LiveTime ITSM Release Notes 6.1

LiveTime 6.1

LiveTime 6.1 includes more than 300 change requests, 200 of which have come from end users. The two main themes of this release are usability and ITIL 3 Financial, Release and Deployment Management. This version has brought forward many interface elements from LiveTime 7.0 so that customers may benefit from these refinements right away. A more detailed discussion of some of these features can be found on our learning site. This release also includes new banner features such as Geolocation support for locating both Technicians and Customers anywhere in the world as well as the LiveTime Widget which can be installed on any web page by adding a single line of code to your site. You can see an example of this on the LiveTime web site. Please find a more detailed list of changes below.

Service Updates

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all current customers. These releases guarantee that LiveTime customers have access to the most reliable and secure production version of its service management tool. The updates are optional.

LiveTime’s service and support team will notify any organizations that are possibly affected by software bugs addressed in the latest release, and provide assistance with the upgrade process.

Licensing

If upgrading from an older release you will require a new License. This new licensing scheme enables the cumulative addition of keys, unlike previous editions of the software. Please contact your LiveTime account manager to obtain a new key prior to upgrading.

Important notes for Active Directory Users

Usernames are derived from the UPN in Active Directory rather than the legacy and now deprecated NT logon name. This has been necessary in order to support Windows Server 2008 and future versions of Active Directory as recommended by Microsoft.

If you are currently using the old ‘NT’ style logons we recommend you change the equivalent UPN to match or just login to LiveTime using the new UPN name, as the old style is no longer supported. Further details can be found in the troubleshooting section of the AD-LDAP Guide from LiveTime.

Upgrading to LiveTime 6.1

For existing users of LiveTime 5.x or 6.x, a database upgrade will be required. Please follow these steps:

1. Stop LiveTime
2. Backup the current database, LiveTime.war and application banners (to reload after upgrade)
3. Install the new WAR file for 6.1
4. Start LiveTime
5. At Database Configuration page, enter the database details
6. Click Test to ensure the database connection is correct
7. Click Schema
8. Click Upgrade, followed by the next Upgrade button
9. Once the migration is complete click Save
10. When the upgrade is complete, the license page is displayed.

After the upgrade the Administrator must:

• If using a version of LiveTime prior to 6.x, re-index the system, by going to the Setup > Privileges > System tab and clicking the ‘Re-index’ button
• Re-upload application banners. Go to Setup > Customize tab.

Oracle RDBMS Users Please Note. When upgrading an Oracle database, a restart of LiveTime is necessary after the database has been migrated and login page displayed.

Informix RDBMS Users Please Note. If upgrading from LiveTime v5.x.x, you will need to first upgrade to LiveTime v6.0.x, and subsequently upgrade from LiveTime 6.0.x to LiveTime v6.1.x.

New Features and Enhancements

ITIL version 3.0

• Implemented various features required to facilitate ITIL v3 compliance for:
  Release & Deployment Management (Requires Change Management Licenses)
• Financial Management
• Fine tuning of various ITIL v3 compliant features
• Service Level Management Reporting
• AMIE Category Defaults for Federated CMDB Support

General

• Added Traditional Chinese and Turkish Translations
• Overall performance increase of around 25%
• Adding Geolocation feature for determining location of each user with built-in mapping

Portals

• Version 7.0 styled User Interface scheme applied to external facing interface
• Alerts can now target all customers from a given org unit
• Many Administrator Setup options have been relocated to make them easier to find
• Administrator users can now create alerts (under the ‘My Account’ tab)
• CTI Lookup URL’s now scan all phone fields using a single parameter on a single URL
• Changing roles is no longer necessary as all functions available in a given portal are presented to users with the appropriate user role and process(es) assigned
• Direct URL’s for Requests & Knowledge Base Articles are no longer portal dependent and will decide based on the user permissions which portal to present the requested content in
• HTTP Header based Single Sign-on Technologies are now supported to drive user authentication
• Inclusion of ‘Widget’ component to facilitate Web 2.0 style support integration with corporate websites
• Added several new statistics and graphs to the customer portal for providing real time feedback on response times and the age of requests.

Configuration Management

• AMIE imports can once again retrieve the item number from the Asset Management Database
• AMIE adaptor written to interface with HP uCMDB
• AMIE adaptor written to interface with Spiceworks 4.0
• AMIE adaptor written to interface with ZENworks 11
• AMIE adaptor written to interface with ManageEngine AssetExplorer
• Novell ZCM now maps by default to the new CMDB categories
• Parent Items in mapping files no longer have to belong to a defined category
• CI attributes, notes and attachments are now indexed and searchable by technicians using full text search

Requests (Service Requests/Incidents/Problems/Change Requests/Deployments)

• Attachments can now be included in outgoing request notes (max of 2 per note)
• Attachments can now be marked as private/internal (i.e. not visible to customers)
• Request Note editor contains finer grained options for controlling message recipients
• When request handshaking is enabled, this will now be the only closure process
• Organizational Unit information can now be accessed from the Request Editor
• Creating a new request will present a list of currently open requests for the selected customer
• Customer search during request creation has new option to show only serviced customers
• Notes that are works in progress, can now be saved as drafts (deleted after 7 days)
• Reworked the ‘Team’ Notification option so it now applies to the current team, or a layer of the team
• ‘New Note’ Button added to requests to fast-track the creation of a note without repeated scrolling
• Request search options have been added to allow searching on requests by closed date
• The Subject field of a request can now be optionally shown in the customer portal
• Service Terms now include a visual indicator representing what the SLA clock is doing (play/pause/stop)
• Change Requests now support Virtual CAB’s by allowing ‘voting’ on Change Requests
• Change Requests can now be rejected back to the workflow entry point

Service Level Management

• Recurrent Outages can now be scheduled for CI’s on a monthly basis
• Various reporting metrics are now calculated (and stored in the database) at the time of action

Web Services

• Web Service calls passing empty strings as values will now clear the specified field
• Request updates made using web services will now correctly update the audit trail
• CI Ownership information can now be retrieved as well as modified using Web Services

Email & SMS Processing

• Out of Office subject line detection is now configurable
• Display names for teams are now supported on outbound messages
• New administrator option to control acknowledgements of received notes
• New administrator option to stop technicians receiving emails about notes they themselves added
• Email urgency will now affect request urgency when entered into LiveTime (from some mail clients)
• The ‘MessagePrefix’ template is now used to determine if a received message was intended for the current LiveTime Instance. Request correspondence subject lines now needs to include this prefix
• SMS Configuration allows users to specify if the message content goes into the email subject or body
• If ‘Body’ is selected, an account token can be entered as the subject content for provider validation
• Email Test button now also connects to the inbox and counts how many messages are found

Other New Features

• Client Items list can now optionally include org unit assigned CI’s the customer can access
• Team editor now supports ‘swapping’ of technicians in and out (as the case may be) of a team
• Bulk editing requests now allows the CI to be updated
• CI Status can now be hidden from customers
• Pentaho custom report definitions can now be uploaded using the administration portal
• Technician ‘Self Assignment’ for new requests option can now be specified per team
• The handshaking days period can now be customized per organizational unit
• CI Shadowing in the customer portal can now be optionally disabled
• Generic quick calls can be reused within Quick Groups as well as exist ‘stand alone’
• Accounts imported from ADS will now retrieve email aliases from a configurable field
• Public Holidays can now be scheduled using an ‘Xth day of a month’ basis
• Team notification options have been reworked to allow team leaders more control of notifications
• Customer mini search results panels now include mouseovers to resolve duplicates
• Surveys have a new ‘1 in 5’ serviced customers, to provide pseudo random sampling
• New bulk update editor for customers
• New bulk update editor for item types

Notable Customer Requests addressed in this release (of about 200)

(CR 1006904 / I 1006895)
Don’t include the original recipients list when re-sending notes

(CR 1005466 / I 1002674)
Allow OLA’s and UC’s to be selected at run time, rather than applying these to individual workflow states

(CR 1005611 / I 1004732)
Allow ‘Serviced Customer’ Survey results to be exported to PDF &/or Excel

(CR 1006913 / I 1006911)
The ‘My Teams Incidents’ Filter will now only show if technicians can see all requests (Administrator Option)

(CR 1007132 / I 1007131)
New option to control if customers can edit shared requests (when they are visible)

(CR 1007180 / I 1007178)
Organizational Units list now includes a column to show the assigned SLA

(CR 1007222 / I 1007212)
The ‘CloseRequest’ email template now has an insertable parameter for the handshaking days

(CR 1007248 / I 1007247)
Request lists now have an option to show the Impact and Urgency values in the lists

(CR 1007358 / I 1007357)
CI’s now allow descriptions to be added, and these will be presented as mouse-overs in the customer portal

(CR 1007428 / I 1007427)
Request closure handshaking periods will now apply regardless of how the request entered the ‘handshaking’ state

(CR 1007530 / I 1007527)
Changes to Request Descriptions are now properly audited in their own history entry

(CR 1007600 / I 1007599)
Allow supported org units to be added directly to a technician account

(CR 1007680 / I 1007679)
Technician skills can be now be assigned for a whole category or item type (every skill)

(CR 1007713 / I 1007710)
Anonymous surveys no longer require a login in order to be accessed

(CR 1007765 / I 1007762)
Part Day vacations can now be scheduled for technicians (limit of 3 in any 6 day period)

(CR 1007798 / I 1007709)
Survey reminder emails can now be sent (and configured in the Administrator Console)

(CR 1007831 / I 1007830)
Knowledge Base searches can now be saved as filters and have shared access controls

(CR 1007841 / I 1007707)
Once a request is closed, only a user with Supervisor access can make changes to it

(CR 1008146 / I 1008145)
AMIE Snapshot merges now provide more data columns to help identify snapshots to merge

About LiveTime Software

Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, LiveTime Software, Inc. is a vendor of Web 2.0, Open Standards based ITIL service management (ITSM), help desk and support software for medium to large enterprises such as Verizon, Wellpoint, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the United States Department of Defense. Founded in 1999, LiveTime Software is a privately held firm with offices in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.livetime.com