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Request Center

Request Center is the new portal for Service Manager end users. Through Request Center, end users can access important and pertinent information quickly, without having to learn how to navigate the User Workspace.

Request Center provides the ability to browse the Service Catalog, view submitted requests, and search for Knowledge Center articles. From the Service Catalog, users can submit requests into applications or access specific URLs as determined by the IT Administrator. The Requests view allows end users to view items that they have submitted, alerting them if any item requires action such as adding information. Request Center allows users access to articles within Knowledge Center.

Knowledge Center

Knowledge Center is a new knowledge base feature included with Service Manager. Users access Knowledge Center through the Request Center portal, including receiving IT announcements and searching Knowledge Center articles.

Knowledge Center announcements appear to all users in the announcements bar when they log in to Request Center. These announcements alert users to important IT events, such as possible outages. Announcements reduce the number of service requests since the alert may answer common questions that end users have.

End users can also become self-sufficient by accessing the articles within Knowledge Center. From the Knowledge Center view in Request Center, users can search the Knowledge Center for related articles. Users can then comment and rate the articles that they find, giving IT feedback on which articles are being consumed and which articles may need to be rewritten for clarity.

Both the Knowledge Center articles and announcements are managed with the Knowledge Management process app.

Knowledge Management

The new Knowledge Management process app manages your Knowledge Center articles and announcements.

The Knowledge Management workflow lets you track new knowledge base articles as they receive the necessary approvals before being published for public viewing. This process ensures that items receive the appropriate reviews before being seen by end users. If an existing article requires edits, these edits receive the same scrutiny as they progress through the same Knowledge Management workflow.

Knowledge Management also provides the ability for IT departments to create announcements that appear to end users in Request Center. The announcements are used for important notices that will only apply for a limited time, after which they are automatically removed from the display.

Request Fulfillment

Request Fulfillment is a new Service Manager process app for managing service requests. Service requests are a request for a service to be provided, such as a request for a new laptop or a request for information. Service requests differ from incidents, because they are not accompanied by a service interruption.

Service requests may be entered by users directly or they may be spawned from an incident. For example, a user may open an incident because applications are not responding. Upon investigation, IT finds that a user's machine has run out of disk space, so IT opens a service request to add a new hard drive to the user's machine.

Requests that an end user submits can be accessed from the Requests view within Request Center. Users can add any additional information necessary to the request directly from Request Center.

Risk Calculator

The Change Management application now includes the Risk Analysis calculator. The Risk Analysis calculator includes a risk survey form, where information is gathered about the extent of the risk this change poses. Based on the responses to the survey, the inherent risk is calculated for the change. The Risk Calculator survey is easily modified to meet your company's risk model. The calculated risk appears on the Risks tab when viewing a change.

The Risk dashboard uses the results in the Risk Calculator to help change management staff monitor the risk of upcoming changes. The dashboard includes a report that shows the ratio of RFCs that have completed surveys compared to those that do not.

Solution Files

The Service Manager solution is now delivered as solution files that are imported and promoted using SBM Application Administrator. The new solution file delivery method allows all components of the solution, such as notifications and reports, to be included when you import and promote the solution.

Previous versions of Service Manager required that on-premise installations start with the sample database provided with Service Manager. The sample database was the only way to receive the reports and notifications included with Service Manager.

2009 R4.02 Enhanced Functionality

The following features which were made available in Serena Business Manager R4.02 are incorporated in this new release of Service Manager:

• The Application Names have been changed in SBM Composer. The names now have an SSM prefix. This prevents possible naming collisions with existing applications. This change will not affect upgrades to existing installations, because the internal ID remains the same.
• The transition buttons that appear on transition and state forms have been updated to make use of the transition control feature. The transition buttons in Service Manager are no longer unique images. The button text is now automatically updated when you modify the transition name within SBM Composer.
• The ability to add and edit relationships has been updated to use the Editable Grid, which allows users to submit or modify relationships in a grid layout directly from the Relationships tab.
• The Post Problem and Merge Incident transitions in Incident Management have been implemented using an Any to Any transition with decision nodes.
• Embedded reports and the Relationship Explorer have been changed to make use of the sub-relational IDs. These IDs eliminated the need for orchestrations which monitored changes to the auxiliary tables and then updated a field within the primary table with a new auxiliary item IDs when new auxiliary items were added. Both the orchestrations and fields have been removed from the solution.