What is a category?

Service Manager uses the category to which a record is assigned to determine what work needs to be performed in order to close an interaction or incident record. For example, an interaction record that describes an email incident requires different work than an interaction record regarding a search for equipment for a new employee.

The Service Desk and Incident Management applications each provide the same list of categories from which to choose. When an interaction is escalated to an incident, the category in the new incident record is the same as the category assigned to the associated interaction record. The category you assign to a record determines the following information:

• Who is responsible for resolving a call report or incident record (the default assignment group)
• Which information you need to open the interaction record or incident record
• Which solutions to search for in the Knowledge base
• The applicable Service Level Agreements
• The default severity of the record
• The default priority of the record
• How quickly a record must be resolved
• The time interval for escalating a record to a higher alert stage
• Who must be notified as the record is escalated

The processing logic for each category is the same. However, Service Manager may use different record forms for each category. The sections displayed on the forms depend on the assigned category because each category has different information requirements. For example, the information that is required to fix a software error is different from the information that is required to solve an equipment failure.

Related topics

Service Desk overview
What is a Service Desk interaction?
Service Desk interaction list
Out-of-box Service Desk categories
Notify By field
Required actions