Release Notes 5.5

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all 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.

Important notes for Active Directory Users

As of LiveTime 5.5 all 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 ADLDAP Guide from LiveTime.

New Features and Enhancements

Requests

• New request editor with SLA progress meter
• Streamlined request creation
• Multi-item requests
• Context sensitive quick call options
• Seamless integration with support contract module
• Separation of service target display for greater prominence
• Enhanced link requests & groups functionality within the requests editor
• Ability to create alerts on a request basis
• Ability to De-escalate requests back to the technician in the previous layer

Technician Scheduling

• Options for enabling each of working hours, vacations and public holiday support
• Support for defining technician working hours
• Integration with technician assignment logic to optionally prevent assignment to off-line technicians
• Support for scheduling technician vacations
• Integration with incident assignment to redistribute technicians workloads when vacations commence
• Scheduling of public holidays in both recurrent and once only
• Ability to re-schedule public holidays to allow for ‘observed dates’ as well as actual dates
• Integration with Service Management to offset due dates
• Ability to define both national and state based public holidays
• Added options to pause SLA timers during public holidays
• Fully integrated into the Events calendar

Other New Features

• Welcome message can now contain HTML
• Added export button to the Logs section to simplify responding to LiveTime support technicians
• Customer accessible quick calls are available and selectable in the portal
• Added ‘My Teams Requests’ filter – which will display all requests a technician is a member of
• Incident Search will allow searching against CI custom fields similar to the advanced item search during incident creation
• Incident Group Notes are now sent to all relevant technicians
• Quick Groups for ‘Problems’ have been removed as the idea of a planned problem doesn’t fit conceptually with Problem Management
• Decommissioned items no longer show up as outages in the outages page(s)
• Item Type & Category Icons now also support 64 x 64 pixels
• Item Types can be hidden from customers, thus making them ‘Internal’
• Item Criticality now directly determines the Impact levels for requests. This provides tight integration from the CI to the priority of a request when derived priorities are enabled
• CI Category now has a visibility control for relationship maps
• Surveys can be stopped by clicking a button instead of adjusting the end date
• Items generated from Purchase orders are now immediately searchable by item number
• More columns are available for Purchase Order view creation
• Added ability to cancel pending contracts without activating them
• PDF Export of Audit Trails for Requests, Items and Knowledge articles
• Reports on Service Delivery KPI’s have been added to the reports section
• Changed naming of Company & Department reports to Organization & Organizational Unit for consistency
• Owned Items column added to customer list view editor
• Addition of more global Time zones
• Added a button to delete all AMIE imported items (restart required)
• Item Web Service now supports paging through owned items
• Requests Web Service now supports entry of custom field data
• Purchase orders now generate a warning on delivery to confirm the action
• Added the ability to raise requests against specific CI’s through email using Item # in subject line as long as individual has access to Item.
• Generally improved page response times and latency
• Added support for Spanish, Chinese and Rumanian, based upon users operating system settings.
• Improved Calendaring for Forward Schedule of Change and added more detail on each request.

Customer Requests fixed in this release:

(CR 2335 / I-1001839 & CR 2686 / I-1002726)
Administrator setting to control visibility of the technician assigned to a request in the Customer Portal.

(CR2966 / I-1003296)
Administrator setting to control default priority.

(CR1518 / I-1000977 & CR 2625 / I-1002361)
Request Searches allow selection of multiple technicians.

(CR2738 / I-1002935)
Escalations caused by SLA’s now state which phase of the SLA triggered the escalation in the Audit trail.

(CR2961 / I-1003230)
Scheduled Quick Calls now have a ‘day of week’ option.

(CR2973 / I-1003408)
Scheduled Quick Calls now have a ‘One Time’ option, allowing calls to be scheduled once

(CR2925 / I-1003151)
Change Request Quick Calls now allow selection of any workflow state – thus allowing them to be pre-approved.

(CR 2516 / I-1002168) CI Relationship map now includes mouse overs to provide access to further information about items without having to select them.

(CR2984 / I-1003380) Enhanced the Bulk Item editor to support editing more attributes at once depending on the items selected.

(CR3383 / I-1004066)
Depreciated value is now selectable as a column in the item list

(CR3221 / I-1003843)
Relationship Maps now support mouse-over tooltips

(CR3172 / I-1003779)
Vendor list is now visible to technicians

(CR2774 – I-1003022)
SLA’s now have custom fields

(CR2759 / I-1002977) Survey creation / administration is now controlled by a user preference in the user details so it can be delegated to technicians

(CR2821 / I-1003081)
Notification controls can now be specified per-team

(CR2505 / I-1002148)
Deleted technicians are now included in technician reports

(CR2803 / I-1003054)
Users can now dismiss multiple alerts – checkboxes have been added to the alert window

(CR3248 / I-1003840)
Multiple errors associated with the LOGINventory AMIE integration have been resolved.

(CR3015 / I-1003427)
Active Directory imports now also check UserPrincipalName as well as SAMAccountName

(CR2885 / I-1003106)
CSV item imports now include cost information

(CR2763 – I-1002982)
List Filter selections are now persisted – so when you leave an area, or indeed logout – users will be taken back to the last filter they chose.

(CR1925 / I-1001269)
User searches will now search both first name and last name (when one field is present)

(CR3238 / I-1003862)
Implemented parsing of MS Word special characters to better represent pasted text in the UI

(CR3003 / I-1003484)
Emails generated automatically by LiveTime no longer append the name of the technician

(CR3102 / I-1003676 & CR3351 / I-1004045)
Paths that begin with file:\ will now be rendered as hyperlinks to support UNC paths on Windows

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