Policies

Note We do not recommend using approval policies and business processes in Service Manager Service Portal to manage approval requirements because Service Manager Service Portal cannot synchronize approval policies and business processes to Service Manager.

Concepts

A policy controls the approval requirements for orders placed by consumers in the Service Manager Service Portal.

The Organization Administrator uses the Policies application to manage approval policies.

There are three Service Manager Service Portal policy types:

Named

The approver is a group of Service Manager Service Portal users that can collectively approve an order for catalog items by a consumer. You can add individual users to the approval group. All users in the specified group are asked for approval and the following properties affect the approval process:

  • The Minimal Approvals property specifies how many approvals are enough to authorize an order. If set to 0, all members in the group must approve the order.
  • The Minimal Denials property specifies how many denials result in rejection of the order. If set to 0, this property is ignored.

User Context

The approver is a manager of a consumer that ordered the service. The Number of Levels property specifies how many managers are involved in the approval process. For example, if the Number of Levels is set to 2, two levels of managers must approve the order. Managers are asked for approval in successive steps. All required managers must approve an order. (One denial results in a rejection of the order.)

Business Approval

The approval process is performed according to the specified business process—created in the Business Process application. (See Business Processes).

Automatic Approval Selection

For all policy types, if Automatic Approval is selected and the wait time for an order is exceeded, then the automatic response (approved or denied) is executed.

  • The Wait Time (days) setting is how long to wait before a request is automatically approved or denied.
  • The Response setting indicates whether to automatically approve or deny.

After an Service Manager Service Portal approval policy is created, it can be applied to a catalog or a catalog item. When applying an approval policy to a catalog, all catalog items in the catalog have the approval policy; however, the Organization Administrator can assign different approval policies to various catalog items in a catalog. Refer to the Catalogs and Catalog Items for more information about applying approval policies.

 

Tasks

Available tasks: