What's new in Service Manager 9.50?

By using the Request Support application, end users can get support assistance from IT in a simple, easy, and interactive way.

If Smart Analytics is enabled in Service Manager, users can use the Smart Ticket feature to submit requests in Service Manager Service Portal.

Users can receive survey links through email and then open the links to respond to the surveys directly from the Service Manager Service Portal user interface. In addition, users can also click the Surveys tile on the launch pad to respond to their open surveys, as well as view their closed surveys. For more information, see the Service Manager Service Portal online help.

End users can click the chat button in the Service Manager Service Portal to communicate with either a virtual agent (Sage) or a Service Desk IT agent in real-time to quickly address the service requests and support requests as they arise. Service Manager Process Designer Assignment rule settings streamlines the End User Chat process and automatically routes the chat requests to the correct Service Desk assignment group. Sage simulates the way a human being responds to a question and helps to reduce IT support costs by suggesting Knowledge Management document links and Service Catalog item links or automating common cases. Therefore, end users can receive prompt, concise answers when they need them the most.

For more information, see End User Chat.

Smart Email is a new feature that enables users to interact with Service Manager through email messages. The supported features are as follows:

• Automatic record creation based on an inbound email

• Automatic replies (outbound email) with links to suggested solutions, including KM articles and service catalog offerings, that are based on the inbound email.
• Email-based approval for service catalog items
• Email-based commenting
• Integrating with Smart Ticket
• Supporting Hot Topic Analytics for interactions or incidents created from email

For more information, see Smart Email Overview

Service Manager 9.50 Collaboration has a more extensive concept, which combines IT Collaboration (previously knows as SMC) and End User Chat. IT Collaboration enables Service Manager IT operators to collaborate in real-time (or anytime) when handling an Interaction, Incident, Incident Task, Request, Request Task, Problem, Problem Task, Change, or Change Task. End User Chat builds a communication channel between Service Manager Service Desk agents and Service Manager Service Portal users or the Employee Self-Service (ESS) portal users so as to increase IT efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and reduce IT support costs. Additionally, the virtual agent accelerates solution delivery without human intervention. Powered by Smart Analytics, it provides 24x7 support and automatically proposes KM articles and Catalog offerings as solutions. The virtual agent can be customized to propose other solutions as required.

For more information, see IT Collaboration and End User Chat.

In Service Manager 9.50, the Applications Upgrade Utility is enhanced to automatically migrate the Classic Change module to Process Designer. This makes Hybrid mode available to all customers who are upgrading from a Service Manager 9.3x system that has legacy technology applied or from a Service Manager 9.4x Hybrid system.

For more information about the different modes of Service Manager and for a summary of changes that are applied when you migrate to Hybrid mode, see Service Manager modes: Classic, Codeless, and Hybrid.

Service Manager 9.50 is not available in Classic mode. If you are upgrading from a Classic mode version of Service Manager, you must upgrade to either of the Process Designer-based modes of Service Manager: Codeless and Hybrid. Migration functionality is built into the Applications Upgrade Utility to help you do this.

For more information about the different modes of Service Manager and for a summary of changes that are applied when you migrate to Hybrid mode, see Service Manager modes: Classic, Codeless, and Hybrid.

The Service Manager Survey functionality is extended to support Service Manager Service Portal as the survey portal and support the use of multiple survey templates for ESS, SRC, and Service Manager Service Portal surveys.

The SM Survey tailoring mechanism is also significantly simplified. Users can easily create custom questionnaires without the need to tailor any forms. Each questionnaire can be used for all SM surveys (ESS, SRC, and Service Manager Service Portal).

For more information, see Service Manager Survey.

When exporting reports as email attachments, you can select the Use Notification check box and then select a notification definition to send emails by following the notification rules. Additionally, you can add customized notification definition records.

For details, see Create a report schedule.

After you enable Smart Analytics in your Service Manager system, you can create Hot Topic Map reports for Service Manager survey, the Service Desk module, Incident Management module, and Problem Management module. Additionally, you can add Hot Topic Maps to the report dashboards for these modules.

For more information, see Hot Topic Map.

This release adds a new check box Support Auto Refresh to each dashboard to enable automatic refresh for a specific dashboard. With this option, both the dashboard owner and audience can view up-to-date data in the dashboard.

For more information, see Enable automatic refresh for a dashboard.

This release adds a new check box Run in Frontend to each calculation report and duration report. You can select this check box to run the current calculation or duration report immediately. When clicking the Refresh button on the Preview tab of a saved report, the system generates a preview of the current report at once.

For more information, see Report calculation chart properties and Report duration chart properties.

Service Manager 9.50 is supported for the ChatOps solution. Service Manager ChatOps is a simplified collaboration model that enables people, processes, tools and bots (chat robots) to exchange information, trigger activities and automate manual tasks in a simpler, and more cost-efficient and rapid way.

Compared to traditional collaboration tools, Service Manager ChatOps provides two unique differentiators:

• A war room, that is, a central place for a specific topic or task, where both people and chat bots gather to raise questions, respond to inquiries, track progress, monitor status, and make decisions.
• Systems of engagement, which centralizes various tools in war rooms, and enables people to quickly get needed information and easily what is going on, and chat bots are able to automate most of ops-related tasks.

For more information, see the following HPE Live Network website:

Servicce Portal ChatOps on the HPE Live Network

The embedded JRE in the HPE Service Manager server for Windows is now OpenJDK 8.

For Linux, the HPE Service Manager server has no jre embedded. You need to manually install an OpenJDK JRE or create a symbolic link to an Oracle JRE.

Now you can send the dynamic debugging messages using Service Manager JavaScript. In addition, you can also customize the output directory and the log file name for the debugging messages.

For more information, see Set debugging parameters using dynamic debugging.

The Service Manager Server now supports a cluster of SQL Server instances with the SQL Server AlwaysOn functionality enabled.

For more information, see Support of SQL Server AlwaysOn.

As of version 9.50, you can set most context parameters of the Web application and all initialization parameters of Servlets from both the web.xml file and the webtier.properties files. The parameters configured in these files take precedence in the following order:

• Custom webtier.properties located in the <customize-folder>/config folder
• Default webtier.properties located in the <webtier>/WEB-INF folder
• Default web.xml located in the <webtier>/WEB-INF folder

For more information, see Web tier parameters.

The JavaScript editor on Service Manager Windows client has the following enhancements:

• Content assist
• Syntax highlighting
• Quick outline
• Hyperlink
• Keyboard shortcuts

When you enter a variable or an expression as the default value and select the Is Expression check box at the same time, the tailoring values for custom fields are automatically filled in the user interface. This also applies to CI information retrieval and fulfillment. If you use variables as the default value for the item title and description fields, the title of the items are automatically filled when you submit these items in your cart.

This enhancement supports the following content:

• Traditional expressions in Service Manager applications, such as name in $lo.operator

• Jscall syntax to return advanced query results, such as the location of a logged in user (As long as a predefined JavaScript expression can return a query result, it can be set as a default value in custom fields)

  Note To use jscall, make sure you define the Javascript function in the Script library first.

• Any RAD expressions

• Text, Multiple Text, Checkbox, and Pick List default value types

• Pre-defined variables in Service Manager

Smart Analytics are enhanced in this release:

• The installer is optimized for installation and upgrade.
• Hot topic analytics is available for surveys, and as a report in the Dashboard.
• The image-to-text feature is improved for better Optical Character Recognition (OCR) quality.
• Smart Search is supported in self-service user view (ess.do).
• Context-aware search is supported for the Title field when you create a knowledge document.

The SAML SSO solution leverages HPE Identity Manager (IdM) as the service provider (SP) and requires the use of Microsoft Active Directory Services (ADFS) as the identity provider (IdP).

Based on SAML 2.0, this solution supports the Service Manager web tier, SRC, and Mobility Client, and is compatible with both the legacy LW-SSO solution and FIPS mode.

For more information, see SAML Single Sign-On.

The FIPS compliance of Service Manager is significantly enhanced to support the following:

• FIPS validated TLS connections
• FIPS validated LW-SSO
• FIPS compliant random number generation algorithms

For more information, see FIPS mode.

• Automatically purge the existing upgrade files before loading the pre-upg.bin file.
• Automatically load the Upgrade Utility file transfer.bin.

• Automatically detect the out-of-box upgrade and custom upgrade.

• The smupgrade command is now obsolete. Instead, you can access the following options in System Administration > Ongoing Maintenance > Upgrade Utility.

  • SQL Compare Utility
  • View/Merge Results

  • Apply Upgrade

  • Create Custom Upgrade

• Provides field merge UI when solving conflicts of renamed upgrade result for simple objects.

Previously, all platform unloads were included in the server package only, including those that are required for Windows client and web client fixes.

In Service Manager 9.50, unloads are now split between the following packages:

• Unloads related to the server, or to the server and the client: in the Server installer (<Server installation path>\platform_unloads)
• Unloads related to the web client: webtier-9.50.zip\unloads
• Unloads related to the Windows client: windows-client-9.50.zip\unloads

The following enhancements are introduced for this integration:

• The SM side integration setup is moved from the System Information Record to Integration Manager (SMIS), which is a central place for integration configuration.

  For more information, see How to Add the UCMDB and UCMDB Browser Connection Information.

• The Get Related and Impact Simulation widgets of the UCMDB Browser are embedded in Service Manager. Users can access them in the context of an affected service or CI in the Configuration, Change, Incident, Problem, and Interaction modules.

  Note By default, the two UCMDB Browser widgets are disabled in Service Manager. To use them, you need to enable them individually.

  For more information, see Centralized CI Visualization and Impact Analysis.

This integration is enhanced to support an additional method, which uses native HTML and JavaScript instead of the CTI applet. This method is supported only for Service Manager 9.50 or later, and does not require the installation of any CTI support code the first time you connect using the telephony URL.

For more information, see Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) with the Web client.

Service Manager 9.50 allows you to link change tasks to Operations Orchestration OO flows. This enables you to automate implementation of change tasks by manually or automatically launching OO flows.

For more information, see Automated implementation of change tasks.

The AutoPass licensing mechanism is enhanced with the following new capabilities:

• Support of integration with HPE Usage Hub for centralized license monitoring
• New server command that enables automated license update

For more information, see Integrate with HPE Usage Hub for license monitoring and Update your license file.

As of version 9.50, the HPE Service Manager web client also supports HTML5 desktop notifications for incoming Service Manager Collaboration conversation messages and new conversation invitations in the following scenarios:

• When the browser is open and the Service Manager web client is not the currently active webpage, the notification appears on the lower-right corner. Click this notification to return to the Service Manager web client webpage.
• When the browser is minimized, the browser window icon flashes in the taskbar. Click the browser window icon to return to the Service Manager web client webpage.

You can now drag and drop supported files from your local drive directly to the "Attachments" section of records.

For more information, see Add an attachment.

A Service manager contextual "More" menu is displayed instead of the browser menu when you right-click lists on the details pane of a record in the web client.

For more information, see Configure the behavior when you right-click in the web client.

• In addition to recording activity updates, the Configuration Management module also provides field-level audit history for updates to a configuration item (CI).

  For more information, see View the audit history of a configuration item.

• When an outage occurs and the associated CI has an SLT, the outage costs to the business are calculated and stored in the outagedetail records. The default Outage Cost per Hour is only applied if you do not specify Outage Cost per Hour in the CI form. You can configure the default Outage Cost per Hour in the Configuration Management Environment record.

  For more information, see Configure the Configuration Management environment record

• In a CI record, you can view related records of more types. For example, you can view documents related to a CI through the newly added Related Documents tab. You can also check the counts of each related record type.

  For more information, see View related records for a CI record.

• The availability requirements for any service are documented in the Service Level Agreement and agreed by the IT Service provider and the customer. An Availability Plan is a document which outlines the calculated forecast needs for a service to be able to meet those needs for the next business year. Its primary purpose is to define and document a plan to fulfill the forecasted requirements.

  For more information, see View the availability plan of a business service.

• Reliability is a measure of how long a service or component can perform its function without interruption. The Component Reliability functionality in the Configuration Management module automatically calculates the reliability of a service or component, and presents the information in a monthly report.

  For more information, see View component reliability.

• The Configuration Management module allows you to view outage information of a business or component, as well as the records affected by each outage.

  For more information, see View component availability.

• The Knowledge Management module provides an option Notify Service Subscribers on Publish that enables the system to immediately notify users upon the publication of a document that is important to them. Each knowledge document can be associated to a service so that the system can immediately notify users who have subscribed to the associated service upon the publication of the document.

  For more information, see Notify service subscribers of the publication of a document.

• New fields and tabs are added in the definition form of knowledge document. When creating or editing a knowledge document, you can add tags and specify associated business services which can be used as search keywords and displayed to end users. You can also link one document to another through the Related Records tab. In addition, you can trigger context-aware search to search for similar knowledge documents if you use Smart Analytics 9.50 as the search engine.

  For more information, see Create a knowledge document.

• When you search knowledgebases using Solr, more advanced search filters are available so that you can perform a more accurate search. For example, you can search by affected services. You can also define different search criteria for each of the specified knowledgebase to narrow down your search results.

  For more information, see Use advanced search.

• Service Manager 9.50 provides an out-of-box Service Catalog workflow which conforms to the principles of ITIL 2011 Edition. You can adapt this default workflow to meet your specific process and business needs.

  For more information, see Service Catalog Management process.

• Several new tabs and fields are added in the Service Catalog item and bundle detail forms so that you can provide more information about the service item or bundle. You can log fulfillment summary and value proposition for a service item, update activities regarding it or associate a service item with existing or new change records and knowledge documents.

  For more information, see Edit a bundle or item.

Service Manager product manuals and online help are now centralized in a single help center. The restructured help center now contains the following information nodes:

• Release notes
• Get started
• Install
• Upgrade
• Integrate
• Administer
• Use
• Troubleshoot
• Develop

The help center is released as a .zip file on HPE Software Support Online website and also published on the HPE Software Documentation Portal.

When this parameter is enabled, the browser’s language preference is remembered.

This parameter enables the web client to load unminified JavaScript files.