Novell Service Desk 7.0.1

January 16, 2013

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 7.0.1

1.0 Novell Service Desk 7.0.1 Licensing

This release of Novell Service Desk supports upgrading from the previous versions of Novell Service Desk. Upgrading from Novell Service Desk 6.x requires a new license to access Novell Service Desk 7.x. Users with valid Maintenance of earlier versions will need to contact Novell Technical Support for new licenses.

2.0 New Features and Enhancements

2.1 Requests

  • Escalating the process of a request now clears the custom field data.

  • Transient e-mails related to non-existing SLA breaches due to status change lag are now cleaned.

  • The Solution button for the service requests have been restored.

  • The Link outage option will no longer be displayed when no outages are pending for an item.

  • Editing an outage within 5 minutes of the schedules start time displays a meaningful message.

  • Sorting on the notes list has been corrected to allow for correct sequencing for notes entered in the same minute.

  • Canceling a customer creation while creating a new request has been enabled.

  • Audit trails now include the attachments that are sent along with the note.

  • The Item Audit trail option in the History tab now allows pdf exports to be triggered.

  • Incident Service Request process conversion is ow functional.

  • The correct line manager will be displayed when escalating requests for approval to senior line managers.

  • Format of the content entered in the widget during a request creation will be conserved.

  • Status changes will no longer toggle the assigned technician (if that technician is a valid selection).

  • Requires custom fields will not block requests from being created.

  • Print View of requests is now re-sizable.

2.2 Service Levels

  • Fine tuning is possible to allow for blackout windows in a more efficient manner.

  • Transient e-mails related to non-existing SLA breaches due to status change lag are now cleaned

2.3 User Management and Authentication

  • Addresses issues related to importing new LDAP user objects after an upgrade from Novell Service Desk 6.5.4. For more information, refer TID 7011494.

  • Address issues related to case-sensitive login.

2.4 Web Services

  • Various web services can now handle data type conversions correctly.

2.5 Miscellaneous

  • Scheduled Quick Call visibility is no longer global, factors CI ownership details.

  • The empty To: information will no longer be appended to notes that are not e-mailed.

  • The Org Unit Search now has the All option to search both companies and departments.

  • List header rows will now scale better with the content of the list.

  • Deleting filters which are in use by a user will no longer render the list to which the filter applied unusable.

  • Partner full text search handling has been improved where they own the customer related to the content.

  • Various fixed have been made to the report builder to improve the quality of the generated queries.

  • The system time zone will now be correctly shown in My Account if no country or time zone is selected.

  • Day of week scheduled quick calls will be correctly processed by the event calendar.

  • The text color in the workflow model window has been corrected for Internet Explorer 8.

  • The Team Summary KPI report works correctly.

3.0 Known Issues

3.1 Unable to run ZENworks Remote Management from Novell Service Desk by using an IE browser

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.

3.2 The In-Place upgrade method for upgrading Virtual Appliance from 6.5.4 version to 7.0 version is not supported

Only the side-by-side migration of Virtual Appliance 6.5.4 to Virtual Appliance 7.0 is supported.

3.3 Unable to connect to MS-SQL database with Windows authentication credentials

Novell Service Desk supports only the SQL Server authentication mode and does not support the Windows authentication mode.

3.4 An error occurs on clicking the Feedback tab after upgrading Novell Service Desk from version 6.5.4 to 7.0

After upgrading Novell Service Desk from version 6.5.4 to 7.0, the Error Reading Data message appears on clicking the Feedback tab on the Home page.

Workaround: Before upgrading to Novell Service Desk 7.0, complete all the outstanding surveys.

3.5 An error occurs while adding custom listenerclass for Workflow or item life cycle state transitions

The following error message appears while adding custom listenerclass for Workflow or item life cycle transitions:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError com/livetime/ws/listen/ListenerArgumentsBuilder

This issue occurs when the ListenerArgumentsBuilder class file is missing from the livetime-listen.jar file.

Workaround: Contact the Novell Technical Support to obtain a new livetime-listen.jar file and the TID for the resolution.

3.6 ZENworks integration features are disabled after upgrading Novell Service Desk to a higher version

The upgrade process disables the existing ZENworks integration settings in the system.properties file.

Workaround: Modify the system.properties file to re-enable the ZENworks integration features. For more information, see Novell Service Desk documentation Web site.