Novell Service Desk is a complete service management solution that allows you to easily monitor and solve services issues so that there is minimal disruption to your organization, enabling users to focus on the core business. It provides an online support system to meet the service requirements of all your customers, administrators, supervisors, and technicians.
This Readme includes information pertaining to Novell Service Desk 7.0.
If you are upgrading to Novell Service Desk 7.0 from an older version, you need a new license to access the application.
On the Novell downloads page, click the NovellServiceDesk-7.0.zip file to download the license key information.
In > , enter the license key and the certificate details.
Click.
The focus of this release is on reporting and usability. Novell Service Desk 7.0 includes a completely new dashboard with drag-and-drop capabilities and the ability to select from over 140 predefined widgets enabling you to set this as your home page.
With the enhancements made to the Report Writer, now you can virtually build any report and use the new scheduling capability for report delivery.
Other significant new features include multi-source LDAP/AD, line manager approvals, new relationship impact map analysis with active life cycle states, calendaring, and knowledge import via CSV.
With this release you can notice significant performance improvements with some applications running 400% faster.
You can use the Directory Server Federation for user authentication.
Directory Server Field mappings can now refer to Line managers for customers.
Users can now have all correspondence sent to an alias, rather than their primary email address.
Challenge-style password reset functionality (for non-directory server access) is added.
The dashboard has been rebuilt and it now uses dynamic (Web 2.0) components.
Dashboard widgets have been created for request streams which refresh every minute.
The events calendar has been rebuilt and supports integration with calendar applications.
Workflow Maps have been further refined to aid readability, and tooltips are added.
Item Relationship Maps have been rebuilt to allow easier navigation of the item relationships.
A new request list has been added in the Home page of the customer portal to aid readability.
A box is now available to customers when viewing a request.
The welcome message is now customized for the administrator (localization) setup.
Service Request and Change Requests now allow Customer or Line Manager approval states.
Visual Cue added has been added to the left corner of the editor to help identify the process being worked in.
Scheduled Quick Calls can now be targeted at specific customers.
Item Relationship Map for CI shadow management is now accessible from the main editor.
Quick Calls can now be shared by a team, restricting visibility to those requiring access.
Quick Calls can now be triggered to be created directly into an approval state.
New option to assign queued requests to the closing technician is added.
Searching the List style custom fields now allows multiple selection of values.
Workflow visual includes Tooltips to aid identification of state transitions.
Incidents can now be converted to Service Requests and vice-versa.
Problems no longer have customer notification options.
Problem Teams now support queueing of problem records.
Outages can now be created to affect multiple of CI’s and trigger item status changes.
Outage notifications have been improved to be more synchronized with request notifications.
FSC dates will be applied to requests allocated to Outage windows.
CI attachments can now be toggled to have public or private visibility.
AMIE mapping file is included to support Spiceworks v5.
ZENWorks Desktop Management is no longer supported by AMIE.
Item Types can now be duplicated.
Knowledge base content can now be imported via CSV.
Customer Survey scale is now user configurable (using the 1 to X response option).
Article Filter selection will now be preserved between sessions.
Forums module now makes use of the Rich Text Editor.
It is now possible to queue support contracts up for customers, organizations and items.
Management of support contracts has been reviewed and refined.
SLA Reports have been reviewed and refined.
Scheduled reports are now completely customizable and can include many system reports.
Custom reports built using the Report Writer can also be included in the scheduled report.
Custom scheduled reports are defined by role and adhere to process based permissions.
KPI reports now allow a date range of up to 3 months (up from the previous 30 days).
KPI request distribution chart now treats an hour as the half hour either side of that hour.
Report Builder supports more entities, and more fields on existing entities.
Report Builder now allows aliases for selected fields to aid report presentation.
Excel and PDF outputs of lists will retain the user sort in the user interface.
Partner banners are now used in partner account email messages.
Request allocation is refined when using a single email inbox.
Out-of-office email markers are now user configurable.
CSV Imports using the Novell Service Desk template will attempt to auto-match the fields using the headers.
Many performance enhancements have been implemented at the data access layer to speed up the UI.
The appliance operating system is now SLES 11 SP2 64-bit, complete with all post SP2 updates, as of October 11, 2012.
A button has been added to the ZENWorks configuration to reset the certificate.
The remote control client will now display version information if the client is incompatible.
In addition to the changes above, these are some notable customer requests also addressed in this release:
Ability to switch off geo-location of customers who have no other access to the system.
Ability to assign a partner organization to customers imported via CSV.
Technician emails relating to queued requests uses the system default language instead of defaulting to English.
A new time zone is added to allow for time zone uniqueness in Mexico City.
An error occurs when you try to perform a Remote Management operation for the first time after installing the ZENworks Remote Management Viewer plug-in.
Workaround: Before running a Remote Management operation, allow the ZENworks Remote Management plug-in to run by clicking Allow in the message bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.
Only the side-by-side migration of Virtual Appliance 6.5.4 to Virtual Appliance 7.0 is supported.
If you do not wish to validate ZENworks integration with Novell Service Desk, you can disable ZENworks by performing the following steps:
On the device where you have Novell Service Desk installed, open the following file in a text editor:
Service_Desk_Install_Path/Server/webapps/LiveTime/WEB-INF/LiveTime.woa/Contents/Resources/system.properties
Set the livetime.disableZENworks key value to True.
Set the livetime.disableRemoteControl key value to True.
Restart the LiveTime service as shown:
On Windows: Run services.msc, the Services window appears. Right-click , then click .
On Linux: Run the /etc/init.d/Livetime restart command.
Novell Service Desk supports only the SQL Server authentication mode and does not support the Windows authentication mode.
After upgrading Novell Service Desk from version 6.5.4 to 7.0, the Error Reading Data message appears on clicking the tab on the Home page.
Workaround: Before upgrading to Novell Service Desk 7.0, complete all the necessary surveys.
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