • Monday, July 02, 2012 10:23 AM
     
     
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    what about multiple assignment? in your case the analyst does not know if an incident is already assigned, so the last one replying to the mail "gets" the incident, right?

    cheers

     
  • Monday, July 02, 2012 12:15 PM
     
     
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    Yep you're correct, if the analysts all respond at about the same time the last one will be assigned that ticket. However to try and reduce the chances of this happening i have created a assignment/reassignment workflow, which notifies the team when a ticket has been assigned. This involves a workflow triggering a Runbook (Not needed to have a Runbook for this, however i needed to work with criteria as well as relationship subscriptions), and would normally fire out an email within 2 minutes of assignment. So that gives you your window where another analyst could theoretically pick up the job as well. Just trying to finish a blog post on how i did this at the moment.

    But here some great articles on how to get a workflow that triggers on assignment/reassignment:

    http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2009/12/15/custom-notification-workflow-on-incident-assignement-or-re-assignment.aspx

    http://scsmsource.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/work-item-assignmentreassignment.html

    Andrew France - http://andrewsprivatecloud.wordpress.com

     
  • Monday, July 02, 2012 1:17 PM
     
     
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    Thank you very much.  Very helpful.

    Chris

     
  • Monday, July 02, 2012 2:07 PM
     
     
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    No worries, if i manage to finish this blog post i'll update here.

    If you found this useful please vote :-)


    Andrew France - http://andrewsprivatecloud.wordpress.com

     
  • Monday, July 02, 2012 9:18 PM
     
     
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    Phew just got the post up on the Assignment Notification using SCO, if it helps you can find it here

    Andrew France - http://andrewsprivatecloud.wordpress.com

     
  • Wednesday, July 11, 2012 8:52 PM
     
     
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    Andrew,

               Thanks for the great information.  I think this is going to work well.  One followup question.  I see you mentioned you made the assignment much easer by adding MailTo links.  I did the same for the Acknowledgement and Resolving, however, since there are multiple people Support Group getting the email, how do you create the Mailto links dynamic so each Tech can click the link to have the incident assigned directly to them?

    Chris

     
  • Thursday, July 12, 2012 5:49 PM
     
     
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    Hey Chris,

    Very good question :-)

    Here we have 6 technicians, so i simply created 6 links. You can see an example in another one of my blogs posts here.

    However essentially all the emails i create are HTML, so it may be possible to code this into the email to insert the logged in user into the return address. But you'll probably come unstuck with email apps not liking emails with code in them. I recently found that they really don't like CSS, so had to do inline styles.

    With creating emails i think the best policy is keep it simple. If you have a lot of techies then i'd probably forget assignment links, and let the techies take care of which address they forward the tickets onto. Most of the time they'll probably just forward it onto their own anyway.

    Here we have kept the naming of the addresses simple: HD-<username>@.

    Sorry this doesn't answer your question. Post back here if you figure it out, would be useful to know.

    Andrew France - http://andrewsprivatecloud.wordpress.com