Serio IT Service Desk & Helpdesk Blog

One of my favourite new features in Serio Release 5 is the Service Explorer. It takes all the data you have in Incidents, Service Requests, Problems, Changes, Items and so on and presents the whole lot in a collapsible tree form.

The best thing is to show you a few pictures.

For of all, screen shot 1 showing me browsing to my Active Incidents using the Service Explorer. Notice the graphical columns as well – these are there by default, you don’t need to customise them in. One of them shows SLA time to go as a ‘progress bar’, going from grey to amber to red as deadlines near.

You can display Incidents, Service Requests, Problems and Changes either separately or all together.

Whatever you are working with, it’s expandable. Screen shot 2 shows what the Service Explorer looks like when you expand an Incident. Notice that some key items of data are expandable -like SLA, Item and Customer. This is so that you can easily ‘drill down’ and get to more data…

as shown in screen shot 3. Here you can see that by expanding the Item, I can see all the tickets we have on file (open or resolved) for Desktop Computer D10001. As these as themselves just Incidents, Service Requests, Problems and Changes they can be expanded as well – revealing their own Change Plans, Checklists, links, documents and relationships.

One of the unexpected benefits, for me at least, is that the Service Explorer makes the process of querying and drill-down easier. It offers many different ways of looking at tickets, as you can see in screen shot 4 where I can see we’ve got just a single High Priority ticket open.

Another new feature is what we call Extended Data. These are additional fields you can attach to tickets of any type. The data is structured, meaning you can have strings, checkboxes, drop down lists and so on, defaulting each if you so wish. As a test, I defined Extended Data for Incidents that is a food survey. This screen shot shows you me actually entering the data, and screen shot 5 shows what the data looks like when you view the ticket in the Explorer.

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With any luck the long awaited Key Element Guides for the ITIL® V3 lifecycle are due out very soon.

Supposedly these “pocket” books are likely to make understanding the lifecycle a little easier…if you have had trouble with Service Strategy (and you are not alone in that I can promise you) I have been told that the Key Element Guide (KEG) on this topic brings it down to the level of mere mortals like myself.

Another TSO publication that helps with understanding the new stuff in ITIL® V3 is the new “Passing your Foundation Exam” book. This is a nice cheap volume and brings the new theory down to a practical level. If you still want more have a look at the Official Introduction. If you haven’t had enough after all that then look at the rather more expensive and technical Core publications. In my opinion, unless you are planning on taking advanced ITIL® qualifications, stick with the more general books.

ITIL® V3 is almost a year old now, the dust is starting to settle and now that the understanding is growing among industry professionals I think there is some good guidance contained therein. I will admit to having been a bit skeptical about the value of V3 after plowing my way through the core books when they were released last May, but the lifecycle approach grows on you and the structure does make good sense.

If you want to get copies of any of the books I have mentioned, they are available through the TSO bookshop or through your local ITSMF chapter.

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