Invite participants

To simultaneously consult with other experts in an IT Collaboration conversation, follow these steps to invite participants:

  1. Open a conversation directly or open a record that has a conversation.
  2. Click More > Add Participant on the header of the conversation window to open the Participants window. IT Collaboration retrieves participants based on the Suggested User Fields configuration in Service Management.

    Tip For more information about how to customize the Suggested User Fields, see step 7 in Add supported record types.

  3. Add a new participant by performing either of the following tasks:

    • Select a user name or a group from the suggested participant list, and then click the Add button.
    • Enter a user’s email address or a user name in the Search Participant field. If an IT Collaboration user does log on to Service Management but is available on Lync, this user's Lync presence status is shown beside his/her name in the participant search result list. Select the participant from the search result, and then click the Add button.

      Tip

      • After you integrated IT Collaboration with Microsoft Skype for Business, the Skype users who are currently available on Skype become searchable. You can invite a Skype user to a conversation from the search result.

      • You can view participants’ presence statuses that are shown beside the user names in the suggested participant list, the participant list, and the participant search result list.
      • To close the Participants window, press ESC or click anywhere outside of the participants list.

    After you invite a participant to the current conversation, the system broadcasts a message to all the other participants to identify whom is invited. Meanwhile, the invited participant receives a system message that shows the members in the current conversation.

Note After you integrated IT Collaboration with Microsoft Skype for Business, pay attention to the following user presence status scenarios when inviting an Employee Self-Service (ESS) user or a Service Portal user to a conversation:

  • If an ESS user or a Service Portal user who is in an End User Chat and is Skype online at the same time, his/her presence status is Online in the participant search result list. In this case, you can invite this user to an IT Collaboration conversation. Your posted messages will be displayed in the user's Skype conversation window.
  • If an ESS user or a Service Portal user who is in an End User Chat and is Skype offline at the same time, his/her presence status is Portal Online in the participant search result list. See the following screenshot:

    In this case, do not invite this user to an IT Collaboration conversation because he/she cannot receive IT Collaboration conversation messages in the End User Chat window.