Thank you all so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to attend our recent webinar! We hope you found it informative. If your company is interested in gaining a deeper understanding of this topic, GWI Software does offer a training course on it. Contact a GWI Software Account Manager for more information or to schedule a course time. (Sales@gwi.com)
Here are the combined Q&A sessions from the two webinars. Many great questions were submitted on both days so we figured everyone would benefit from seeing them all.
Q. You had shown various approval cycles. i.e Open Pending Approval. Where are those setup?
A. The status values that are in the pick lists on the approval cycle configuration page can be customized from the Incident and Change Management - Basics configuration pages.
Q. What type of notification or what does the end user see when a change is either declined or approved?
A. Email. There are several approval events that can be setup with automated notifications and the receipients lists for each events is similar to the SLA events with the addition of the Approvers.
Q. We are running 7.0.0.0 and we don't have these tabs. do we need to upgrade to 7.0.0.1?
A. The approval feature needs to be enabled on the global configuration page.
Q. So the approvers will need access to c.Support, correct?
A. Correct, an approvers needs access, but they do not have to be given support representative level access. An approver with End User Desktop (EUD) access can review and approve or decline an incident or change request record.
Q. We support several different companies - can we have different approvers for each company?
A. Approval cycles can be associated with companies allowing you to have the system automatically email the appropriate approvers for the company the customer submitting a ticket that requires approval is from.
Q. Is this webinar recorded?
A. A recording of this webinar will hopefully be available sometime next week.
Q. If I identify an approver defined as a Client only, and they only have access vie EUD, can they approve?
A. Yes.
Q. If the requester is from EUD, can they identify their Approver on the fly. For example, I am request a monitor, but my Manager needs to approve.
A. No, requesters can't choose the approver for their request. The approver would need to be associated with the requester (customer) ahead of time so the system would be able to check the requester's record to determine who their manager is.
Q. Can you set up a time limit on the approvals? Meaning if it doesn't get approval within 72 hours, then the incident is suspended or elevated?
A. A time limit on the approvals is not currently available. If the status selected for the record as it's awaiting approvals is an open status the SLA time limits would be active, but those limits are based on ticket closure rather than approvals/declines. We will submit this as a feature request.
Q. can we set up an approval cycle to go directly to the submitters direct manager?
A. Yes, Approval cycles can be associated with customers. If an approval cycle associated with the customer is called by a requests SLA the customers manager(s) will be setup as the approvers from the request.
Q. When will cSupport be linked up to the AD? This feature makes more work if you have many groups and managers in your organization.
A. Synchronizing AD groups and memberships is something we are trying to squeeze into the next release. It has been requested by several clients.
Q. Can we create an approval cycle that would not count against the origial SLA of a particular ticket category?
A. If you don't want the time the ticket/request spends awaiting approvals to count against your SLA time limits you'll just need to define a suspend status for the approval initiated status on the approval cycle definitions that you define.
Q. After an approval cycle is approved is there a way to automatically route this incident to another rep.
A. There isn't a way to reassign a ticket automatically once approval has been received. The ticket/request doesn't get assigned to the approvers when it is generated so the appropriate assignee that should handle the record once it gets approved should be setup as the default assignee. Once the ticket is approved an automated email message can be directed to the assignee so they know that their assignment has been approved.
Thanks again to everyone that attended the webinar.
Eric & Darren