SharePoint 2010. Creating a custom form with cascading drop down list

Kudos for this post here: http://www.sharepointdiary.com/2015/11/cascading-dropdown-using-infopath-forms-in-sharepoint-list.html

Incident Management Process Document and Visio Workflow

Sure, everyone already has some sort of incident management process in place. The problem is that you may have been doing this since day one without anyone actually bothering to document how it all works.
This is a real pain when you try make a change to the process, and realise that everyone in the department has a completely different understanding of how things should actually be done, when you've got a new member of staff on board, or when your're trying to build some workflow automation into your ITSM tool
So to save yourself the hassle of documenting it from scratch, just download this handy Incident Management Process framework document and natty Visio Workflow diagram and tweak it to suit your environment.
It's written in line with ITIL V3 guidelines, so it shouldn't be too different to what you are already doing, or what you should already be doing.

Free Problem Management Process and Workflow Diagram Download

Yes folks. Roll up for yer free ITIL process document downloads....
Let's face it. you don't want to re-invent the wheel, especially once everyone has heard about wheels and pretty much agreed that they need them. The same principal applies to Problem Management.
If you're looking to implement ITIL aligned Problem Management processes within your workplace, then prepare to amaze your friends and colleagues with this amazing process doc that details the objectives, process activities and workflows needed to implement Problem Management in your environment. It also includes workflow diagrams of the Problem and Error Control elements of the Problem Management life cycle.
Obviously, as ITIL is about adopting and aligning, you'll need to tweak it to match your specific needs, but it's a pretty good starting point.
If you download, and have any questions, or pointers for improvement, please post them here.
Download ITIL (V3) Problem Management Process Document.

Choosing the Right ITSM Tool

In the noble and unending battle to save the world form shonky IT Service Management  , your ITSM tool can be either your soundest ally or your greatest nemesis. Your Han Solo or your Darth Vader, your Sancho Panza or your windmill, your Queequeg or Moby Dick or your, well… you get the picture.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, that your current system falls into the ‘nemesis’ category, or your relationship with your current system or vendor is no longer as rosy as it used to be, and you’re taking a look around to see what else is out there.

Which, inevitably, means dealing with sales people.  Now, I have friends, and some family, who work in sales. Now, I understand; it’s a job that needs doing, and someone needs to do it, just like e-coli bacteria are needed to maintain a healthy gastro intestinal system. All the same though, I’d rather reduce my direct contact with both to the bare minimum.

One of the first tired old lines a sales rep is likely to trot out is that their product is Pink Verified for all 10 + ITIL processes. (YAWN! Show me one that isn’t). Next they’ll tell you that you can roll it out to your facilities and HR departments and bandy about Americanism’s like ‘onboarding’.  These are just more good things to add to an already long list tactics sales people employ that really piss me off ( see my post  ‘tactics sales people employ that really piss me off’ for more). I know they’re just trying to do their jobs in the cut throat market, but there has to be a better way for them to operate, and people need to tell them that.

Gartner Magic Quadrant: IT Service Management  Tools

Unless you’re just looking for a basic ticketing system, and not a full-on ITSM suite, it’s not really worth considering a toolset whose developers haven’t bothered to go through the process of getting their system verified by Pink Elephant as being compliant in at least the core ITIL processes, or that don’t warrant a rating in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for IT Service Support Management Tools. You can find details of the most recent evaluations here.

The long and the short of it is that ALL PROPER ITSM PRODUCTS DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING.  (see above for what qualifies an application as a ‘proper ITSM’ application. What you need to know is what makes one a better product for your environment for you than others?

Once you’ve checked out the products that are Pink Verified in the processes you plan on using, and or appear in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Report, it comes down to three key  criteria:

1.       Cost
2.       Ease of configurability
3.       Partnerships

Cost:

You can count on the fact that almost every sales person you speak to will try do everything in their power  to avoid giving you the price up front.  Sharks. The lot of them.  It’s also almost inevitable that this is the one piece of information you absolutely, unequivocally need to decide if a products a contender for you.  It doesn’t matter if their product comes ‘round to your house, cooks you breakfast and then drives you to work every morning if your budget doesn’t stretch to the price tag on their application.  The way to get them  to give this to up front is to email them your requirements ( real requirements, like how many licences you need, if you want them to host it, and how much they charge for implementation.  Requirements  like ‘enhanced business process automation’ , ‘increased efficiency’, ‘ITIL alignment’, ‘improved customer satisfaction’ are red herrings. Why would you even be looking at their products if it couldn’t deliver these things’) Be clear that you can’t engage with you further until you have an indicative cost. Don’t speak to them on the phone, and bar their demo team from your premises until you have the figures.

If you’re lucky, you work for a company that’s got a clear IT  strategy and will pay head when you you start talking about return on investment, and you may be able to look at systems that cost more upfront, but deliver cost benefits after a few years.IF not, you’re probably best of looking at a SAAS option that may not cost as much up front, but will probably end up costing more over a five year period.

Scale is also key here. An IT Department upwards of 50 employees is going to fork out a massive amount in licensing anyway, so paying to host the application in house would only represent a small additional cost.

Hidden Costs:

You need to be absolutely clear about what the configuration you are paying for will do out of the box.  You don’t want to be paying for additional modules or consultancy fees straight after you’ve gone live in order to get the application you thought you were going to get after you saw the demo. You also don’t want to be shelling out extra for a test/sandpit environment.

Ease of Configurability:

Here’s a real clincher.  I’ve recently had the misfortune to work with a product that represented good value for money when it was implemented.  The problems was that if didn’t have a few code jockeys sitting around bone idle that you could set to work every time you wanted to implement a new business process, your tool would gradually get out of step with the way you were working. Almost any significant change to the system required a degree of coding. The company reps always trotted out the fact that their product was used internally by the Microsoft internal service desk.  Anyone that’s ever had the misfortune of dealing with MS support can vouch for the fact being associated with the support arm of Microsoft is nothing to brag about. They also skirt around the fact that MS have an army of coding geniuses available to build their processes for them.

IF you’re a Service Desk manager or team leader, the chances are you’re going to be the one tasked with system administration.  As if you don’t already have enough to do. Your ITSM tool is there to make your life easier, and if you’re up to your elbows in its guts trying to get it to do what you want all the time, then you’re not going to reap its benefits.

Once you ‘ve specced out a process, documented how it’s going to work and got all the relevant stakeholders to agree to it, you want to be able to build it into your ITSM tool as quickly as easily as possible.

Do yourself a favour, and get whoever’s doing the demo for you to show you how they would go about setting up a new process within the application. There’s no reason in this day and age why any decent ITSM tool shouldn’t to do most of what you require pretty much straight out of the box.

Partnerships:
If you’re in service delivery you know how important client\customer relationships are, so look for a vendor that places customer relationships at the centre of their business model.

A few years back I worked with a product that isn’t particularly big in the UK, but offered good value for money.

The system was in place when I joined, but luckily the reseller was small and took really good care of its clients. The benefits we were able to realise for the business because of the ongoing support and brilliant relationship management we had with the vendor far outstripped, in my opinion the benefits we would have reaped from a more expensive ultra deluxe ITSM product with poorer vendor support .

Be realistic about your needs. Sure, that salesman’s going to rabbit on about the 11 ITIL processes, but how many to you actually have implemented in your environment, and how many more are you likely to take on during the lifecycle of your product? That products isn’t  going to create service improvement plans and implement a CMDB for you while you’re on your lunch break. The temptation to blow the budget on the most expensive system around is always going to be there, but unless you have the processes and procedures in place to take advantage of all the completed level of sophistication of the application, you’re going to be paying for functionality you don’t use.

Most importantly, don’t rush into any decision. You’re going to be shelling out a lot of money for a decent application, and it’ll be with your department for years, and the last thing you want to be doing each day at work is battling Darth Vader when you could be hanging out in the Mos Eisley Cantina with Han.

SharePoint Conditional Formatting Error on Lookup or Calculated Field

My missus recently dismissed my blogging endeavours as 'boring geek stuff'. Well, she's going to eat her fucking hat when she gets a look at this beauty...
One of our SharePoint chefs at the office was came up against a brick wall earlier to today when trying to apply some conditional formatting to rows in a SharePoint list. He was trying to colour code rows depending on the value in the 'location' column in any row. Simple, everyday stuff.
After looking at the field he was referencing when writing the condition criteria, yours truly noticed that the field in question was in fact a lookup field referencing another list.
This means that while the condition was set to look for a value of 'x', SharePoint was also getting back the numerical values that made up the ID of the lookup item in the master list when querying that field.
You'd expect that changing the comparison part of the clause to 'contains'  instead of 'equals' would sort that out. And quite frankly I looked like a right dick when I told everyone it would, and then in fact it didn't.

The solution that did work was:

1. In SharePoint: Create another column, with a 'single line of text' field.
2. In SharePoint Designer: Create a workflow to copy the the text from the lookup column to the new column when a new entry is created.
3. In SharePoint Designer, open the list and the view you want to apply the formatting to, and ammend your existing conditional formatting entry to  reference the newly created column.
4. Hide either one of the duplicate columns fron the view you're working on.

Hope that helps someone out there.

My IT Heroes: Part I

Why write about my IT Heroes? Somebody has to dammit. Because my IT Heroes aren’t the the Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners Lees, Bill Gates' or Steve Jobs' of this world. No sir!

My IT Heroes are those dedicated, tireless, unsung heroes who spend every spare minute of their lives, posting solutions, contributing to forums and updating their blogs for the benefit of those of us too lazy, slow witted or just too plain old incompetent to figure things out for ourselves. Most importantly, they’re people who share their expertise for free; when it’s quite evident they could be charging for it. They’re the sort of people who’ve got me out of more than a handful of sticky situations where I’ve contemplated hanging up my IT hat, getting a paper route and moving back in with my parents.

Pinal Dave: IT Hero, Legend

First and foremost amongst these, has to be, in my opinion, the irrepressible, unsurpassable,
unbelievable, unrivalled SQL Authority: Pinal Dave.
Now, I love SQL. Who doesn't? But no one loves SQL like Pinal Dave loves SQL. And you can take that to the bank, bucko.

According to his online resume, Pinal Dave (pronounced ‘Pinul Daway’), ‘has written over 2200 articles on the subject on his blog at http://blog.sqlauthority.com. Along with 8+ years of hands on experience he holds a Masters of Science degree and a number of certifications, including MCTS, MCDBA and MCAD (.NET). He is co-author of three SQL Server books -SQL Server Programming, SQL Wait Stats and SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers. His past work experiences include Technology Evangelist at Microsoft and Sr. Consultant at SolidQ. Prior to joining Microsoft he was awarded Microsoft MVP award for three continuous years for his contribution in the community.’

But Pinal's work is not just a digital paean to relational databases and all their splendour, worthy as that may be an exercise in itself. First and foremost, Pinal’s site is a community asset and go-to place for those of us lacking his mad skills on the SQL front.

By his own admission he started his blog as a repository for scripts and solutions he was working on, and only found out later that these where visible to others on the net. Spurred on by unexpected feedback on a SQL script he was working on, Pinal has over the subsequent seven years, gone on to co-author 10 books on the subject. Pinal's site is like an Aladdin's cave of scripts, solutions levels of enthusiasm for his subject matter that make you want to get out there and build SQL scripts all day long.

Its people like Pinal who remind you that you're not just someone toiling away in an industry or sector, but that you're part of a community of people who are - by and large - creative, intelligent, filled with curiosity and dedicated to solving problems and fixing things. The SQL Authority blog epitomises the sort of thing that great about the net, community building, collaboration, knowledge sharing. The sort of thing that don’t get much attention from the media because it’s not about making a gazillion bucks, or wildly sensationalist.

In a recent post celebrating the seventh anniversary of his blog, Pinal thanked everyone who had visited his site and made it such a success over the years. No Pinal Dave. THANK YOU.

White Paper Service Desk Excellence Contribution (or, 'How I Failed to Win the Nobel Prize')

I was recently approached to contribute to an industry White Paper on Service Desk Excellence in the UK. Not quite as prestigious as being awarded the Nobel Prize, I know. But it was nice to have my opinion elevated to the same level as the folks at NTT Data, the Rank Group, 365 and O2, amongst others.

The paper was aimed gathering information about what makes an effective and excellent Service Desk, with a particular focus on:

• Individuality & Uniqueness
• Motivation & Reward
• Appraisal & Staff Satisfaction
• Development and Progression
• Culture & Environment
• Communication & Customer Satisfaction.

So, if you're interested in getting a snapshot what some of industry leaders are doing to drive excellence, innovation and development within their Service Desk environments, look no further.

You can access the White Paper on Service Desk Excellence via this link.

Enjoy!