SolarWinds Service Desk May 2020 release notes
Release date: May 2020
These release notes describe the new features and improvements in SolarWinds Service Desk.
If you are looking for previous release notes for SolarWinds Service Desk, see Previous Version documentation.
New features and improvements in SWSD
- Mass Comments for Related Incidents
- Private/ Public Notes and Comments
- The New Change Management Lifecycle
- Change Catalog and Change Catalog Items (Templates)
- Automated Change Processes (Workflows)
Changes to Improve Agent Productivity
Mass Comments for Related Incidents
We are excited to announce the ability to send a mass update on related incidents. Have you ever had a Wi-Fi outage that caused a large # of incidents to come in? You no longer need to respond to each incident independently, you are now able to send one Incident index to all related incidents.
This is available in:
- Changes to related incidents
- Problems to related incidents
- Incidents to related incidents
Private/ Public Notes and Comments
When you are working in an incident, choose if the Incident index you create appears as a public or private Incident index in the related incidents.
- That is, will everyone involved see the Incident index (public), or only the internal team members (private)
When you are posting a note from a change or problem, it will come over as a public Incident index to the related incidents.
The New Change Management Lifecycle
Implementing Changes across your organization can be a very complex and cumbersome task, especially when they have a high impact on your business and employees. The previous Service Desk’s Change Management module helped you plan, execute and communicate change plans seamlessly while following ITIL best practices. It also provided you with visibility to past changes, information about which plans worked, which plans didn’t (and why) - so you and your team could continuously improve your performance.
The new Service Desk Change Management lifecycle addresses these needs that many mature organizations have, especially during the pandemic, when minimum IT services disruption is even more crucial for business continuity. For more information on the New Change Management Lifecycle, click here.
Change Catalog and Change Catalog Items (Templates)
The Change Catalog is a new section of the Service Desk platform. To gain access, administrators must set up new permissions per relevant roles. Please click here for more information.
While Changes are often unique, many can belong to the same family or ITIL type and have a great deal in common. Therefore, a Change Catalog Item (CCI) or a “Change Template”, can include all of the shared content and process elements that are relevant for a certain family or type of changes.
Using templates that are based on your organization’s past experience and ITIL best practices can help you drive consistency and expedite Change Approvals and Execution workflows.
Automated Change Processes (Workflows)
To help you and your team streamline and automate your change workflows, we are introducing the new automated change process, available at the bottom of the Change or Change Catalog Item page.
Change Notifications
Close collaboration and advanced visibility among Change lifecycle stakeholders is key when planning and executing changes. For this reason we have added the “Comments” tab to Change Pages, allowing you and your team to keep each other up-to-date.
The “Notes” tab will be replaced by the “Comments” tab, and will include all of the functionalities available today at the Incident Page*. As long as you have permissions to see Change, you can use this tab to @mention other agents and add updates as needed. You can also configure relevant email notifications and templates via the Setup section.
*Existing “Notes” data has been migrated to the comments tab, and will be available to you there.
Export Additional ITSM Records to PDF
As part of our ongoing investment in the Service Desk reporting and analytics capabilities, we keep adding enhancements to facilitate your needs. Starting today you can export the following ITSM records:
- Change
- Release
- Problem
- Solution
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