What's new in previous versions

Supports DevOps for applications tailoring, which is based on native Git integration. This feature enables you to modify, commit, and deploy code changes inside Service Manager. The commit and deploy function inside Service Manager guarantees a "Review Based Development" that only allows users with special permissions to check in and deploy codes.

The SM-UCMDB integration now supports federating Change Task records from Service Manager to UCMDB.

All Service Manager adapters for the SM-UCMDB integration are now consolidated into three:

• ServiceManagerEnhancedAdapter9.41(based on the generic framework)

• ServiceManagerAdapter9.41 (based on XSLT)
• ServiceManagerAdapter9.x (based on XSLT)

Service Manager Service Portal 9.52 incorporates the Change approval functionality that was previously available through content packs together with further enhancements. If you are designated as an approver of Change requests, you can approve all categories of Changes.

For more information about how to enable Change approval, see Enable Change approval.

In Service Manager Service Portal 9.52, you can accept or reject a Service Manager Service Portal request while the request is in the Resolved status. This functionality was previously available through content packs.

For more information, see Service Manager Service Portal Consumer Help.

The type ahead feature of the Search Service Manager Service Portal text box in Service Manager Service Portal 9.52 supports multiple words and sentences. When you type a few characters in the text box, the system automatically displays the Suggested search list and the Suggested result list. The Suggested search list lists the recommended search terms and highlights your search term. You can select a term in this list to open a search result page. The Suggested result list lists a series of suggested search results and highlights your search term in the titles and descriptions. You can select a result in this list to open the target ticket.

Service Manager Service Portal also provides correction when the system cannot find any matches for your search terms. For example, if you type iphoen in the Search Service Manager Service Portal text box and then system cannot find a match in the search results, the system automatically suggests iphone.

For more information about Service Manager Service Portal search configuration, see Configure SMSP search.

• The installer script capability is extended to enable Chat, Survey, and LW-SSO at the same time, all in one step.
• Support for remote installation is added so that you can install Service Portal on multiple nodes by running the installer on the load balancer node only.

The Configuration Management module is reimplemented on Process Designer technology. The module now uses a default Configuration Item workflow. When you upgrade to Service Manager 9.52, a migration tool will convert all Classic Configuration Items to Codeless Configuration Items.

For more information, see the Configuration Management section in the Service Manager Help Center.

You can configure reports on the dashboard to use colors to highlight defined thresholds and ranges of values. When you define a colored range for a report, the section of the relevant axis falling within that range is displayed in a defined color, and threshold markers are displayed on the report to mark the limits of the range.

For more information, see Add colored ranges to a report.

You can now paste images to the HTML Editor as attachments.

For more information, see Using the HTML Editor.

The existing Smart Analytics license files are no longer valid on April 30, 2017.

New license files are included in Smart Analytics 9.52. If you upgrade to Service Manager 9.52 or perform a first-time installation of Service Manager 9.52 before April 30, you need take no further action.

However, if you will not upgrade to or install Service Manager 9.52 before April 30, you must update the license files. To help you do this, a Smart Analytics License Tool is included in the Service Manager 9.52 release package. Simply follow the steps in the tool to renew the license files. Additionally, the tool is available to download from the following Micro Focus Support website:

https://softwaresupport.softwaregrp.com/km/KM02749940

Previously, you could only add stop phrases by updating the qssp.db file for Hot Topic Analytics. After this configuration, you had to restart a series of Smart Analytics services. As of Service Manager 9.52, you can configure stop phrases on the Configure IDOL Stop Phrase page in the Service Manager UI without restarting the Smart Analytics services.

For more information, see Set stop phrases for Hot Topic Analytics.

By default, the Hot Topic Analytics topic map displays up to 10 blocks. Service Manager 9.52 enables you to configure the maximum number of blocks in a Hot Topic Analytics topic map.

Order numbers and request numbers generated on the Service Portal side are now automatically synchronized to the Portal Order ID and Portal Request ID fields on the Service Manager Interaction detail form and search form.

The Service Portal installation mechanism is enhanced in the following ways:

• Service Portal now can be installed on a Red Hat Linux system that has no Internet access.

• The installer is redesigned to use a single shell script that automates the installation process.

  Note You still need to run additional scripts (such as enableSurvey and enableChat) to perform some post-installation tasks.

Previously in an outbound email, the knowledge documents proposed by the virtual agent Sage only included KM articles from the SM knowledge library. Now, if the corresponding connectors (the SharePoint connector, file system connector, or HTTP connector) are set up in Smart Analytics, the proposed knowledge documents also includes SharePoint pages, documents on a file system, or web pages from external libraries.

When you open an End User Chat window in Service Portal, you can specify the Service Portal ticket number from the Previous Support Ticket ID drop-down list if you have submitted a support ticket before the chat.

By default, when a parent task is not created, the child task is created and moved to the "Active" state. You can now configure the child task to stay in the "Waiting" state in this situation.

For more information about how to do this, see Configure child task behavior when the parent task is not created.

You can now configure Service Request Catalog to display a language selection box on the login page.

For information about how to enable this feature, see Enable language selection on the Service Request Catalog login page.

Smart Search indexing for "sclib" type knowledgebase libraries is enhanced in the following ways:

• The back-end indexing mechanism is refactored to improve performance.
• You can schedule indexing based on a time period record.
• You can view the detailed status of indexing jobs.

If you have Smart Analytics installed, a Smart Search icon is added to the top-right of the UI. Clicking the icon displays a search box that performs a Smart Search. This enables you to use the Smart Search feature of Smart Analytics to search for content wherever you are in the Service Manager UI, without having to navigate through menus.

New server patch installation tool

Service Manager 9.51 includes a new server patch installation tool (PatchSetup.bat or PatchSetup.sh) and a new server patch uninstallation tool (PatchUninstall.bat or PatchUninstall.sh). The installation tool is located in the patch directory after you unzip the patch, and the uninstallation tool is created in the <SM Installation>\_uninstall directory after you run the installation tool.

For detailed information about how to use the new tools, refer to the Upgrade the Service Manager Server and Back out the Service Manager Server topics.

Service Manager 9.51 provides a demo data unload file (demodata.unl) for testing and demonstrating the new 9.51 features after you have upgraded to the 9.51 applications in a fresh installation environment. This demo data package is for Service Manager 9.51 Codeless only. To import the data package, you must use the Apply Demo Data wizard provided by Service Manager 9.51.

For more information about how to do this, see the "Service Manager 9.51 Demo Data" topic in the Service Manager Help Center.

By default, you can submit a Service Catalog request from Service Catalog > Order from Catalog, and then search for the desired cart items, or you can submit a Support Catalog request from Service Catalog > Non-cart Catalog Requests, and then search for non-cart services. In an out-of-box Service Manager system, these two search results use different formats and cannot be merged. However, you can now customize the Service Catalog search result to include both cart items and non-cart items for a better user experience.

For more information, see Customizing Service Catalog search result.

The Command/Search box at the top of the UI is replaced with a command icon. Click the icon to display the Command/Search box.

This UI enhancement helps simplify the tool bar, provides a unified and consistent user experience across Micro Focus software, and eliminates potential confusion between the Command/Search icon and the Smart Search icon.

If you select a right-to-left (RTL) language (for example, Arabic) when you log in to Service Manager 9.51, the navigator panel is displayed on the right side of the UI to better align with the direction of the text. Additionally, the following changes improve the user experience when Service Manager is displayed in an RTL language:

• The text of accordion items and tree items in the navigator pane is aligned to the right
• The navigator toolbar is aligned to the right
• The right and left arrow keys collapse and expand the tree, respectively (in LTR language versions, the key mapping is reversed)

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 9.61 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 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 9.61 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 Micro Focus Marketplace website:

Service Portal ChatOps on the Micro Focus Marketplace

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

For Linux, the 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 Dynamic debugging of user sessions or schedulers.

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 Micro Focus 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 9.61, 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 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 9.61 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 Micro Focus Usage Hub for centralized license monitoring
• New server command that enables automated license update

For more information, see AutoPass licensing.

As of version 9.50, the 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.

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 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 9.61 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 Micro Focus Support Online website and also published on the Micro Focus Software Documentation Portal.

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 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 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 Search is a brand new search experience that enables you to search across Service Manager modules and into a variety of content such as SharePoint sites (including SharePoint documents with entitlement), static webpages, and shared folders. Smart Search provides a greater search capability than SOLR, and supports various operators such as AND, OR, NEAR, NOT, BEFORE, and AFTER. You can integrate multiple knowledge libraries by configuring different search connectors, so that all change analysts, incident analysts, request analysts, service desk analysts, problem analysts, change managers, incident managers, request managers, service desk managers, problem managers, and SRC users can search all the information that they can access.

By configuring Smart Search preconditions and actions, IT users can search for content from different libraries easily and quickly. Users can also process a record with the context aware search, which automatically searches and displays records or articles related to the current record. From the search result, users can perform actions such as copying solutions or finding similar records, so as to improve the resolution rate and reduce resolution time.

Hot Topic Analytics in the new version of Smart Analytics for Service Manager includes the following enhancements:

• Hot Topic Analytics is now available in three modules

  After you enable Smart Analytics in an out-of-box system, you can use Hot Topic Analytics for the Service Desk, Incident Management, and Problem Management modules. Additionally, you can access Hot Topic Analytics from the report dashboards for these modules.

• Creating knowledge articles

  Now you can easily create knowledge articles based on the analysis performed by Hot Topic Analytics.

• Setting parent/child relationship among incidents

  When you review the hot topics suggested by Hot Topic Analytics in Incident Management, you can use the Set Parent action to open a wizard, and then select the parent and child incident. The system will suggest a list of parent incidents, ordered by their relevance to the selected child incidents, and then you can select the parent for the child incidents. You can also create a new parent incident from the same wizard.

• New RESTful APIs

  New RESTful APIs are provided for Hot Topic Analytics, as well as Smart Ticket and Smart Search.

In previous versions of Service Manager, the device table used the logical.name field (labeled CI Identifier) as both a unique key field and a CI display name field, and used the id field (labeled CI Name) to display CI identification numbers. As a result, duplicate CI names were not allowed, while some external systems that integrate with Service Manager, such as Micro Focus Universal CMDB (UCMDB), allow duplicate CI names, which caused so-called "duplicate logical names issue." Moreover, other modules that consume CI data, such as the Incident and Change modules, cannot have their CI data automatically synchronized when CIs are renamed or removed, which leads to data integrity loss.

The following features of the logical name solution in Service Manager 9.41 resolve these problems:

• Updated Configuration Item dbdict and form
• Allowing user-specified CI Identifiers for new CIs
• Ensuring cross-module CI data integrity through the Reference Field mechanism
• Skipping Query Rewriting in link line records
• Auto Complete in the web client
• Behavior changes of the Fill and Find functions
• Updated DEM Reconciliation Rules functionality
• New or updated RAD and JavaScript functions
• Support for CI reports

Integrating Service Manager 9.41 with other Micro Focus Products

Service Manager 9.41 has implemented code changes to resolve the impact of the logical name solution on integrations. A few integrations also require code changes on the other endpoint product side, which are available only after the Service Manager 9.41 release and hence require manual changes by the customer at the time of the Service Manager 9.41 release.

Service Manager 9.41 supports Micro Focus's Global ID solution for product integrations such as Micro Focus Service Asset Configuration Management (SACM).

Previously, the identification of CIs from the UCMDB and UD solutions was difficult, and potentially resulted in the duplication of CIs in products such as Service Manager, Asset Manager, and Run-time Service Model. The Global ID solution uses the UCMDB global ID as a reconciliation key in the data push framework, thus facilitating the reconciliation of CIs across Service Manager and other products.

For more information, refer to Recommendations for Global ID Best Practices in CMS.

As version of 9.41, Service Manager supports the ASM functionality in the UCMDB Browser. Service CIs and consumer-provider relationships that are discovered by ASM can be pushed to Service Manager; additionally, you can tailor Service Manager such that Service Manager users can access ASM in the context of a business service, and access Impact Simulation in the context of an affected CI.

Support of ASM enables Service Manager users to view the accurate service trees that are discovered by ASM and facilitates service modeling in Service Manager.

For more information, refer to Micro Focus UCMDB Browser.

In Hybrid mode, Process Designer technology can be fully functional, but the mode also supports legacy technology such as Format Control. Service Manager 9.41 Hybrid is designed explicitly to ease the transition between Service Manager Classic and Service Manager Codeless by enabling you to continue to take advantage of your previous investments in legacy tailoring. This mode is available only to customers who are upgrading from a Service Manager 9.3x system that has Process Designer Content Pack 9.30.2 (PDCP3) applied.

When you upgrade to Service Manager 9.41 Hybrid, a migration tool that is embedded into the Applications Upgrade Utility automatically migrates some legacy technology to Process Designer (for example, the tool automatically generates Process Designer workflows that continue to use legacy states, format control, and process). The extra steps in the Applications Upgrade Utility that comprise the migration tool are displayed automatically when you upgrade from an applicable system.

Additionally, further manual tailoring enables you to continue using even more legacy features (for example, you can run the legacy Request Management module and the Process Designer-based Request Fulfillment module in parallel).

As of version 9.41, Service Manager Collaboration supersedes the previous Micro Focus Enterprise Collaboration (EC) based instant messaging solution. As an instant messaging tool embedded in Service Manager, Service Manager 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. Service Manager users who do not log on to Service Manager but are available on Microsoft Office Lync can also be invited to a Collaboration conversation.

For more information, refer to Service Manager Collaboration.

In Service Manager 9.41, Service Manager Reports can display in the same report both the raw data from the system and the new data calculated from the raw data. Particularly, you can generate a duration report that displays Service Level Management information against status, phase, and assignment group changes, such as the duration of record handling.

The following is a summary of the implementation.

• Calculation Report and duration Report

  Calculation Reports can reorganize the standard report data to show an overlapping report, which can display both the raw standard report and the calculated report. Duration Reports can count and display the time duration reports against status, phase and assignment group changes depending on the system data provided by the SLM module license and configuration.

• Data preparation framework for duration reports

Service Level Management is enhanced in this version to support calculating the Process Target expiration based on assignment groups, so that you can monitor the performance of internal/external teams as per the agreed Operational Level Agreements or Underpinning Contracts. In addition, we offer a new calculation type to calculate the Process Target expiration time based on your work schedule.

For more information about these features, refer to Calculation of Process Target metrics.

To increase IT agents’ efficiency and to enhance user experience, Service Manager 9.41 introduces a new, streamlined interaction solution. This streamlined interaction solution provides the following features and benefits:

• A simplified, intuitive form for interaction logging that requires fewer fields to fill and fewer clicks
• A streamlined workflow that requires fewer steps in interaction handling

• Status synchronization between interaction and fulfillment records:

  • End users have full visibility of fulfillment status
  • IT agents can focus on fulfillment records
• Visibility on the attachment of interaction in the fulfillment record
• Consolidated menu entry for interaction creation, which is based on whether Smart Analytics and the streamlined interaction solution are enabled or not

For more information on the streamlined interaction solution, see the Service Desk section in Service Manager 9.41 Help Center (Codeless version) and the Service Manager 9.41 Processes and Best Practices Guide (Codeless version).

Service Request Catalog 9.61 introduces the following new enhancements:

• SRC Survey

  SRC Survey is based on the Service Manager HTML Email solution (JavaMail) and applies the out-of box internal Survey connector. By sending surveys from the records, you can collect user satisfaction by ratings or open comments. The system automatically generates an interaction record of a Complaint or Compliment category if the user registers an interaction. The administrators can add new questions to surveys and customize the answer types in the survey.

• Show related records

  The request details page lists all related records in the Fulfillment Summary section. The information includes the ID, the title, and the status of the related record.

Service Manager Mobility in this version includes the following enhancements:

• A Related Records tab is added to the Detail view of a record in the power user view in Service Manager 9.41 Codeless.
• A list of related records is added to the open tickets and the closed tickets in the self-service user view.
• The display name of a CI can be displayed in comfill for mobility. Now you can fill a CI by its display name.
• You can now search from SharePoint and Wiki pages (such as HTTP library) in addition to the knowledge base library in self-service user view, based on the prerequisites that you have purchased a Smart Analytics module license, enabled Smart Analytics, and configured the connectors to the SharePoint and HTTP libraries correctly.
• When Smart Analytics is enabled, the attachments in the knowledge base library can be searched directly.

• When Smart Analytics is enabled, the search will perform a spell check to return meaningful results. For example, if you search for "offica," the search result will return records that include the term "office" if there is no exact result for "offica."

• The Open Ticket button is renamed to Submit a Request in the self-service user view.

Service Manager Upgrade Utility in this version includes the following enhancements:

• Provides a simplified UI wizard by grouping the upgrade process to various phases with sequential step numbers.
• Provides two extra wizard screens for the customers who are upgrading from Service Manager 9.3x with Process Designer Content Pack 9.30.2 (PDCP3) applied to Service Manager 9.41 Hybrid.
• Removes the data scan option.

The HTML Editor enables you to visually add and edit rich text content formatted with HTML tags. Though the HTML Editor is powerful, web sites may be abused without a proper security control. Therefore, as of Service Manager 9.41, you can use the HTML Editor whitelist to define a list of allowed HTML elements.

For more information about the HTML Editor whitelist, see Enable HTML Editor whitelist.

Service Manager 9.41 provides an enhanced query hash algorithm, which ensures a higher level of system security when the Service Manager web client or Service Request Catalog (SRC) is handling URLs. By default, this functionality is disabled for backward compatibility.

Prerequisites

To use this functionality, your system must have the following configurations:

• Service Manager server, web client, and SRC version 9.41 or later

• Service Manager 9.41 or later applications, or

  (For SRC) Service Manager 9.4x (earlier than 9.41) applications with QCCR1E120868_SRC940p3_SM940.unl applied. This unload file is available from the SRC 9.41 package.

  Note SRC 9.41 works with Service Manager 9.4x applications only. Therefore, there is no SRC unload for Service Manager 9.3x applications.

  Caution After upgrading to applications 9.41 (by running the upgrade utility or the applications patch manager) or after applying the unload for this functionality, restart your Service Manager server. Additionally, after applying the unload, you need to tailor the System Information Record form (info.company.g).

Tailoring the System Information Record form

To enable this functionality in a Service Manager system running the 9.3x or 9.40 applications, after applying the unload for your applications version, you still need to tailor the System Information Record form. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Service Manager Windows client as a system administrator.
2. Open the info.company.g format in Forms Designer in Design mode.

3. In the General tab, add a check box with the following settings in the Properties pane.

   Property	Setting
   Caption	Enable Enhanced Query Hash
   input	strong.queryhash.flag

4. In the General tab, add another check box with the following settings in the Properties pane.

   Visible Condition	[strong.queryhash.flag]
   Caption	Allow Legacy Query Hash
   input	keep.old.queryhash.flag

5. Click OK twice to save this format.
6. Restart the Service Manager server.

7. Go to System Administration > Base System Configuration > Miscellaneous > System Information Record, and then click the General tab to verify the two check boxes are successfully added.

Service Manager 9.41 provides a demo data unload file (demodata.unl) for testing and demonstrating the 9.61 new features after you have upgraded to the 9.41 applications on a fresh installation environment. This demo data package is for Service Manager9.61 Codeless only. To import the data package, you must use the new Apply Demo Data wizard provided by Service Manager 9.41. For detailed instructions about how to access the Apply Demo Data wizard and load the demo data package, see Service Manager Installation and Upgrade Documentation Center.

To-Do alerts are operator-specific notifications that appear in a floating window at the top of the screen immediately after an operator logs in to the system. The window appears only when there are pending alerts. The operator can view and acknowledge the To-Do alerts, and check the details of the records listed. The To-Do alerts feature must be enabled for individual operators by an administrator.

Service Manager 9.41 includes a number of user experience improvements to the web client. For more information, refer to the Service Manager 9.41 Release Notes.

The inactivity timer is a feature that administrators can configure to close user sessions that have been idle for a specified period of time. In Service Manager9.61, this feature is enabled by default, and the time-out value is set to 30 minutes.

For more information about the inactivity timer and how to configure it, see Inactivity timer.

Built on Service Manager 9.40 and using an OEM-licensed version of Micro Focus IDOL, SM Smart Analytics heralds the debut of the "Big Data" edition of Service Manager.

Smart Analytics enables your Service Manager to become a more intelligent and efficient system by extracting and understanding your content. Smart Analytics includes the following features in this release:

Smart Ticket

With Smart Ticket, you can quickly submit a Service Desk record by just entering a description or attaching a picture. SM Smart Analytics will intelligently populate other fields such as category or affected services by extracting and analyzing the content that you entered in the record.

Hot Topic Analytics

Hot Topic Analytics intelligently displays an interactive diagram indicating the hot topics among recent incidents so that you can easily discover incident trends and identify problem candidates.

For more information, see Smart Analytics overview.

The Service Manager Reports feature provides reports and dashboards to enable faster analysis and improved time to resolution. Service Manager reports organize data into various chart formats, and dashboards display one or more reports. In this way, Service Manager Reports can provide global information about critical activities or metrics.

The Service Manager The Service Manager Reports feature provides light-weight reporting for active operational data. As such, the reports are designed to retrieve, represent, and visualize at most 100,000 active records out of millions. To define analytic reports against the entire dataset, we recommend that you use third party business intelligence tools.

Important: Please note that this initial release of Service Manager Reports has minimal calculation capabilities. As such, we recommend that you continue to use Crystal Reports or other third party tools for calculation-intensive reporting.

Service Manager Reports schedules assist report managers or administrators to send reports or dashboard information to the relevant users or user groups at scheduled intervals. The report schedule specifies who is to be notified, when they are notified, and the notification method.

Service Manager monitors the performance impact of reports and dashboards. If the time spent on generating a report exceeds the time threshold that the administrator sets, the report performance log collects the information and displays it on Report Running Status dashboard. Report Administrators can take the following measures to eliminate the impact of the slow reports:

• Enable the cache
• Enable database replication
• Enable indexing for the table query
• Disable the report

After you upgrade to Service Manager 9.40, MySM is disabled.

• MySM is not supported on Service Manager 9.40 applications +Service Manager 9.40 binaries. Customers can leverage the new Service Manager Reports feature to meet their requirements. Service Manager Reports can incorporate the charts and pages created in MySM by using the provided migration script.
• MySM is supported on Service Manager 9.3x applications + Service Manager 9.40 binaries. Existing customers can continue to use MySM after upgrading to Service Manager 9.40 binaries only.

Service Manager 9.40 provides a new System Navigator, which has the following enhancements:

• You can easily switch the System Navigator between the following two modes:

  • Sidebar mode. In the sidebar mode, the System Navigator only displays the icons of the top-level menu items. When the mouse hovers over an icon, a pop-up menu immediately appears on the right side of this icon and displays the submenu.

    Note The sidebar mode only works in Power User view (index.do) and Enterprise Self-Service view (ess.do), but does not work in Accessible view (accessible.do) and Self-Service Accessible view (accessible_ess.do).

  • Accordion mode. The accordion mode looks and works similar as the traditional System Navigator.

  For more information about the two modes, see Switching the System Navigator.

  Note  

  When you deploy the web client of Service Manager 9.40 together with an earlier version of Service Manager application, you need to perform the following actions:

  • You must install the QCCR1E114612_SM940_SM930.unl unload file. Otherwise, the System Navigator does not work. For more information about how to install an unload file, refer to the following section in the Service Manager 9.40 Release Notes:

    Installation notes > Application Unload installation

  • We recommend that you set the Enablesidebarmenu parameter to FALSE to disable the icons and the sidebar mode of the System Navigator. Otherwise, the Service Manager web client uses the default icon for all menu items.

• You can customize the icons of the first-level menu items. Service Manager provides the out-of-box icons so that you can easily specify them in the menu record. For a complete list of the out-of-box icons, see Service Manager menu icons.

  For more information about how to customize the menu icons, see Customize System Navigator menu icons.

• Service Manager 9.40 enhances the branding capability for the new System Navigator. For more information, see "Additional branding implementation options" in Branding the web client

The vertical layout has the following advantages:

• The vertical layout can present more information in the detail pane and list more records in the list pane.

• When you move the mouse over a record ID in the record list, a hover window can display the values of all the fields that are configured as record list columns.

By default, the vertical layout displays the first four columns in the list pane. You can easily show or hide columns. To do this, follow the instructions in the Show or hide columns section in Working with record lists.

The color indicator can apply a color mark-up on a field if the value of the field matches the pre-defined color indicator setting. The color indicator settings apply to record list, detail form, and reporting.

Service Manager 9.40 already provides out-of-box color indicator settings on several fields. For example, the Severity, Priority, and Impact fields in several tables. You can customize the out-of-box settings on these fields or create new color indicator settings for other fields. For more information about how to create or edit the color indicator setting, see Configuring color indicator.

In the record list, you can quickly switch on or off the color indicator of a column. To do this, use the Color Indicate option in the drop-down menu of that column.

The following new capabilities are available in the Quick Jump component so that users can move even faster among sections in record details:

• Expand All: Expand all first-level sections in record details.

• Collapse All: Collapse all first-level sections in record details.

• Back To Top: Go back to the top of record details.

For more information, see Using Quick Jump in record detail.

Service Manager 9.40 provides a quick help that lists all the web client keyboard shortcuts. You can open this quick help by using one of the following methods:

• Click the Help button

  • If the web client does not have online help, the shortcut list directly opens.
  • If the web client has online help, a drop-down menu appears. Click Shortcut List from the drop-down menu.
• Use the keyboard shortcut: Alt+Ctrl+/

Process Designer Content Pack 9.30.3 introduced the following new features that are now merged into Service Manager Codeless:

• Implementation of the Process Designer framework and workflows for the Help Desk modules (Service Desk, Incident Management, and Problem Management)

• Support for interaction between Process Designer-based Help Desk modules and other modules

• Support for phase-based Response SLOs (referred to as Service Level Targets (SLTs) in Service Manager 9.40) for Service Desk and for Incident Management

• Introduction of Incident tasks to Help Desk and support for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Incident tasks

• A Process Designer security mechanism for Help Desk modules, including:

  • New Process Designer security areas for Help Desk modules
  • New Process Designer security roles for Help Desk modules

  • Help Desk security profiles are migrated to security roles and rights

  • Access rights for the navigation menu and for the Inbox are replaced by Process Designer security roles and rights

• The following usability improvements:

  • Simplification of related records in Help Desk modules

  • The ability to switch between the Group style and the Tab style for a Notebook control in the web client

  • The addition of record numbers to record titles, including Interactions, Incidents, Incident tasks, Problems, and Problem tasks

  • A real-time counter in the Attachments and Related Records sections

  • Enhancements to the ability to trace phase transition in the workflow figure

• The following Process Designer framework enhancements:

  • Workflow-based rule sets to replace file level format control

  • Workflow-based actions can be re-used across phases

  • Workflow backend transitions enable cross-module interaction

  • A new tool that exports workflows into an unload file, so that you can copy workflows from one Process Designer-based system to another Process Designer-based system

  • Phase orders to specify the sequences for Process target calculation

The following modules are fully reimplemented on Process Designer workflows.

Request Fulfillment

The Request Fulfillment application in Service Manager Codeless enables business staff to improve their productivity and the quality of business services and products. It can also help to reduce the cost of providing services and the effort involved in requesting and receiving access to services. Moreover, the use of the Request Fulfillment application can increase the control level of an organization’s services and the number of fulfilled requests.

Request Fulfillment includes the following key features:

• The Request model, which defines the prerequisites, required authorizations, and sequenced or parallel standard tasks that are used to fulfill the service request
• A detailed and customizable product catalog
• Scheduling of service requests and tasks
• Automated request fulfillment
• Order and stock management
• Interaction with other Service Manager applications, such as Service Catalog, Configuration Management, Service Desk, Incident Management, Change Management, and Service Level Management

• Integration with other products:

  • Providing a common web service interface so that other products are able to access service requests and tasks
  • Integration with Asset Manager for request fulfillment billing

For the Request Fulfillment processes and best practices, see the corresponding sections in Processes and Best Practices Guide for Service Manager Codeless.

Service Desk

The Service Desk application includes the following key features.

• Automatic updates of records

  Service Manager Codeless enhances the Service Desk by providing an auto-update feature between an interaction and a related incident, problem, change, or request. After the initial escalation of an interaction (where the status of the interaction updates the related link), the auto-update feature will update an interaction when certain status changes occur in the related record.

  In addition, when customer-visible activities in related records occur, these activities may also be reflected in the interaction record.

• New Categories

  You can now escalate from an interaction directly to a problem.

  A new "Compliment" type has been added, which follows the same workflow as complaints.

• Behavior change

  In this version of Service Manager, you may escalate an interaction only one time. Previous versions of Service Manager allowed you to escalate an interaction multiple times.

Problem Management

Problem Management includes the following enhancements.

• Problems that are designated as "Major Problems" now make the review phase at the end of the workflow mandatory.
• Problems now have a "Source"field, which allows you to specify the origin of the incident as an end user, event, an internal source, or elsewhere.
• Known Errors are separated out from Problems and given their own identifier. For details, see Open a known error.
• A new Cost tab was added.  
• You can modify the categorization of the problem while using the closure wizard.
• You can send a survey directly from the problem to a designated recipient. For more information, see Service Manager Survey.

Incident Management

Incident Management has a number of small enhancements:

• Incidents can now be designated as parent or child of another incident, and includes supporting fields such as "Parent" to designate whether an incident is parent, and "Parent Link" to designate a child and to create the actual link to the parent incident.
• Incidents now have a Source field, which allows you to specify the origin of the incident as an end user, event, an internal source, or elsewhere.
• Incidents can now link directly to known errors.
• You can send a survey directly from the incident to a designated recipient. For more information, see Service Manager Survey.
• A new Cost tab is added.  
• You can modify the categorization of the incident while using the closure wizard.
• You can mark an incident as major incident. After you do this, Service Manager notifies the specified Incident Manager, and the Review Details field in the Major Incident Reviewsection is mandatory in the Review phase.

Change Management

The Change Management application in Service Manager 9.61 Codeless is reimplemented on Process Designer. The Process Designer based Change Management workflows (including Change and Change Tasks workflows) are easier to maintain than the legacy ones.

ITIL aligned Change workflows

The new Change Management workflows (Change Proposal, Normal Change, Standard Change, and Emergency Change) in the out-of-box system are aligned with the latest version of ITIL:

• Change Proposal: The Change Proposal process allows users to analyze, evaluate, and develop a business case for a change. A Change Proposal is used to describe and document a large, proposed change, usually when the proposed change has significant impact on the organization's IT infrastructure (for example, such as when an organization wants to move all their existing servers to a Linux-based environment). Such changes usually involve planning and evaluation, feasibility studies and the like.

  Note To support change proposals, Knowledge Management has added two new document subtypes: Business Case and Project Information.

• Normal Change: The Normal Change process defines the steps necessary to process changes that are categorized, prioritized, planned and follow all approvals before deployment. Normal Changes can be further categorized as Major, Significant, and Minor.
• Standard Change: The Standard Change process defines the steps necessary to process a pre-authorized change that follows a standard procedure. For example, a password reset or the provision of standard equipment to a new employee.
• Emergency Change: The Emergency Change process defines the steps necessary to process changes that are intended only to repair an IT service error that is negatively impacting the business at a high level of severity.

Change Models and Change Categories

Change Management can be configured such that new change records are created from either a Change Model or a Change Category.

• A Change Model allows you to define a set of change settings, such as Category, Subcategory, Change Template, Service, Company, Department, Allowed Roles (security roles), and Tasks. When a change is created based on this change model, the change record is automatically populated with the predefined values in the change model.
• A Change Category has a workflow associated with it and one or more subcategories defined for it. When a change is created based on this change category, the change record is automatically populated with the predefined values in the change category. The out-of-box system provides the following change categories: Change Proposal, Standard Change, Normal Change, and Emergency Change.

Task Workflows and Task Categories

To work with the new change workflows, a number of Change Task categories are provided. Each of the task categories has a Process Designer based task workflow associated with it. Additionally, change tasks can be planned within change records by using Task Planner, or planned within change models.

Other enhancements

• A Cost tab is added to Change records to improve impact analysis and evaluation of business cost of downtime.
• Remediation planning is expanded for failed changes to allow other options than“back out”.
• Change categorization is enhanced:
  • Sub-category “Significant” is added for Normal changes. Significant changes are more larger in scope than minor changes but do not require the enhanced planning and review of a major change.
  • You can modify the categorization of the change while using the closure wizard.
• A Review Required option is provided for Standard, Normal, and Emergency changes, which is used to disallow changes to bypass the Post Implementation Review phase. Once you turn on this flag, the change record cannot bypass the Post Implementation Review phase, and the system automatically sends a notification to the Change Coordinator and Change Manager once the change record enters the Post Implementation Review phase.
• The previous "Backout" phase is renamed to the more general "Remediation" phase to more aptly reflect the different mitigation scenarios that may occur as a result of a unsuccessful change. This makes it more clear that some remediation plans may be to take an action other than backing out the change, such as taking no action, trying to implement the change again, raise a problem, etc..
• You can send a survey directly from the change to a designated recipient. For more information, see Service Manager Survey.

Service Level Management

Service Level Management in Service Manager9.61 implements Process Designer for management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Underpinning Contracts (UCs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs). In addition, the following terminology changes are implemented: service level objectives are renamed to service level targets (in forms and display values only; the underlying table columns and code have not changed due to compatibility considerations), response targets are now process targets, and availability targets are now service targets.

In addition, all three types of service agreements are now treated as equal, and the relationships between them clarified to show OLAs and UCs as supporting (underpinning) agreements to an SLA. Support for regular service reviews has been added through the addition of service review fields, and the addition of new Knowledge document subtypes for Service quality plans, and service improvement plans.

For more information on the new Service Level Management, see the entire Service Level Management documentation set in the Help Center.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management has a number of small enhancements in the release. Reference documents now have a new "Subtype" field to support a wider variety of documentation types. These types are described as follows:

• Service Design Package (a document that provides the initial outline of a service agreement and denotes what agreements will be required, who the signatories shall be, and other process oriented details).

• Service Quality Plan (SQP, a long term quality improvement plan for a service agreement)

• Service Improvement Plan (SIP, a limited short term improvement plan for a service agreement)

• Business case (provides a business justification for a change proposed by a formal Change Proposal)

• Project Information (provides information about the project proposed by a formal Change Proposal)

• Availability Plan

This release includes the following enhancements to the Process Designer framework.

Workflow viewer and workflow editor enhancements

The user experience of viewing, creating, and editing Process Designer workflows is enhanced with the following new features:

• You can now copy and paste phases within a workflow.
• You can now add descriptions to transitions between phases, as well as to phases and workflows.
• The description field for transitions, phases, and workflows now supports formatting (such as italics and bold text) and hyperlinks.
• You can now view a phase's description by hovering the mouse over the phase in the workflow viewer.
• An icon is now displayed in phases in the workflow viewer and workflow editor if the phase has approvals.

Condition Editor enhancements

The Condition Editor widget is completely redesigned with an easy-to-use graphical interface that includes the following new features:

• You can now build conditions by using meaningful operators instead of characters. For example, the enhanced Condition Editor uses "Greater than" instead of ">" and "Not equals" instead of "!=."
• You can drag and drop individual expressions within conditions. This makes it very easy to modify complex conditions that have many nested expressions.
• You can now copy and paste conditions between condition editors. For example, if you want to apply the same complex condition to an automatic transition in two different workflows, you can create the condition by using Condition Editor in one workflow, copy it, open Condition Editor in the second workflow, and then paste the condition.
• Condition validation is now built into Condition Editor. You cannot save an invalid condition, and the specific elements in the condition that fail validation are highlighted in the graphical interface.

Task Planner enhancements

Task Planner is now available for Request Fulfillment as well as for Change Management, and can be used at both the record and model level. The Task Information section in change models, changes, request models, and requests now contains a graphic display of the tasks that are planned for that record. You can open Task Planner directly from this section by clicking Edit.

You can now use Task Planner to configure input and output fields in tasks and to set the recommended maximum number of concurrent tasks.

Task Planner is now itself customizable. You can add fields to Task Planner and configure the mapping between the statuses of tasks and the statuses that are displayed by Task Planner.

New and enhanced rule types

New rules

• Popup Message Box rule: This rule enables you to create and configure popup message boxes that appear to end users.
• Assignment rule: This rule enables you to automatically distribute records (such as tasks or records) to the groups and assignees who are most able to process them.
• Run Action rule: This rule automatically runs actions (defined by rule sets and/or backend transitions) on records that have a specified relationship to the record that triggers the rule. For example, you can use this rule to change the workflow phase of related records under specific conditions.
• Run Scheduled Action rule: This rule automatically runs an action (defined by rule sets and/or backend transitions) on records after a specified length of time has passed. For example, you can use this rule to automatically close incident records that have been in a Resolved state for a certain number of days.

Enhanced rule

Start or Stop Clock rule: This rule enables you to start or stop an Service Manager clock to measure elapsed time. In this release, the rule is enhanced to enable you to set the timezone of the clock, schedule the clock, and include fields in the clock name when you set the clock name by using a JavaScript.

Improved development auditing

Changes to Process Designer elements, such as workflows, phases, or rules, are now logged in the devaudit table. This allows you to track the customizations that you make by using Process Designer, and to unload them from your development environment.

The out-of-box Service Manager 9.40 includes all the functionalities of the Case Exchange Content Pack for Service Manager 9.34. These functionalities enable the setup of the following Case Exchange integrations.

• The integration between two Service Manager systems

  Note The other Service Manager system must be 9.40 or 9.34 with Case Exchange Content Pack applied.

• The integration between Service Manager and Service Anywhere

For more information about how to create a Case Exchange integration, see Case Exchange framework.

Three entity relationship management tools were introduced.

• Relationship Manager: a tool that can automatically discover logical entity relationships between tables and fields in your Service Manager system by querying the erddef, link, and relatedObjectMap tables and then save the results in the relation table. For more information, see Relationship Manager.

• Entity Relationship Diagram utility: a utility that presents entity relationships for selected files and fields in your database in dynamic diagrams (called Entity Relationship Diagrams or ERDs). For more information, see Entity Relationship Diagram utility.

  Note This utility is intended to replace the legacy Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) creation utility. The legacy ERD creation utility and its documentation are still accessible from the product user interface (Tailoring > Tailoring Tools > ERD Create Records) and the online help, and might be removed in a future release.

• Missing Reference Report utility: a utility that can generate a report for selected files to help you find out and solve potential data integrity problems (missing references). For more information, see Missing Reference Report utility.

Service Manager 9.40 Mobile Applications introduces the following enhancements.

• Self-service user interface

  The employee self-service (ESS) functionality that was previously available through content packs is now incorporated directly into Service Manager. The Service Manager Mobile Applications self-service user view is intended for end-users as an entry point to Service Desk and provides a simplified Service Desk interface for users to perform the following tasks:

  • Search the knowledge base
  • Submit a self-service request
  • Submit a smart request
  • View opened and closed tickets
  • View, approve, or deny pending approval requests

  For more information on installing and using Service Manager Mobile Applications, see the Micro Focus Service Manager Mobile Applications User Guide.

• New mobile operating system support

  Service Manager 9.40 Mobile Applications supports iOS 8.

In this release, Service Manager additionally provides the Service Manager Survey tool, which enables you to implement email surveys in Service Manager independently without integration with a third party survey tool.

The Service Manager Survey feature is based on the HTML Email solution (JavaMail), and enables users to manually send individual surveys directly from a record to selected users. Additionally, it enables the system to automatically send scheduled surveys to specified users through an out-of-box internal survey connector based on the survey integration framework.

When users receive a survey link, they can directly click the link or open the link in a web browser, and then log in to Service Manager to complete the survey. They can also view open surveys that they have been invited to join and closed survey that they have completed in the Service Manager portal. In the out-of-box system, Service Manager surveys are designed to achieve the following goals:

• Collect user satisfaction ratings for the following areas: the level of service provided, the speed of response that the user received, and the level of communication regarding the service.
• Collect additional comments from the user (if any)
• Allow the user to select if a complaint or compliment needs to be registered. If the user selects to do so, the system automatically generates an interaction record (Complaint or Compliment category) with the information that the user provided, and sends an email to the user with information about the interaction record. The user can click the record link to view the record details and status.

For more information, see Service Manager Survey.

• Notification of updates for your requests

  To improve the overall communication between IT and end users, a new flag is added to the Your Requests list to inform the requesters about updates that are made to their requests by IT operators.

  Once a "Visible to Customer" update is added to a request, a flag that contains the following message is displayed to the requester:

  This record has new updates.

• Copy read-only fields

  You can now copy read-only fields in SRC pages such as Catalog Item Details, Request Details, Approval Details, and Subscription Details.

  For example, you can copy the request ID of an item on the Your Request Details View page.

• SRC user interface improvement

  The SRC user interface is updated.

• Approve requests and view request details

  Users can now approve or deny request fulfillment records on the Your Approvals Request page, and view their current approvals on the Request Approval Details page.

Prior to version 9.40, Service Manager used the VARCHAR, CHAR, and TEXT data types to store text strings in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Microsoft SQL Server relies on database collation to support a specific language. Although some languages share the same collation, most languages do not. As a result, Service Manager did not support multiple languages when running on a SQL Server database. Service Manager 9.40 is enhanced to support the Unicode data type on SQL Server. During a new installation of the Service Manager 9.40 server, when you run the server configuration utility, if you select the Use Unicode Data Type check box for SQL Server (see the following figure), Service Manager creates data with the Unicode data type when it loads the applications and demo data, except for the following system tables: dbdict, licenseinfo, lock, and lockshared.

For more information, see Microsoft SQL Server database Unicode support.

To prevent potentially dangerous attachment files from being submitted to Service Manager, the Service Manager Server provides support for blocking certain types of attachments submitted through the Windows and web clients, as well as through web services, based on a pre-defined list of forbidden file extensions (a so-called "blacklist"). Only attachments whose file types are in this blacklist are blocked.

Beginning with this release, the web client provides additional protection using a so-called "whitelist" to control what types of attachments are allowed to be submitted to Service Manager. From the web client, you can submit only attachments whose file types are in this whitelist. In the out-of-box system, this whitelist includes the following file types, which are considered safe: bmp, jpg, jpeg, png, gif, txt, log, unl, and csv. This whitelist is defined in the web tier configuration file (web.xml). You can adjust the list at your own risk.

In addition to the default accessibility functions of the web client, this release also includes accessibility support for the following components:

• Embedded Service Manager Calendar
• Service Manager Reports
• Process Designer Request fulfillment

Smart Analytics heralds the debut of the "Big Data" edition of Service Manager. Using an OEM-licensed version of Micro Focus IDOL, this powerful Service Manager-IDOL integration drives automation further into ITSM processes by mining unstructured data and by extracting information from different types of data.

With the Smart Ticket and Hot Topic Analytics features, Smart Analytics enables Service Manager to become a more intelligent and efficient system. In addition to the functionalities provided in Service Manager Smart Analytics 9.34, Service Manager 9.61 Smart Analytics introduces the following enhancements:

• You can install Image Servers in a distributed setup.
• Hot Topic Analytics is provided for the Service Desk, Incident Management, and Problem Management modules.

• The Query Editor is added to Hot Topic Analytics so that you can build complex queries to refine the intelligent analysis performed by Hot Topic Analytics.

• You have more tailoring choices (for which corresponding tailoring instructions are provided).

For more information about using Smart Analytics, see the Smart Analytics overview section.

Service Manager Case Exchange is a solution that exchanges data between two Service Manager systems or between a Service Manager system and a Service Anywhere system. You can use the Case Exchange framework to transfer data between the two integrated systems and view or process the exchanged data in your native environment.

Service Manager9.61 includes all the functionality of the Case Exchange Content Pack for Service Manager 9.34. You can use the Case Exchange framework to set up the following integrations for the Incident Management module:

• The integration of two Service Manager systems

  Note The other Service Manager system must be 9.34 that has the Case Exchange Content Pack applied or later versions.

  Service Manager9.61 includes two integration templates: CaseExchangeSM_SM_Pull and CaseExchangeSM_SM_Push. These two templates allow you to set up the integration with the other Service Manager system by using the Pull or Push mechanism. One improvement made in this release is the ability to turn on the attachment transferring functionality for both Service Manager systems when the Push mechanism is used.

• The integration of Service Manager and Service Anywhere

  Service Manager 9.61 provides an integration template: CaseExchangeSM_SAW. This template allows you to set up the integration with a Service Anywhere system by using the Pull mechanism.

For more information about using the Case Exchange functionalities, see the Case Exchange framework section.

As Oracle does not provide further updates for Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 7, Service Manager9.61 starts supporting JRE 8. The JRE 8 support of different Service Manager9.61 components is as follows:

• The Service Manager9.61 server requires the upgrades of the embedded JRE of the Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX.

  Note Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 do not support JRE 8, so you need to manually install JRE 1.6.0_20 or its later updates for Solaris 9 and JRE 1.7.0_45 or its later updates for Solaris 10, and then make Server/RUN/jre a symbolic link that points to the JRE 6 or 7.

• The Service Manager9.61 web client requires a 32-bit version of JRE 5 or greater; however, a 32-bit version of JRE 8 is recommended.
• The Service Manager 9.35 Knowledge Management Search Engine requires JDK 6 (Update 21 or greater), JDK 7 (Update 67 or greater), or JDK 8.

• The embedded JRE version in Service Manager 9.35 Windows client and its Configuration Utility is upgraded to JRE 8.

See Service Manager 9.35 Support Matrix for more information. You can also get more information about Java SE Runtime Environment from the Oracle website at http://www.oracle.com.

Service Manager 9.35 Mobile Applications introduces the following new enhancements.

Self-service user interface

As of Service Manager 9.35, the Employee Self-service (ESS) functionality that was previously available through content packs is now incorporated directly into Service Manager. The Service Manager Mobile Applications self-service user view is intended for end-users as an entry point to Service Desk and provides a simplified Service Desk interface for users to perform the following tasks:

• Search the knowledge base
• Submit a self-service request
• Submit a smart request
• View opened and closed tickets
• View, approve, or deny pending approval requests

New mobile operating system support

Service Manager 9.35 Mobile Applications supports iOS 8.x.

New parameter

The maxRequestPerSecond parameter in the Service ManagerMobile Applications configuration file (web.xml) defines the maximum number of requests allowed per second for one user session from the Service ManagerMobile Applications client. The default value for this parameter is 10. To allow unlimited requests, set the value to -1.

New behavior change

When searching the knowledge base in the Service ManagerMobile Applications self-service user view, the maximum length of the query keyword string is limited to 1024 characters. Any query string longer than 1024 characters will be truncated to 1024 characters.

Service Request Catalog 9.61 introduces the following new enhancements.

Enable TLS/SSL connection

To ensure secure data transmission, the default value of the src.security.secureLogin parameter is set as true to enable a TLS/SSL connection between the Service Request Catalog web application server and the web browser. If you do not want to enable the TLS/SSL connection, you can set the value of the parameter to false.

Query fields auto-fill

The Lookup fields in the dynamic user options and the Checkout Panel are automatically filled when only one result is returned.

Improved ID affiliation

Approvers can view the Request ID and its affiliated Cart Item IDs as necessary, so that it is easy for them to identify the cart items to be approved or denied.

Advanced search for interactions

Service Request Catalog supports advanced search for interactions.

Administrators can customize the search fields in Service Manager, and then Service Request Catalog users can filter the search results based on the predefined search fields.

Setting variables as the default values for custom fields

You can use variables as the default values for fields in the Checkout Panel.

Multiple selection for user options

Users now are able to select multiple values (for example, multiple CIs from the device table) in an Item Option field when they order a catalog item in Service Request Catalog.

View attachments in Change records

Change approvers can view the attachments in the Change approval records when they approve Change requests.

Copy read-only fields

You can now copy the read-only fields in Service Request Catalog pages, such as the Catalog Item Details, Request Details, Approval Details, and the Subscription Details pages.

User option template

Service Manager client users are able to save the existing User Selections in a catalog item as a template, and then apply the template to one single catalog item or to mass-apply it to selected catalog items.

In Service Manager 9.35, the primary key feature is enabled by default. Therefore, you no longer need to specify primary_key_mode:1 in the sm.ini file to enable the primary key feature. Additionally, the primary_key_mode server configuration parameter is now obsolete and is therefore removed. For example, when you add a key to a dbdict record, the primary key type is always available for selection.

The rest of the primary key feature behaves almost the same way as in previous releases, except that Service Manager does not convert a unique key to a primary key unless you explicitly change the unique key to a primary key either in the Service Manager client or by running the system_addconstraint command.

Service Manager 9.34 includes the following user experience improvements in the web client to reach a higher level of readability, efficiency, and consistency:

• New look and feel

  The new look and feel of the web client follows a clean and modern design that aligns with the Micro Focus brand. The new design refreshes almost all user interface (UI) elements, such as headers, toolbars, and icons.

  • The new design increases the size of some UI elements (for example, widgets and the space between widgets) to improve readability.
  • The new UI elements are clean and simple, and the newly introduced icons are more meaningful.
  • The new design uses fewer background colors.

  All these improvements help users to focus on the information, so users can find the information they want more easily.

  Note If you use Internet Explorer, we recommend that you use Internet Explorer 10 or a higher version for better experience and performance. Internet Explorer 8 has some known limitations, for example:

  • The browser cannot automatically adjust the size of the login graphic when the size of the browser window changes.
  • The browser does not support certain HTML styles. For example, round corners of a box and the shadow effect when an item is in focus.

  User interface backward compatibility

  Service Manager 9.34 provides the following capabilities for you to bring back some of the UI elements and styles of Service Manager 9.33:

  • Bringing back the icons in toolbar and forms

    In the event that you prefer to retain the previous icons, you can download them from the live network: https://hpln.hp.com/node/6/otherfiles/?dir=20276

    To apply the icons, follow the instructions in the following online help topic:

    System Administration > Tailoring > Web tier > Branding the web client > Additional branding implementation options

  • Using the compact layout

    The compact layout can bring back the page layout that is used in Service Manager 9.33. In your existing tailored forms, there is a possibility that the increased size of some UI elements in the new look and feel may introduce certain display issues, for example, truncated text or overlapped UI elements. You can use the compact layout to work around these issues. For more information, refer to the following online help topic:

    System Administration > Tailoring > Web tier > Using the compact layout

• Date picker

  The new date picker provides a more efficient way to select date and time. You no longer need to open a new window to select a date and time. The new date picker supports keyboard shortcuts.

• Auto complete

  The auto complete functionality in the Comfill widget displays matching values as you type. You can quickly select a value from the list, so you no longer need to jump back and forth several pages to select the value for the field.

  For more information about how to configure the auto complete feature, see Auto complete.

• Message bar

  The new message bar floats over the page so that the content of the page no longer moves down. The background color of the message bar identifies the type of the messages.

• Message history box

  The new message history box is modeless, which means you can perform other tasks in Service Manager while leaving this box open. This feature is particularly helpful when you need to copy text from the message history box and paste the text into somewhere else in Service Manager.

  The new message history box no longer opens a new browser window, and hence is quicker than the old message history box.

• Easy branding

  Service Manager 9.34 provides a graphic user interface that facilitates the branding, tailoring, and upgrading of the web client. Now you no longer need to clear the cache after branding, and the new branding settings can take effect immediately.

  For more information, see Branding the web client.

Service Manager Case Exchange is a solution to exchange data between two Service Manager systems or between Service Manager and another product. The Case Exchange framework mainly facilitates the following operations:

• Sending and receiving data
• Viewing and processing the exchanged data in the native environment

The Case Exchange framework enhances the existing Service Manager Integration Suite (SMIS), which provides an interface to enable the Case Exchange solution. Case Exchange takes advantage of SMIS and provides the following core features:

• Connector

  Case Exchange is enabled by connectors, which can open, update, and close records in the system of another provider. Connectors can also perform the following tasks:

  • Listen for events or updates related to record exchange.
  • Take care of the physical communication to the system via REST-based Web Services in JSON format.
  • Manage appropriate authentication and identity credentials required by the connected system.

• Field mapping and value mapping

  Field mapping and value mapping determine how the record data is transformed into the internal or external normalized case format.

  Field mapping ensures that the data from one system is send to the correct field on the second system. To avoid interface failures the field names and the field name description should not contain any special characters.

  Value mapping ensures the data is correctly transformed according to the rules required in each system. The value mapping supports expressions and calculations to ensure the data is correctly manipulated prior to sending or updating records in the local database.

• Outbound trigger rules

  The outbound trigger rules determine which kind of record shall be sent to the external system. The Case Exchange framework includes a dedicated rule type in Rule Sets. This type of rules can trigger the Case Exchange request from Service Manager to the integrated systems.

  If Process Designer is implemented in the object of the exchanging record, you can invoke a Rule Set from workflows. However, if Process Designer is not implemented, you must invoke a Rule Set from the table trigger by using the following new API:

  lib.CaseExchange_RuleExecute.executeSingleRuleSet (record,oldrecord,RuleSetID)

• Error handling

  In addition to the existing retry mechanism on the failed exchange request, the Case Exchange framework introduces this new feature to better handle errors. With this feature, SMIS can automatically submit a new Incident record for the failed exchange request.

• Audit and logging

  For administrators, the Case Exchange framework introduces the new SMIS task log feature to track all transactions of exchange requests. Administrators can access this log from SMIS. For users, the Case Exchange framework introduces the Case Exchange section in the Incident record detail. When a Case Exchange integration instance is active and a Case Exchange task has occurred to an Incident record, the Case Exchange section appears and contains the details of the Case Exchange information.

With these core features of the Case Exchange framework, you can set up the Case Exchange integration with an easy and flexible approach.

SMIS enhancements

To enable the Case Exchange framework, SMIS includes the following enhancements:

• Integration templates for Case Exchange

  SMIS includes an out-of-box template for the Case Exchange integration: CaseExchangeDefaultTemplate. When you set up the integration, you can use and modify the out-of-box template as needed.

• Dynamic connector form

  Instead of the legacy table format, connector parameters are currently maintained within a dynamic form, which is customizable in the SMIS template.

• Configurable background scheduler

  To save system resources, multiple integration instances can share the same background scheduler. When you create an integration template, you can define a default shared scheduler for the instances that are based on this template. All instances that are based on this template can use the same shared scheduler. However, if you create an instance that specifies a different scheduler, SMIS creates a new scheduler accordingly.

• Task log

  The SMIS task log keeps all transactions of exchange requests. An integration administrator or a user has access to the SMIS task log to view the transaction details. A log entry in the SMIS task log always links to a task in the SMIS task queue. Through the link, you can manually solve an unsuccessful exchange request when needed.

• Field Mapping

  Field mapping has the following enhancements:

  • Field Mapping is currently configurable in the SMIS template. You can directly import the field mappings from the template when you create a SMIS instance.
  • You can specify an Alias when you define the field, and use the Alias in value mapping to represent the field.
  • Field mapping introduces a new field type: variable, which can be used to define a variable field. For example, the Update field (activity log) for the Incident object.

  • When you use the when callback function in field mapping, you can define multiple entities with different conditions, and use placeholders to express a condition that is more complex than true and false. For more information about how to use placeholders, see Use placeholders.

• Value Mapping

  Value mapping has the following enhancements:

  • When you configure value mapping entries, you can set a condition to an entry. The condition can be true, false, or an expression that uses placeholder. For more information about how to set a condition for a value mapping entry, see Configure a condition.

  • To make the value mapping customization more flexible, SMIS introduces the pre script and post script. For more information, see Pre script and Post script.

• To easily see how their activities will be affected in a specific time range.
• To easily see which business records are scheduled for or associated with a specific time range.
• To directly view important details of time period records and associated records from tooltips.
• To directly open records from the calendar to view their details.
• To view time conflicts of object records from either conflict icon tooltips and shadow bars.

For more information, see Calendar Administration.

You can use Time Period Management to manage time period definitions for your organization so that end users can see how their activities will be affected during different time periods. If integrated with another module in Service Manager, Time Period Management will enable you to directly view time periods from that module. For example, if integrated with Change Management, time period definitions will enable users to view time periods and changes in a Calendar widget and view time periods and changes in the context of a selected change.

For more information, see Time Period Management.

The Text Import Wizard is enhanced to better support importing of data in CSV (Comma Separated Values) format into Service Manager. For example, the wizard now can import master data (such as Roles, Categories) and business data (such as Contacts, Departments, Assignment Groups, Service Catalog Items, and Configuration Items).

The enhancements include:

• The order of columns in the source CSV file no longer has to match the exact order of the fields in the destination file (table) in Service Manager. You can specify a mapping between the source columns and the destination fields.
• The text import feature now can handle CSV files with a complex data structure such as array data.
• You can now manipulate source data during import, by specifying JavaScript expressions for the import.

For more information, see Import a character-delimited text file.

You can use this delta migration tool to transfer the data that is added or updated during a specified range of time ("delta data") from one Service Manager environment to another. Depending on your data range, you can choose to manually export or import a single UNL file or to automatically export or import multiple UNL files by running background schedule tasks. One typical use case is that after an upgrade of your Service Manager applications, you use this tool to migrate delta production data to the upgraded environment.

For more information, see Delta migration tool.

User experience improvements to the request submission process

All panels are expanded by default so that you do not need to click the Next button to complete a request. Therefore, you are not blocked by mandatory fields, and can view and edit any sections directly.

Additionally, all sections can be expanded or collapsed. You can click the Expand All and Collapse All buttons for all sections or click the Expand and Collapse arrow buttons for a single section to improve the readability for the long scrolling screen.

Change your password

You can now change your expired password during login to Service Request Catalog.

The SMOMi integration template is enhanced to support more than one OMi server.

For more information, see Incident Exchange (OMi - SM) integration setup.

This solution has been improved by optimizing the behavior in the following two power user scenarios:

• You log in through power mode first, and then click an email link in power mode as well.
• You log in through power mode first, and then click an email link in self-service mode.

In these scenarios, a new tab or window (depending on your browser's setting for opening external links) opens always in power mode without a warning, and the original working tab no longer expires.

For more information, see Log on from the web client.

The following behavior changes apply to the To-Do queue:

• When you open a view from the To-Do queue, all groups in the view are collapsed by default.
• When you switch to a new view in the To-Do queue, all groups in the new view are collapsed.
• If you have not manually expanded any group in a view, or if you have expanded a group without selecting a record, when you click the Refresh button, all groups in the view are collapsed.
• If you have expanded one group and selected one record in the group, when you click the Refresh button, the previously selected record is still selected and the corresponding group is expanded no matter whether the group of the record has been changed or not.

Service Manager 9.33 includes enhancements to the attachment handling functionality.

You can now attach multiple files to records concurrently and download multiple attachments from records concurrently. In the event that a file fails to be uploaded, an error message is displayed below the file name, and the remaining files are uploaded as expected.

Additionally, Service Manager 9.33 includes the following improvements to the attachment handling UI:

• A progress bar is displayed during the file upload process.
• The "Attachment" section displays when a file was attached and the login name of the user who attached the file. To accommodate this information, the width of the attachments grid is widened. Therefore, you may need to redesign the form if you do not want a horizontal scroll bar to appear.
• An attachment count is added to the header of the "Attachment" section. This enables you to determine whether files are attached to a record without expanding the "Attachments" section.
• Checkboxes are added beside file names in the attachment grid, to enable the multiple file download and removal functionality.

Limitations and recommended versions

• To avoid a potential issue that may occur when a large number of users attaches files concurrently, we recommend that you upgrade the JRE version of the web tier to 1.7 Update 45 or a later update.
• If you are using a IBM Web Application Server (WAS)-based application server, we recommend that you upgrade to version 8.0.0.7. In earlier versions of WAS, you cannot download attached files that have non-Roman characters in the file name.
• You can only upload multiple files if your browser supports the HTML5 File API (this includes, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Windows Internet Explorer 10). Otherwise, you can only upload single files.
• When you download multiple attachments concurrently, Service Manager 9.33 packages the files in a compressed (zipped) folder. Some third-party unzipping tools may not correctly handle file names that contain non-Roman characters. In this situation, the name of the unzipped file may change unexpectedly. We recommend that you use WinRAR to unzip the compressed folder.
• In Internet Explorer, if you want to trigger the Add file button by using the keyboard instead of the mouse, you must press the spacebar instead of Enter. Additionally, you must press Tab two times to move the focus away from the Add file button.
• Be aware that if Kerberos or TSO is enabled, Internet Explorer 10 behaves as Internet Explorer 8 or 9. Therefore, the following attachment handling functionality is unavailable:
  • Progress bar during file upload
  • Multiple file selection
  • Size validation before file upload

Resolves the performance issue when customers use an Oracle case-insensitive database. Executes all statements within Service Manager using UPPER clauses in WHERE condition, GROUP BY clauses and ORDER BY clauses.

This solution eliminates the need to use case-insensitive Oracle which can slow down system performance. For details, see Parameter: sqlupper and Parameter: system_createupperindex.

This feature enables users to magnify Array fields or table widgets in detail forms through a resizable pop-up window, by clicking the Magnify Table icon. This enables users to view the entire list in the array or table without scrolling down.

You can disable this feature by setting the enableTableMagnify parameter to false in the web tier configuration file (web.xml).

When users create, update or delete a record, grouped views (such as an Incident view) are automatically refreshed.

This feature enables you to configure Service Manager to secure outbound emails with an S/MIME signature. The recipients can verify the signature on their mail system (for example, Microsoft Outlook), to make sure that the email messages are truly originated from Service Manager without being intercepted in transit.

For details, see Append an S/MIME digital signature to outbound emails and Startup parameter: emailout.

Service Manager 9.33 includes two new scripts:

• smfsdel.bat, which provides a mechanism to securely delete files from the file system on which you have installed Service Manager.
• smfchecksum.bat, which provides a mechanism to verify the Service Manager binaries.

These two scripts were created to meet the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) certification as per the government regulations of Russia. These two scripts are packaged together with Service Manager. Most customers will have no reason to run these scripts but you can run them freely as you like.

For details, see Scripts for FSTEC Certification on Service Manager.

Knowledge article feedback

You can now add feedback to a knowledge article from within Service Request Catalog. This feedback is reflected in the Service Manager Knowledge Management process.

Knowledge article usage

Service Request Catalog now stores the search history and KM usage history in Service Manager.

Login names are stored

Service Request Catalog now stores your login name.

Additional contact information

You can now see additional contact information, such as the first name, last name, and email address of the contact. You can configure the additional contact information by modifying the applicationContext.properties file. For more information about customizing Service Request Catalog, see the "Add additional contact information" section in the Service Request Catalog Customization Guide.

Comments on service requests

You can now post comments on open, pending, or denied service requests by clicking Comment & History button.

Google Chrome support

Service Request Catalog now supports Google Chrome.

Tablet support

Service Request Catalog now supports tablet devices, such as Apple iPad and Google Android tablets. This release merges the Service Request Catalog content pack (9.32.cp1). Because of this, the content pack's method to customize Service Request Catalog is now also present in this current version. Administrator's have the option of choosing the original method of customization, which works only for browsers in a desktop, or the new method, which works for both desktop and tablets. For more information about customizing Service Request Catalog, see the "Appendix D" in the Service Request Catalog Customization Guide.

Additional Information on encryption algorithm

The encryption tool used during the installation of Service Catalog was modified slightly to provide better explanations of the encryption process and also better documentation of the available encryption algorithms. For more information, see the encryption section of the Service Request Catalog Interactive Installation Guide.

Support for the Service Manager software load balancer

Service Request Catalog now supports the Service Manager software load balancer. For more information, see the Service Request Catalog 9.33 Customization Guide.

As of version 9.33, Service Manager can integrate with Apache Subversion (SVN) to provide a version control solution for your customized applications.

Before you can tailor the Service Manager applications by using SVN, a system administrator must export the application records from Service Manager to XML files and store them on an SVN server as a shared repository. By using an SVN client, you can check out the latest version of the data files from the SVN repository and then import those files to your own development database in your development environment. When you modify the application code in your development environment, your modifications are automatically synchronized to your local XML files. You can then commit your code changes back to the SVN repository. In this way, SVN retains a clear history of any changes made to a specific application.

For more information, see Implementing version control for your tailoring.

This version of SRC provides the following new features:

For more information, see the following documents:

• Service Request Catalog 9.32 Interactive Installation Guide
• Service Request Catalog 9.32 Customization Guide

Supported Scenarios

As of version 9.32, Service Manager (SM) provides full support for F5 hardware load balancers (F5LBs). The following is a list of supported scenarios:

• Web server (s) + Web application servers <-> F5 LB <-> SM application servers

• Browsers <-> F5 LB <-> Web server(s) + Web application servers

• Browsers <-> F5 LB <-> Web application servers (not recommended if requires TSO/SSO)

• Web Services clients <-> F5 LB <-> SM application servers

Supported Configurations

Service Manager 9.32 uses a new mechanism to execute queries across tables. This new mechanism greatly improves the query performance and also reduces data duplication to ensure data integrity.

For more information, see Cross-table join query improvements.

Service Manager 9.32 supports primary keys and "Not Null" constraints on the unique keys.

For more information, see the following documents:

• Service Manager 9.32 help: Working with primary keys
• Service Manager 9.32 Release Notes

As of version 9.32, Service Manager supports IPv4/IPv6 as a dual stack network. This addresses the needs of being able to run Service Manager infrastructure in an organization where both IPv6 and IPv4 are enabled in parallel.

Most Service Manager components support IPv6 from Service Manager 9.32, except for the following legacy features which still support only IPv4:

• SCAuto SDK
• ODBC Driver for Crystal Reports

For more information about supported IPv6 address formats and required IPv6 configuration for the Service Manager server, clients (Windows, web, SRC, and Mobility), integrations (KM search engine, LDAP, and SMTP), see IPv6 overview.

As of version 9.32, the Service Manager server provides an embedded troubleshooting tool, SM Doctor. Once your server has upgraded to version 9.32, you can find the smdoctor folder directly under the server installation directory (<SM server>). This folder contains all files required for running this tool.

For more information, see Service Manager Doctor.

This release has enhanced the inactivity timer mechanism so that administrators can set up an inactivity timer for a specific operator; this enhancement also improves performance by eliminating the use of the inactive.startup background process.

For more information, see the following documents:

• Service Manager 9.32 help: Inactivity timer
• Service Manager_9.32 Release Notes

This version of SRC enables extended search capabilities from the Service Catalog items, Support Catalog items, and Knowledge Management documents from Service Manager 9.31.

Service Subscriptions

SRC now allows users to quickly view and manage their subscribed services through the introduction of a new Subscription page and Dashboard widget.

Approvals

SRC now supports Approvals and Approval delegation. Upon logging into SRC, users will see a new Approvals widget that displays the number of approvals in their queue.

Default Layout Improvements

Popular Requests and Popular Bundles widgets now appear on the Service tab, or can be hidden. Service Status and Support Status are merged into a single Request Status widget. Display the most important Service Managerinformation using the smallest amount of screen real estate

Custom field editing

SRC allows users to edit custom fields when submitting a Service Request or updating a Support Request. In addition, support for a date/time picker has been added for custom fields and user selections.

Launcher to support third party applications

SRC also adds an area, called the Launcher, which allows you to add links to launch third party applications. Examples of third party links might include such things as a video for training, the launching of a chat support application, or a link to a search Web site. The administrator can customize the Launcher fields, buttons and mapping through simple manipulation of the manifest.xml file.

Customized user interface

This version of SRC allows for greater control of the look and feel of the catalog. In this version, you can customize the visibility and arrangement of the widgets, brand the SRC by adding your organizations logo, modify the color scheme, and adjust text sizes and fonts.

For more information, see Micro Focus Service Request Catalog for Service Manager.

Service Manager Collaboration (SM Collaboration)

By integrating with Micro Focus Enterprise Collaboration (EC), Service Manager Collaboration (SM Collaboration) enables SM and non-SM users to collaborate in real time (or anytime) in the context of an Incident, Service Desk Interaction, Change, or Change Task. Non-SM users can participate in the conversation using the EC stand-alone web interface or using Microsoft Office Communicator/Lync. SM Collaboration suggests participants to be invited to the conversation based on the context of a record, such as contact, configuration item (CI), service, or assignment group. You can also search users by email address or user name, and invite them to the conversation. The conversation is stored as a permanent part of the corresponding record.

For more information, refer to Service Manager Collaboration.

Improvements of the RecordList functionality for the Web client

The RecordList functionality has been improved to achieve better performance and usability in the Web client. In addition to performance improvement, improvements have been made in the following areas for list-only and list-detail pages: grouping, page navigation, drilldown, and keyboard/mouse operations.

For more information, see RecordList improvements (web client) and Working with record lists.

Enhancement of Mobile Applications and Smartphone support

• Localization support. Four additional languages are supported: French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.
• Support of custom date formats for date/time fields in Change Management views.
• Ability to reassign Incident and Change records.

For more information, see Service Manager Mobile Applications User Guide.

Downtime Management for the CLIP solution

The integration between Service Manager (SM) and BSM supports synchronization of scheduled downtimes from SM RFCs and tasks to BSM in order to suppress events.

For more information, see SM-BSM downtime synchronization.

Enhanced Lock Management

This version of Service Manager introduces a new lock management system. This new locking mechanism consists of a record entry for each locked resource in a database table. The new Lock table (for exclusive locks) and LockShare table (for shared locks) have been created to house these records.

For more information, see Lock management

UCMDB integration enhancement

The integration has been enhanced in the following areas:

• Support of UCMDB 10.0
• Accessing the UCMDB Browser from the Service Manager UI
• Populating UCMDB with CI/CI Relationship data from Service Manager
• Improved error handling for data synchronization from UCMDB to Service Manager
• Performance tuning for data synchronization from UCMDB to Service Manager
• Additional DEM Rule options for duplicated logical names
• Ability to automatically load managed fields in DEM rules
• Support for enabling outage spreading
• New options for synchronizing CI deletions from UCMDB to Service Manager

For more information, see Micro Focus Universal CMDB Integration Guide.

As of version 9.31, only one live Web client is allowed in the same browser session. This is to prevent data loss that could occur when users open multiple Web client instances in the same browser session.

For more information, see Log on from the web client.

For information about vMotion recommendations and known issues, see whitepaper Service Manager 9.31 vMotion Test Report, which is available from the Micro Focus Support web site.

Support of LW-SSO v2.5

The Service Manager server and Web tier have upgraded to LW-SSO v2.5 since version 9.30p5. The Web tier's LW-SSO configuration file contains a new security parameter: secureHTTPCookie. This parameter must be specified in combination with secureLogin in the Web tier configuration file (web.xml).

For more information, see Configure LW-SSO in the Service Manager server and Configure LW-SSO in the Service Manager Web tier.

Service Manager Doctor enables support engineers to collect configuration and diagnosis data from customers' Service Manager environments.

Mobile applications and Smartphone support

You can perform key tasks in Incident Management and Change Management on your Smartphone. Mobile applications on Service Manager are designed to maximize the following user tasks:

Field Support Engineer, Incident Analyst

• View and update an incident record’s resolution status, description, and more
• Check for newly assigned or high-priority records
• Reassign the record to a different assignment group, for example, from hardware support to application support

Change Approver

• View or update changes requests

Administrator

• Provide users access to the Mobile applications on their Smartphone by enabling the following: cookies, Java, Javascript, pop-ups
• Create a Web Services connection
• Configure the Web Services information settings
• Deploy Mobile applications
• Map Service Manager fields using Web Services
• Configure Mobile applications

For more information, see Service Manager Mobile Applications.

Service Request Catalog (SRC) enables users to perform self-service tasks easily

A new self-service requesting and approval interface has been added to the web client. The new interface makes the following user tasks easy and intuitive:

End user

• Submit support requests to IT for catalog and non-catalog items
• View details of your requests
• View request status
• Edit and update open requests
• Close requests for which support is no longer required

Approver

• Appoint others to approve requests on your behalf. You can delegate approvals to any user with the same level of privileges.
• Specify the effective time period of the approval delegation.
• Remove or reassign approvals

Administrator

• Add a custom field to a catalog form. Fields can be radio buttons, checkboxes, single or multiline editable text fields, or lookup fields.
• Remove a field from catalog form.
• Pull data from the fields to support backend fulfillment, approval, workflow, or automation purposes.
• Add triggers for the validation of business rules (set from Service Manager) in catalog forms.
• Easier tailoring of the catalog forms by using wizard-driven customizations that leverage localization mechanisms.
• Form customizations are preserved during product upgrades.
• Enhanced Single Sign-On access for self-service (SRC):
• Users logged in to the enterprise SSO system are not required to log in to get to the Service Catalog.
• Provides seamless authentication between other Micro Focus products.
• Leverages the Micro Focus standard security authentication framework.

Search engine and search form for Knowledge Management

The new Knowledge Management search engine and search form bring you additional capabilities and speed in your searches. The following search tasks are enhanced:

End user

• Enhanced search results with improved search relevancy
• Knowledge Management Search form redesigned to align with familiar consumer search engines; reduced complexity and improved efficiency
• Enhanced language support

Administrator

• Set up and maintain the search engine using a highly scalable search engine designed for enterprise requirements
• Index multiple file types including Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 files, PDF, HTML/XML, compression, image, and audio
• Flexible architecture
  • Multiple index servers can be used to provide scalability and improve performance
  • Supports high availability by allowing search server to be decoupled from index servers; by allowing search servers to be replicated to multiple servers, and load balanced as needed
  • Provides fail-safe capabilities such as the creation of a second index server or search server for failover and the ability to switch to a backup server immediately without having to restart or log out and log back in to the Service Manager server

Process Designer for Knowledge Management

The Process Designer provides an easy-to-use set of tools for designing and visualizing your workflows and business rules. The graphical Workflow Designer enables you to design a KM workflow and to visualize the status of a workflow. You can also model advanced processes. The Process Designer also includes a Business Rules Editor that enables you to create and edit business rules and associate rules with workflow states and transitions to easily build a process. The following user tasks are enhanced:

Business Analyst

• Design a workflow graphically by using the Workflow Designer
  • Visualize the status of the workflow
  • Model advanced processes
• Create and edit business rules by using the Business Rules Editor
  • Associate rules with workflow states and transitions to easily build a process
  • Provide a role-based security model

For more information, see Process Designer.

Upgrade process and documentation enhancements

New Upgrade utilities and enhanced documentation make the upgrade process for all four supported upgrade paths easier to implement. Upgrade enhancements include the following:

• New interactive documentation that enables you to customize the upgrade instructions for your specific upgrade path, environment, and upgrade scenario
• Reduced number of manual steps required for an upgrade

For more information, see Service Manager Upgrade Guide.

Custom components in MySM and the ability to export them to Change Management

The following enhancements to MySM are now available:

• Ability to create and share custom MySM components
• Availability of MySM to Change Management

For more information, see Customizing MySM.

Micro Focus Change Configuration and Release Management (CCRM) new features

Micro Focus Change Configuration and Release Management (CCRM) new features in 9.30:

• Leverage RC to suggest optimal time window for RFC: RFC scheduling utilizes the Change Planner to suggest the next available “ideal” timeframe for particular type of RFC
• Automate change implementations: Integrate Operations Orchestration (OO) flows to initiate change actions automatically
• Multi-tenant SM + RC integration: Enhanced support for RC integration in Multi-Tenant environment
• Additional Single Sign On support
  • PPM integration
    • SM supports LW-SSO for inbound web services requests
    • SM supports LW-SSO for inbound UI requests (PPM calling SM)
  • RC integration
    • SM supports LW-SSO for inbound UI requests
    • Symphony adapter and use of Trusted Sign On is no longer required

For more information, see Micro Focus Change Configuration and Release Management (CCRM).

Web tier uses SSL encryption between the web browser and web application server

The Service Manager Web tier uses SSL encryption between the web browser and web application server by default. You must provide a valid web application server certificate to use the following SSL features:

• Encrypt all communication with the web application server
• Protect against complex SSL-related attacks
• Authenticate that the web application server is a valid host

For more information, see Service Manager Interactive Installation Guide.

Emailout enhancement

JavaMail has replaced SCMail for outbound emails.

For more information, see Startup parameter: emailout.

Application forms modernized and simplified

Application forms in Configuration Management, Knowledge Management, and Request Management are enhanced to improve usability:

• Collapsible sections and sub-sections enable enhanced browser-based interaction
• Field and label alignment has been improved

Localization Enhancements

New localizations have been made to the Service Manager components.

Applications, Windows Client, Web Client, SRC, Online Help

• Brazilian Portuguese
• English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Spanish

Applications, Windows Client, Web Client, SRC

• Dutch
• Czech
• Hungarian
• Polish

Applications, Web Client, Windows Client, Online Help

• Arabic

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

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

maxMessageNumber

This command enables the Service Manager server to generate the DDL of indexes and constraints for your database and save the DDL to the following file: <Server installation directory>/RUN/ddls/index.ddl.

This parameter allows you to disable the contextual help.

This parameter controls whether to prevent an attachment that has the same file name with existing ones from being uploaded to Service Manager.

This parameter no longer controls the visibility of the Help button, which is now always visible.

When this parameter is set to true, two options are displayed if you click the Help button:

• Online Help: allows users to access the help server that is defined in the web tier configuration file (web.xml).
• Shortcut List: allows users to access a list of web client keyboard shortcuts.

When this parameter is set to false, only a list of web client keyboard shortcuts is displayed if you click the Help button.

ir_asynchronous

The default value is changed from 0 to 1.

This parameter is removed from the web.xml file. You should configure it in a webtier.properties file that you create under <Customize-Folder>/config.

For more information, see Encryption of client keystore passwords.

Determines whether a file exists or not.

Determines whether a file exists or not.

This parameter defines the number of seconds the Service Manager server waits for a semaphore before generating a core dump.

This parameter enables you to specify the protocols to use when Service Manager clients (Windows, web, or web services) are connecting to the server through Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or when the Service Manager server is connecting as a client to another application through SSL.

This parameter defines the delay time (in milliseconds) to trigger auto complete after the user stops typing characters.

This parameter defines the maximum number of records that are fetched from the server side at one time and returned to an auto complete selection list.

This parameter is specified so that when the user input contains the specified character, Service Manager retrieves the query results from the backend rather than from the cache.

This parameter enables auto complete for comfill widgets globally.

This parameter defines the directory on the web tier host to save web client rebranding configurations.

This parameter determines if the odd and even rows in record lists have different background colors.

This parameter specifies the threshold at which an increase in native memory usage in Service Manager triggers JavaScript garbage collection.

This parameter specifies the maximum number of files that can be attached to an individual record.

messageBarError

messageBarInfo

messageBarWarning

These parameters indicate how different types of messages are displayed.

For more information, see Web parameter: message display properties.

This parameter determines if RESTful access to the Service Manager server through a web browser is allowed.

We recommend setting this parameter to at least 128 MB. A warning has been added to the server log (sm.log) that is displayed when the parameter has a value less than 128 MB.

This parameter defines the first day of the week of the Calendar widget.

Web parameter: viewcontexthelp

This parameter enables the web client to display the same context-sensitive help debug information in field help as the Windows client does.

The default value has been changed from 5M to 500 KB.

This parameter defines the length of time (in seconds) the Service Manager server continues to handle a client request after the client session is closed (for example, the client session is manually disconnected or is timed out). When the specified time is reached, the server terminates the server thread that handles the client request.

This parameter indicates the minimum number of characters that is required to trigger the auto complete feature.

This method has been updated to support four new arguments: response headers, binary request data, binary response data, and follow redirects.

Parameter

utallocmode

The character that separates attributes in the ldapserver parameter is changed from a comma (",") to a percentage symbol ("%"). The parameter uses the following syntax:

<hostname>%<port>%<base directory>%<certificate file path>

This parameter specifies whether the unsupported Oracle DB versions are allowed or not when Service Manager connects to the DB server. After Service Manager is connected to Oracle DB and prints out the "Connection to dbtype" message, Service Manager checks the Oracle server and client versions. If the DB version is unsupported and the parameter allowunsupporteddbversion is configured to 0, Service Manager will disconnect the DB server.

When this parameter is enabled, the Service Manager RTE does not check a CA's root certification. In this situation, you do not need to set a root certificate for the CA that issued the LDAP server’s certificate on the SM server in order to enable LDAP over SSL in SM.

This parameter specifies the maximum memory allowed for a session (in MB). After the limit is reached, the session is terminated. By default, this parameter is disabled (set to 0), which means there is no memory limit for each session and therefore each session can use the maximum memory available to the server's operating system.

Parameter

This parameter defines the encryption key for encrypting fields in the database.

Prior to SM9.32p2, there are N+1 "EMAILOUT" threads in System Status and the logged-in users are counted as N+1; as of SM9.32p2, there is only one "EMAILOUT" thread and the logged-in users are counted as 1.

This parameter defines a timeout value in seconds for all Knowledge Management search server hosts (including indexing hosts, search hosts, and load balancer hosts).

In a horizontal scaling implementation, Max Logins for operators is enforced at the cluster level. This parameter allows administrators to turn off this feature.

This parameter provides the option to use one-way/anonymous SSL for web services clients in a Trusted Sign-On (TSO) or Common Access Card (CAC) configuration. When enabled, this parameter allows web services clients to access SM SOAP interfaces without a certificate.

This method saves binary data to a field in a Service Manager file object.

removeTemplate

restoreTemplate

JavaScript function

A JavaScript function that removes / restores the relationship between operator records and their associated template.

A RAD function that translates the date/time fields to the correct SQL statement dialect. You can use this function in expert search of incidents, as well as in JavaScript programming.

helpServerContext

Help server preferences

AppServerEncoding

Parameter: debugdiagnostics

Allows administrators to disable the Diagnostic Service when encountering performance issues.

By default, the Diagnostic Service is disabled. Before running the reportdiagnostics command, administrators must specify debugdiagnostics:1 to enable the Diagnostic Service.

Parameter: localizedecimalpoint

Enables users to use a pre-configured decimal symbol (for example, the comma) when completing numeric fields.

This parameter controls whether or not a non-ESS user consumes a floating or named license when logging in to Service Manager through Service Request Catalog.

Web parameter: unmaskDeferMillis

Web parameter: autoCloseMaskDelay

Web parameter: lockWaitTimeout

Web parameter: socketReadTimeout

maskMessageDelay

There are occasions where browser performance when using the Service Manager Web client can appear sub-optimal. With the current Web-tier, there is a “mask” mechanism that masks the user’s web page before a server side response is received. This behavior prevents the user from doing anything further which may issue a new request. This mask appears as a grayed out window overlaying the browser. However, this mechanism may make it appear as if the browser has hung or frozen, or otherwise performing poorly.

To help manage browser performance and apparent hang or freeze issues when using the Service Manager (SM) Web client, the autoCloseMaskDelay, unmaskDeferMillis, socketReadTimeout, lockWaitTimeout parameters were introduced to facilitate control over the mask behavior. For more instructions on correct configuration of these parameters, see the Mask and Timeout Parameters in Service Manager white paper at the Micro Focus Support web site.

Startup parameter: cache_slots

The default value has been changed from 2003 (which is too slow) to 9973.

Parameter: reportLBInterval

Automatically logs information about available ports and threads in horizontal and vertical scaling servlet implementations periodically (every n seconds).

Note: The reportLBInterval JVM option is no longer used.

Startup parameter: emailout

A new emailout parameter that specifies the number of threads to send emails. This parameter has been introduced to improve the system performance when sending email notifications.

Defines the maximum number of groups that can be used in a view. This limit is useful if a user runs a poorly created view that causes servlets to consume too much CPU and memory and terminates the servlets.

Web parameter: disableLoginAutoComplete

Controls password auto-complete for the web client login page.

Startup parameter: enableAnubisMonitor

Startup parameter: anubisPollInterval

These parameters eliminate the need for the anubis process. You are recommended to use the new functionality instead of the old method to automatically restart stopped background processes. To do so, before enabling enableAnubisMonitor, disable the anubis RAD applications by deleting the anubis agent record and anubis schedule record that you created when using the old method.

Defines the maximum response size (in bytes) for HTTP requests.

Defines the timeout value (in milliseconds) for Jgroups remote procedure calls.

Web parameter: recordListArrayDisplayStyle

Web parameter: acceptBrowserLang

uncompressFile

This method expands a .zip file into a specified location.

setAppMessage

This method defines the message returned in the "message" attribute in a SOAP response.

getBinary

JavaScript function