Skip to content
A few weeks ago, as a first step for introducing billing integration, it was made possible to relate effort classes to service offerings from within a service offering. As a usability improvement for financial managers...
Author: Patrick Bakker
In some organizations, UI extensions are becoming quite large and complex. To ensure a good understanding of the purpose and dependencies of each UI extension, a Description field has been added to UI extensions in...
Four new reports have been added to the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. These reports provide overviews of the internal, external, and trusted organizations that are visible to the account the person is currently...
A new category for workflow tasks has been added to tasks and task templates. In addition to Risk & Impact, Approval, and Implementation tasks (and the Fulfillment Placeholder task, which was added for the 4me...
Last year, a feature was introduced that enables people to send and receive emails to known and not-yet known users, directly from the Request form. Those emails are added as notes within that request, and...
When a request is forwarded to a trusted account, specialists within that account can continue to access that record, even after it is no longer assigned to someone from that account. This works differently for...
A small usability enhancement has been made to automation rules on request templates. Unlike automation rules on task templates, which can be edited either on the task template or on the task itself, request template...
Since a few weeks, the information that is necessary to identify a request in a supplier’s service management system that is different from 4me, is no longer stored per request but per account. This ensures...
After a request has been completed for an end user, this person is able to reopen this request during the next 28 days. After that period, it is also no longer possible to provide feedback...
The Reference feature in the Note fields of requests, workflows, and many other records makes it possible for specialists to include references to other 4me records in their notes. This include knowledge articles. When a...
Sometimes, an end user’s query is best resolved with a quick chat-session with a specialist from the service desk team. Especially when the information exchange is fully captured and integrated within the service management solution....
Six new reports have been added to the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. The first of these, the metric ‘People’ report, shows the number of people of the account the user is currently working...
A person with the Account designer or Account administrator role can now see a new option in the Actions menu for all record types in view mode in 4me: ‘Copy NodeID’. Selecting this option copies...
When a service desk analyst opens the Service Desk console to assist someone, the recent requests of that requester are immediately visible to that analyst. Until now, the open request were shown first, and then...
When an organization has set up a 4me® account that is used only as an integration point for one of its external providers, it is important to know how requests are identified in the ticketing...
4me® has started with an initiative to make it easier for MSPs (Managed Service Providers) to use the 4me data to generate invoices for their customers via an integration with their invoicing tool. Next to...
Requests, (project) tasks and problems can be forwarded to other team members or (members of) other teams by pressing the Forward selected assignment… button in the header bar by the person to whom that assignment...
The change calendar provides a graphical overview of the tasks that are scheduled to be completed in the near future, as well as the tasks that were recently completed. When two tasks overlap in the...
A new filter has been added to four task-related reports. The ‘Template team’ filter shows only those tasks that were assigned to a specific team, as defined in the task template. This filter can be...
When a person’s approval is needed for a task or a project task, and that person has not turned off email notifications, an email is sent that can contain links to approve or reject the...
It is now possible to add internal custom fields to configuration items. Internal custom fields on configuration items are only visible to people with the Specialist role in the account in which the configuration item...
When a requester has been selected by a service desk analyst (SDA) to register a new request, the recent requests of that requester are visible in the Service Desk console. This may help the SDA...
A much-requested and major new feature has been added to 4me: the Shop capability. It allows people from the organization (and even their customer organizations) to order items or services directly from the 4me Self...
A small usability enhancement has been made to the ‘Pickups’ view, which is accessible by clicking on the ‘Pickups within target’ KPI of an FLSA Report in the Analytics console. The ‘Breaches’ column (the column...
A ‘Job Title’ filter has been added to the person record. This can be helpful when searching for people with a specific role, but also for performing bulk updates. The filter can function with only...
When an incident, RFC or RFI is created or edited, the Service Hierarchy Browser (SHB) opens at the right side of the screen. Here, a specialist can apply the correct service instance, configuration item, template,...
It is now possible to use automation rules to retrieve information from configuration items that are related to another configuration item (CI). This can be useful when maintenance tasks must be performed on a configuration...
Custom views can be used to let users select a specific option in a custom field when registering an RFC, for example. In the case of configuration items (CIs), a custom view that is linked...
Earlier this year, it has become possible to send an email from a request. That email becomes a note, as well, and replies to it also turn into notes within that request. Not long after...
When a request is being created or edited, the Service Hierarchy Browser (SHB) opens automatically at the right side of the screen. If the person selected in the Requested for field is a user of...
Recently, the 4me Whistleblowing feature was announced, which means that people can be allowed to log in to 4me anonymously. Logging in without credentials, also known as guest login, can also be a very powerfull...
Automation rules were already available for many record types, including requests, problems, workflows, tasks, project tasks, and their respective templates. It is now also possible to build automation rules on person records. A typical use...
Serbian is written in two alphabets, Serbian Cyrillic and a variation of the Latin alphabet. The two are almost directly and completely interchangeable. Both alphabets are widely used in Serbia; standard Serbian uses both alphabets...
4me informs users about impending (and active) target breaches using color codes, both in the Target column of the views and in the record headers. But sometimes, especially in the case of resolution targets for...
In organizations that have a directory account and multiple support domain accounts, some people can have roles in several of those accounts. When an account administrator clicks the Link roles… link to add roles for...
The Lansweeper App on the 4me App Store has been updated to make the integration more flexible for customers with multiple Lansweeper installations. When installing the Lansweeper App in 4me® the user must make an...
In 4me, contracts can be registered for configuration items (CIs). These contracts are between the customer and a supplier. Supplier organizations are maintained in the ‘Organizations’ section of the Records module, as external organizations. When...
Automation rules can now access calendars in 4me, such as work hours or support hours calendars, or any other calendar. That calendar can subsequently be used to calculate a target time using a start time...
Two new reports have been added to the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. The ‘Actual Versus Planned for Open Requests’ report compares the time spent on the requests to the planned effort of open...
When multiple requests are grouped into one request group, that request group contains a section ‘Grouped Requests’, which is collapsed by default. Because the number of requests that are grouped together can be an indication...
An enhancement of the in and not in operators of the automation rules have been made. Until now, these operators only accepted a comma separated list, as demonstrated in the expression check1 in the screenshot...
A small update has been made to the Activity monitor, which can be found in the Settings console. The 4me Password Age, showing the last time the password was reset for that user, is now...
A seemingly small update has been made to the appearance of self-service search. Seemingly, because in preparation for many more user interface updates that will be rolled out incrementally in the next few months, the...
Several of 4me’s customers have requested the possibility to schedule exports of dashboards and send these as a PDF file in an email to internal or external stakeholders. It was, as a matter of fact,...
Since the end of last year, the EU Whistleblower Directive came into force. According to the Directive, organizations must implement internal reporting channels. These have to be designed and operated in such a manner that...
A new trigger option has been added for automation rules on configuration items (CIs). ‘On source update’ triggers when the Source field of a configuration item is updated. This can be useful when using discovery...
Since the end of last year, it is possible in 4me to make a recurrent reservation for a configuration item. It is now also possible to discern with an automation rule whether a reservation is...
The Waiting until field is used to specify the date and time at which the status of a record is to be updated from ‘Waiting for…’ to ‘Assigned’. This field is available only when the...
The possibilities for basic text formatting within 4me have steadily increased over the years. One of them is numbered lists, which can have sub-lists (or nested lists) within them, to create structures like the table...
The 4me service automatically sends out email notifications to ensure that people are notified of updates in 4me that are important to them. An email template is used for each of the different notifications that...
When a request is grouped with another request or a request group, it only makes sense that the Desired completion date for all these grouped requests is the same. Until now, it was only possible...
A small usability enhancement has been made for Project Management. Often, when editing a project task to add an assignee for that task, a user will want to link him- or herself. This would then...
It is now possible to read the permissions on a person record with automation rules. Permissions is an array of type permission that exposes the following fields and roles: Continue reading
A new array function has been added to the automation rules. The detect function returns the first item in an array that matches the condition. It is similar to the select function, when that is...
Earlier this year, the customer representative(s) of an SLA were given more privileges in 4me. Since then, they are able to see the ‘All Requests’ section in 4me Self Service and also have access to...
A major new feature has been added to 4me®: Scrum support. Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. As...
In 4me self Service and in the 4me Mobile App it is now also possible to reverse the order of notes in requests, tasks, and other records that can contain notes. For this, the Sort...
It is now possible to add a description to any of the dashboards of the Analytics console. When editing the dashboard, a description field is now available. As this is a rich text field, the...
When representatives from 4me, customers, and partners convene in the city where East and West coalesce, you can be fairly certain that it will involve lively conversation and an inspiring ambiance. And great conversations were...
On the person record of someone who is a manager of at least one other person, a ‘Managing’ section has recently been added. When opening this section, everyone who reports to this person can be...
Last week, a new field was added to the task templates, making it possible to add a note to an approval task, or make a note required when completing any other (project) task. In the...
The time that people spent on requests, problems, changes, and projects is importantinput for any support organization. For Managed Service Providers (MSPs) this data may even be used to charge their customers, generally by using...
The functionality that was added for the enhancement ‘Add a Note to an Approval Task’ also works for ‘Risk and Impact’ and ‘Implementation’ tasks and project tasks of the category ‘Activity’. Instead of three options...
By adding a new field to the task template record type, organizations can now decide for themselves if they want notes to be required, optional, or hidden for approval tasks. The Note behavior field actually...
Since the initial announcement of Google Maps support by means of a Location field in UI extensions, this functionality has been notably improved. Three very useful options have been added to the ‘Snippets’ section of...
It is now possible to change the avatar of a service instance. Up until now, the avatar would be the same as for the service it is related to. By being able to change the...
Requests, tasks, and project tasks can all be created from or related to a template. Within their respective views it was already possible to show the related template, by customizing the columns of that view. ...
Recently, the 4me Specialist Interface was updated to hide the view pane when editing a record with notes, granting more space to work on that record while, if possible, showing the notes separated from the...
The execution of an automation rule is typically performed within seconds after it is scheduled. Sometimes though, while 4me is scaling up under load, it may take more time, even up to a few minutes....
When a specialist navigates to the ‘Automation Rules’ section of the Settings console, all generic automation rules are listed by module. This makes it easy to see which rules are executed on request templates, which...
Custom collection elements are special records that could not be registered using one of the standard record types available in the 4me service. Each custom collection element belongs to one custom collection. These custom collection...
The email template ‘Watchlist Item Updated’ is used to send notifications to users, which inform them of a status update or an added note to a request, problem, release, workflow, workflow task, project, or project...
A person record in 4me contains basic information about that person, which is always visible, such as their local time and their manager. It also contains detailed information, which is organized in sections that can...
The assignments in the inbox could already be filtered by the Agile board on which they were placed. Now it is also possible to filter these requests, problems, and tasks by a specific column of...
After several changes have been made to the placement of the ‘Notes’ section over the last few weeks, the section itself has now received an update, too. This update serves to make the notes easier...
When an end user adds a note to a request, it usually means that they asked for an update, or added important information to the request. When a specialist is assigned to this request, or...
Especially for enterprise organizations and MSPs, executed automation rules can originate in various accounts. For people tasked with troubleshooting, it can sometimes be challenging to identify the account where the rule was defined. When an...
It is not uncommon for organizations to work with various SaaS enterprise solutions; sometimes as legacy systems, or when working with other internal or external organizations. The 4me® App Store already boasts several standard integrations...
Short URLs are used to shorten the long URLs of website addresses, or for creating QR codes to easily share knowledge articles, dashboards, surveys, and much more. Short URLs can now also be created for...
Recently, UI extension fields that can be set to ‘Internal’ (by means of a checkbox named ‘Visible only to specialists, auditors, and account administrators of this account’) were made ‘Internal’ by default, following the principle...
The team at Joost-IT has just published the TOPdesk App on the 4me App Store. This one-way integration from 4me to TOPdesk SaaS is free of charge and available to all 4me customers. The app...
The Watchlist functionality helps both specialists and end users to easily follow requests and other records, even when these are not assigned to them. After clicking on the ‘eye’ icon, they get notified every time...
In problem records, the Analysis target field is used to specify when the current assignee needs to have completed the root cause analysis of the problem. It is now possible to check and update the...
When a provider must wait for some customer action before work on a request or task can continue, it should not be held accountable for SLA breaches. By setting the status of the record to...
One of the challenges of user interface (UI) design is the balancing act between content and white space: how to show as much information as possible without compromising usability. Different screen sizes must be taken...
Organizations that use 4meⓇ but also have a ServiceNow installation can now create and update incidents in ServiceNow directly from their 4me account. Such a scenario can occur, for example, when the Service Desk team...
With a UI extension, custom fields can be added to 4me forms. These fields can be given certain properties; to make them required, searchable, hidden, etc. For some categories, such as UI extensions for request...
Another webchat app is available from the 4me App Store: Click4Assistance. This app, which features an AI-powered chatbot called Coni, is aimed especially at the UK market. There, it has gained traction as an ISO...
In 4me®, notes added to requests, tasks, or other records are always read from top to bottom. Many requests have been registered to change this order, but, at the same time, many other people prefer...
Pie charts, donut charts, and (ungrouped) bar charts can now show either absolute numbers or percentages. For this, the option ‘Show percentage’ is added to these reports. When placing the mouse pointer over any of...
The Workflow Progress Tracker shows the individual phases of a workflow and the current progress of that workflow. It even shows the completion date or completion target of these phases, when a user hoovers the...
When importing records into 4me, the Source and SourceID fields are checked to see if a record already exists. This is also true when importing automation rules, which is done to transfer them between 4me...
It was already possible for account designers to define a maximum length of a text field within a UI extension, using the HTML attribute maxlength. Now, it is also possible to define a minimum length...
The Workflow Progress Tracker allows requesters to track the progress of their requests, even when these are linked to a workflow. This progress tracker is presented at the top of any open request that is...
If a workflow task contains one or more automation rules, the automation rules icon is shown next to that task in the Gantt chart of that workflow. Clicking on that icon enables the user to...
The ‘Mention’ feature allows users to mention others when adding a note to, for example, a request or task. By mentioning someone, that person receives a notification with the note. A new setting has been...
Specialist Interface users with larger screens can now see the ‘Notes’ section of many record types separated from the other sections and basic information of those records. Making better use of the available screen real...
In the ‘Search Phrases’ section of 4me’s Analytics console, the top 100 search phrases, their conversions and their conversion rates are listed. By default, the searches that were performed in the Service Desk console are...
What do the Colombian Peso, the Argentinian Peso, and the Chilean Peso have in common? Most of them are spent in South America. But also, these are currencies supported by 4me®. Organizations in Santiago, Valparaíso,...
Custom views can be created for many of 4me®’s record types. They can be linked to a UI extension, to create lists out of which user can select items. Custom views can be filtered to...
It is now possible to access the creation date of a configuration item with automation rules. This can be useful if certain checks need to be executed on configuration items depending on their age, as...
In 4me® it is possible to send and receive emails to known and not-yet known users, directly from within the Request form. In the ‘Send Email from Request’ template, which should be prepared in order...
Two new reports are available from the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics module: ‘Completed Requests by Hour’ and ‘Completed Requests by Day and Hour’. These reports can give insight to management whether the actual work...
In the ‘Account Trusts’ section of the Settings console, a person with the Account Administrator role can define how different organizations can work together in 4me. The options for assigning workflow tasks and project tasks...
It is now possible to hide – and unhide – the menu sidebar. This can give users a bit more screen space, whenever they need it. A hamburger menu button is added to the top...
Reservations make it possible for organizations to allow their people to reserve certain configuration items for a period of time. A configuration item can obtain a certain status, however, that no longer allows it to...
The basic ‘All Configuration Items’ view shows the label, name, support team, status, and site of each configuration item (CI) that is registered in an account or its child accounts. The data in this view...
When a specialist presses the Provide Feedback button of a knowledge article, a Standard Request form opens for submitting feedback. The rule that determines which team is selected in the ‘Assignment’ section of this RFC...
When an email is sent to 4me®, the Mail API ensures that the information in the body of the email gets added as a note in a new or existing request. When that email was...
Specialists who are looking for a request template that contains a specific UI extension can now use the added UI extension filter. It also includes a filter option to display only request templates that have...
Over the coming months the Virtual Agent will receive a number of upgrades. This first enhancement improves the results from a search using the Virtual Agent by including both the most relevant knowledge articles and...
In IT service management, Configuration Management is an IT management process that tracks individual configuration items (CIs, or assets) of an IT system. In Enterprise Service Management (ESM), not every support account that delivers services...
It is now possible to create custom views on workflows. This enables organizations to expose all (or a filtered subset) of the account’s workflows to their users through a UI extension. One specific use case...
4me® is a high availability system, which means that the percentage of time our service is available to the users is exceptionally high. Conversely, the amount of time the service is unavailable to our users...
Key contacts and customer representatives can see the ‘All Requests’ section in 4me Self Service. For persons with the Key Contact role, all requests that are related to the organization of the key contact are...
A new app has been made available from the 4me® App Store, albeit only for beta testing, for now. According to the description from QRatify, the provider of the app, the Intune Endpoint Manager app...
In several record types, the Supplier field is present for selecting the supplier organization that has been asked to assist with the request, problem, task or project. Working with external supplier organizations is commonplace in...
When an organization migrates from their previous solution to 4me, they generally want to import their legacy data, including requests. For this, an import CSV file can be created, which also includes all the notes...
The email template fields can be used to customize the email notifications that 4me® generates. Three fields have been added to the long list of already available email template fields: updated_by_organization_name:The name of the organization...
Organizations that want to integrate 4me® with Azure DevOps can now easily do so. A new app has been added to the 4me App Store: the Azure DevOps app, by Expertize. This integration app works...
A new field type has been added to the ‘Snippets’ section of the UI Extensions form. The Location field adds a map, powered by Google Maps, to the record type selected in the Category field...
Auto-translation has been enabled for Welsh. People who prefer to communicate in Welsh in 4me® can now read and write notes in that language, even if other users do not speak it. World-wide, almost 800,000...
A few weeks ago, an enhancement was released that grouped time entries on requests, tasks, project tasks and problems by person, providing more overview when many time entries are registered on those records. On 4me®...
Since last year it is possible for specialists to customize what they see in views, by using the ‘Customize Columns’ option from the vertical ellipsis (⋮). The view can then be saved as a personal...
Customer satisfaction measurement is not just a metric for management reporting, it is a starting point for improving processes and services. That is why request records contain a field called Addressed, which is set to...
A little while ago, product backlogs were introduced, as a first step to providing Scrum support in 4me. It is now possible to add an estimate for complexity for each of the items on a...
Automation rules consist of a trigger, one or more expressions, a condition and one or more actions. When creating the condition of an automation rule, the Boolean operators ‘and’ and ‘or’ were already available to...
It is now possible to create a new request in 4me from Slack, a messaging program for business. This can make it easier for an organization's customer support team to register a request when the...
Working in text fields is now considered user activity. To be clear: when a user has been inactive for a certain time, he or she must log in again. This time is the ‘Idle session...
After last week’s updates to the main page of the Service Desk console, the underlying pages have also received a makeover. The support domains, services, configuration items and other items that can be selected are...
When creating a UI extension, the snippet generator can be an invaluable tool. A small enhancement to this tool may make working with it even more enjoyable. When clicking the Insert Snippet button in the...
From a workflow it is possible to start a project. It is now also possible for an automation rule to access the workflow that started the project. One use case would be for an organization...
Automation rules can now access the child service instances of a service instance. This makes it possible for service providers to automatically assign a request to a team that is responsible for the child service...
Last week’s release introduced the ability for a provider to stop the SLA clocks under certain conditions, using automation rules. This temporarily removes the accountability of a provider, for example when a workflow has to...
Work continues on updating the 4me Specialist Interface. After updating the views, the previews, the font, the service hierarchy browser, the main menu and several smaller aspects of the user interface, the Service Desk console...
Since the previous release the customer representative(s) can see all requests and dashboards related to an SLA in 4me Self Service. It is now also possible to update customer representatives in an SLA using automation...
Several fields of project records that could previously not be accessed by automation rules are now available for automation. This concerns mainly the financial information of a project: effortvaluecost_of_effortcost_of purchasestotal_costbudget_allocated This allows an organization, for...
Organizations that want to better understand how their users use 4me can now install the Hotjar app from our app store. Hotjar uses heatmaps that help you see what people actually do; where they click,...
Service level agreements (SLAs) are established between service providers and customers to agree on a minimum service level. Whenever a request is registered, the clock of the affected SLAs starts running, so 4me can calculate...
As part of the redesign effort of the Specialist Interface, several new enhancements were introduced this week. The most striking change is undoubtedly that of the buttons of the five consoles, which are no longer...
Short URLs are used to shorten the long URLs for end users to access specific knowledge articles or request templates, amongst many other uses. To make it immediately clear to a configuration manager or account...
Reports in 4me can sometimes be displayed in several different ways, one of them being a Donut chart. Just as a Pie chart, it displays data as a circle where each segment represents a part...
When a user wants to see data related to a specific organization, it is possible to filter a report or other relevant records by that organization. If that user also wants to see data from...
The software development kit (SDK) for accessing the 4me v1 REST API via .NET has been completely revised. This makes it even easier for .NET developers to create apps and integrations for 4me that use...
It is now possible to duplicate UI extensions. This is especially useful when an account designer or administrator has to create many similar UI extensions. Instead of creating them all from scratch, they can now...
Many large organizations work with experienced contact persons who have a good overview of their business processes. These people are not necessarily specialists. Giving them the Key Contact role would give them the ability to...
It was already possible to create automation rules for specific project tasks, and to update the phase of a project task. Now it is also possible to create generic automation rules on project tasks. This...
Several new updates to the 4me Specialist Interface have been made. These are aimed at modernizing the interfaces, improving usability and readability, and making better use of the larger screen resolutions that have become more...
In the ‘Translations’ section of the Settings console, the service categories, services, request templates and UI Extensions can be translated. Translating these records ensures that the end user sees them in their preferred language. These...
When someone is planning to be unavailable to work on assignments, they can specify this in the ‘Out of Office’ section of their profile settings. Here, it is also possible to set an approval delegate,...
Personal views allow users to filter and order any view in the Inbox, Records and Settings console and then save that view. It is now possible to create or update a personal view and make...
It was already possible to create automation rules on workflow templates, but so far only at the task level. Now it is also possible to create automation rules on workflows and workflow templates at the...
New person records in 4me can either be created by administrators or by service desk analysts. It was, until now, not possible for a person with the Service Desk Analyst role to update the Auto...
There are around 3 million native Lithuanian speakers in the world, so several of them are bound to use 4me. Support for this language has now also been added. This means that the user interfaces...
Time entries are used by people to report the time they spent on different time allocations. They are visible, for example, at the bottom of the request pages. When there are only a few time...
Three new reports that are related to the Activity Monitor have been added to the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console: Logins agingPasswords agingCoverage of 2FA and When drilling down into the data of these...
4me allows attachments to be very large: files of up to 2 GB may be uploaded. It ensures that users do not need to worry about the size of the files they share in 4me. ...
Due to our rapid expansion in the Balkans and southeastern Europe it is not surprising that support for Macedonian was also requested, and now also available. The auto-translation capabilities of 4me have been extended to...
It is now possible to request the contact information of an organization via an automation rule. This can be useful when communicating with external organizations with which no trust relationship has been established. The example...
Since last week it is possible to dynamically add tasks to a workflow. This can be done with the help of automation rules. This functionality has now been expanded somewhat. It is now also possible...
In the Scrum framework, a product backlog refers to a prioritized list of functionalities which a product should contain. But simply put it is a to-do list of all the most important enhancements, problems and...
All rich text fields in 4me allow for text to be highlighted in any color. This is a great feature which makes certain parts of the text stand out even more than bold or italic. ...
It is now possible to select multiple customer representatives per service level agreement. This is in essence a preparatory change for an enhancement (to be released at a later date) that will allow selected end...
It is now possible to add tasks to a workflow dynamically, using automation rules. This provides organizations with even more flexibility in deciding which tasks should be part of a workflow under different conditions. As...
As our partner network continues to expand, we sometimes welcome a new customer who works in a currency that we have not encountered before. It is then immediately added to the list of supported currencies,...
Now that automation rules are available on problem records, it is also possible to create an integration that works on problem management. For this, the generic automation rules on problems have been added to the...
When an incident occurs repeatedly, a problem manager can register a problem to prevent further recurring of such an incident. Subsequent incidents may be related to that problem, until its cause has been discovered and...
The order in which items in the views of the 4me Specialist Interface are displayed can now be completely adapted to the wishes of the user. Views may now be sorted on multiple columns, each...
After the recent enhancement that allows people to send an email directly from a note in a request, another powerful feature for sending emails from 4me has now been delivered: sending emails using automation rules. ...
When importing records into 4me, a CSV (comma-separated values) file or TSV (tab-separated values) file can be used. In countries where the decimal separator is a comma, double quotes need to be used to include...
It is now possible to concatenate arrays in automation rules. In the example that was given in a previous blog post about attachments in UI extensions and automation rules, two arrays of attachments were combined...
It is now possible to look up and update knowledge articles with automation rules. This can be useful in many scenarios. For example, for selecting relevant knowledge articles based on related services and keywords, and...
It is now possible for specialists to add or update the request template of an existing request using 4me Self Service or the mobile app. Thus far, this was only possible using the 4me Specialist...
4me has its own terms of use and privacy policy. These are published on our website, and on the bottom of the login screen. Organizations that use 4me may also want to show their terms...
It is now possible to ask a user to supply an attachment, using a custom field. It is also possible to use automation rules to access these attachments and add them to a note. To...
It is now possible to access SLAs using automation rules. This can be especially useful for managed service providers (MSPs) that have many customers, and therefore have many SLAs to maintain. Imagine, for example, the...
It was already possible to filter configuration items on their serial number. Now it is also possible to look up CIs by their serial number. This can be useful, for example, when a ticket must...
Last year, a new option in the ‘Self Service Settings’ section of the Settings console was added to allow people to register as end users for 4me Self Service. At that time, it was not...
When a team works without a coordinator, specialists of that team receive notifications for every request, problem or task that is assigned to that team. When that team or the number of assignments for that...
In 4me, teams can either work with a coordinator or without one. When a coordinator is specified, that person will receive all the team’s assignments that are not assigned to a specific member in his/her...
The ‘Automation Rules’ section within requests, tasks and project tasks is useful for a limited group of users but takes up valuable space in those forms that many users just scroll past. For this reason,...
In the View mode of a service offering, any request templates that have been disabled are displayed in a strike-through font, like this: Provide external hard disk drive. In the ‘Standard Service Requests’ section of...
When a task of a workflow cannot be completed - for example when an approval task is rejected - the workflow comes to a stop, with its status set to ‘Progress Halted’. Using automation rules,...
At some point a task in a workflow either fails, or succeeds. When it succeeds, the workflow continues. When it fails, the status of the workflow changes to 'Progress Halted', and the workflow is often...
When a request (or problem) is related to a workflow, the assignment is automatically set to the manager of that workflow. This makes sense in many cases, but in other cases, for example where the...
The @Mention functionality in 4me is a powerful mechanism to communicate with people within an organization’s own account(s) and other trusted accounts, right from the related ticket. In some cases, however, an organization may prefer...
A new app has been added to the 4me App Store: the Atlassian Jira app, by Expertize. It is the first app available in our app store that is provided by one of our partners,...
Sometimes, when an approval is needed for a request, users want to continue working on that requests after that approval. Until now, the work would have to continue on a workflow, as approval tasks are...
A new filter has been added to the ‘Inbox’ view of the 4me Specialist Interface for ‘My Inbox’. This ‘Member’ filter allows users to see only requests that are assigned ‘to me’. Using such a...
People that access 4me will immediately notice the new login screen. It has been modernized, both visually and functionally. Single sign-on options are now presented first, as these are now used more often than the...
Changes and change-related concepts in 4me are now renamed to workflows and workflow-related concepts. This means that the 'Changes' section of the Records console is now called 'Workflows', and 'Change templates' are now 'Workflow templates',...
A new ‘Contract’ filter has been added to the Configuration Items views, to help financial managers and configuration managers find configuration items that are related to a specific contract, or find configuration items that have...
In some organizations, especially in large enterprises, the number of services and service instances can be quite large. Up to now, the easiest way to determine in which support domain account a service or service...
When an account administrator or account owner deletes a note, this action is now visible in the audit trail for that record. It also shows up in the ‘Audit Entries’ section of the Settings console,...
A new application has been added to the 4me App Store, ready to be used by all our customers. The 4me Lansweeper app is a one-directional out-of-the-box integration between Lansweeper Enterprise Cloud and 4me that...
As the new year ushers in, this is a great time to look back at what will go down in the books as another incredibly strong year for 4me. The first indication of this already...
When a specialist looks at a configuration item in View mode, several attributes are visible that are in fact not from the Configuration Item record type but from the Product record type it is related...
It is now possible to use automation rules to update the members of a skill pool, and conversely to link a skill pool to a person. This can be very practical for making services available...
Organizations that provide services to consumers, students, or citizens, often use their website as a portal for answering questions or logging requests. Registering these people and their requests in 4me enables these organizations to apply...
When an end user in 4me Self Service registers a new request or opens a request in which the user is mentioned after the request had been closed, the Add Note button is shown. Clicking...
It is now possible to create an automation rule that looks up the people of an organization, or an automation rule that look up the time zone of a site. This can be useful, for...
A new integration is available in the ‘App Store’ section of the Settings console: Conversed.ai. Conversed.ai delivers a full-service platform for managing conversational interactions with end-users in an automated way using AI, with an optional...
To enable organizations to measure the performance of the support teams that are responsible for a service instance that is or was affected by a request, the 4me service generates affected service level agreements (ASLAs)...
In 4me, users can make reservations for configuration items by submitting a request from a request template of the category ‘Reservation’. This functionality has now been extended by offering the possibility to book recurring reservations. ...
When a configuration item (CI) that is not a software version is registered in 4me and configuration items of the same product category already exist, a label is suggested based on the existing numbering scheme. ...
Automation rules are used to automatically update 4me records when specific conditions have been met. They are triggered by events, such as the creation of a request or task, or an update of a specific...
To avoid any confusion around the purpose of some of the sections in the Settings console and to prepare for changes to come, two sections have been renamed. The ‘Applications’ section is now called ‘OAuth...
When an administrator or service desk manager creates a broadcast, the audience for that broadcast can be selected in the ‘Visibility’ section of the form. For organizations that use a directory account, the option ‘All...
When the knowledge articles from a service provider are shared with the covered specialists of trusted accounts, these specialists are immediately provided with vital knowledge that can make a difference in doing their own work...
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) provide coverage for the users of the service, defining the minimum level of support that a provider is to offer a customer in case of a service degradation or outage. To...
When an invoice is linked to a change, contract, SLA, FLSA or project, the invoice may be amortized. When the ‘Amortize’ checkbox is checked, the Amortization start and Amortization end fields become available. To simplify...
When copying and pasting amounts into 4me forms, it can happen that non-numeric characters such as currency symbols are accidentally included in the copied data. To facilitate the task of the financial manager in these...
When a request is registered or updated from the Service Desk console and the configuration item that is involved is known, that configuration item should be related to the request. After clicking ‘Link configuration items’...
Two languages have been added to the already large list of languages supported by 4me’s Auto Translation feature. People who prefer to communicate in Portugal Portuguese or Irish in 4me can now read and write...
Directory administrators can see the activity and usage of the people registered in their directory and support domain accounts in the ‘Current Usage’ section of the Settings console. A new column has now been added...
When viewing a report, creating a dashboard, or even when searching for a specific record: being able to filter on a date or date range is often fundamental for selecting the required data. 4me’s date...
Up to now, most widgets that can be placed on the 4me Self Service homepage did not have built-in headings, but the ‘my_open_requests’ and ‘my_completed_requests’ widgets did. This inconsistency, in some cases leading to an...
To be able to interact with the Status fields of requests, problems, tasks and project tasks from the Javascript of a UI extension, the following functions have been made available for account designers and account...
Recently, a new filter has been added that makes it possible to get an overview of which users in an account are billable for the 4me service and which users are not. This ‘Billable’ filter...
Automation rules now allow delayed rules to be executed multiple times in a single automation chain. This also allows for the use of loops in automation rules, that can be used to send daily reminders...
Two metric reports have been added to the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. The ‘Services’ report shows the number of enabled services visible to the given account and the ‘Service instances’ report shows the...
A new filter has been added that can show users in which records they were mentioned. The ‘Mentioning me’ filter is available in the Specialist interface for all record types that allow mentioning: RequestsProblemsReleaseChangesTasksProjectsProject TasksRisks
Sometimes organizations don't just want to know the duration of a complete change, but also the duration of each of their separate tasks. For changes that consist of several tasks, two reports were created a...
Custom views can be created for many of 4me’s record types, including custom collections. They can be used as filtered views, showing only records that meet predefined requirements. The ‘Release’ record type has now been...
As the number of data transactions in 4me is steadily increasing, it is important to keep monitoring the most used transaction types and optimize those, to reduce resources and speed up delivery. One such transaction...
The ‘Legal & Compliance’ section of the Settings console has been updated. Apart from the added ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 27018:2019 certifications in the ‘Security and Privacy Certifications’ section, a new section has been added...
When several configuration items are related to an invoice, the invoice amount reflects the total amount of all these CIs. This amount was also displayed in the ‘Invoices’ section of a CI in the ‘Configuration...
When creating an invoice for multiple configuration items, it is now required that these CIs are all of the same product. This way, the Unit price of the CIs in an invoice is a better...
Whenever a major incident happens that affects multiple users, it is possible in 4me to create a broadcast that is sent to specific groups of users to inform them about the unavailability or degradation of...
It was already possible to cause a task within a change workflow to generate a new request based on a request template with the category ‘RFC’ or ‘RFI’. This can be configured by a change...
A standard integration with Sophie, a virtual agent that aims to understand natural language and support users, is now available as an app. Sophie Virtual Agent can provide 24/7 first level support. She can help...
From the person records it is now possible to get an overview of which users in an account are billable for the 4me service and which users are not. This can be especially helpful for...
Surveys are a great way for organizations to receive feedback about the user experience of their services. It is now possible to create shareable links and QR codes to invite users to fill out a...
A new log has been added to the ‘System Logs’ section of the Settings console. The Permission log keeps track of changes to user permissions. Organizations can use this log to see which users have...
Two new reports have been added to the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console: ‘Service Cost’, showing the total costs of all services within a selected date range, and ‘Service Cost by Service’, showing the...
The ‘Service Insight’ section has been added to the Analytics console. Service Insight provides an overall picture of an organization’s service landscape. Intended mainly for senior management, it provides the user with a dashboard for...
It has been possible for a while now to cause a task within a change workflow to generate a new request based on a request template from a different internal or external provider. This can...
A new field for alternate names of software versions has been added to the configuration item form. Organizations that have used a discovery tool to populate their configuration management database (CMDB) with the software that...
An earlier release made it possible to link invoices to configuration items. With that enhancement, several fields were moved from the Configuration Item record type to the invoice record type, such as PO number and...
To give knowledge managers and other users more insight into who performed the latest update to a knowledge article, the Updated by column is now available for the ‘Knowledge Articles’ views via the ‘Customize Columns’...
A year after the socially distant but highly interactive and fruitful online CAB meeting of 2020, we were happy to finally be able to meet with representatives from our valued customers and partners in person...
Rich text boxes can become very long, for example when extensive instructions are placed in a knowledge article. To format text at the beginning of the article would in those cases involve a lot of...
New filters have been added for the product and configuration items record types. In the ‘Products’ view, products can now be filtered on ‘model’. In the ‘Configuration Items’ view, CIs can now be filtered on...
Due to the way HTML code is sent from Microsoft Office applications to the clipboard when copying data, it had so far not been possible to copy text and images at the same time from...
In the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console, several reports can be found that present data about SLA targets that were either met or violated. To give organizations better insight into the specifics and numbers...
To accurately determine the amount of time spent on changes and compare that to the time that was planned to be spent on them, it is important to also include time spent on related requests...
4me now generates at least one expense record for every invoice. Invoices that are depreciated or amortized over time will have an expense record for each month that falls in the depreciation or amortization period. ...
As service cost tracking is becoming one of the central pillars of 4me, several more adjustments have been made to the Invoice form. With last week’s enhancements regarding invoices for configuration items, the possibility for...
Custom suggest fields can be added to UI extensions when it is necessary to ask users to select a value from a list of organization-specific options. Now it is possible to create dependencies between such...
When an invoice is linked to a configuration item, the financial manager can choose the depreciation method. When an invoice is linked to a change, contract, SLA, FLSA or project, an ‘Amortize’ checkbox is shown. ...
It is now possible for a person with the Financial Manager role to link an invoice to one or more configuration items (CIs) or to directly add an invoice from within a CI record. After...
It was already possible to use automation rules to look up the addresses of sites. Now it is also possible to create an automation rule that automatically retrieves the address of an organization, or the...
Time entries can sometimes be visible between trusted accounts. For example, when a time entry is registered by a specialist of a service provider for a change or project task that was assigned by a...
A new option in the ‘Self Service Settings’ section of the Settings console makes it possible to allow people to register as end users for 4me Self Service. This new functionality can be very helpful...
More sharing options within the account have been created for dashboards. So far, it had only been possible to keep a dashboard private, or make it visible to anybody of the account who has access...
It is now possible for a person with the Key Contact role to view dashboards directly from 4me Self Service. For this, the dashboard needs to be shared using a new setting that is available...
People with the Specialist role can edit their own dashboards, while people with the Account Designer or Account Administrator role can edit all dashboards. To avoid that a dashboard is edited without the knowledge or...
In recent enhancements, it has become possible to relate invoices to projects, and after that to changes, contracts, service level agreements and first line support agreements. Soon, it will also be possible to link an...
It is now possible for organizations to define the region of their trusted and external organizations. This allows MSPs, for example, to group their customers into regions and generate reports not only on individual customers,...
In November last year, 4me introduced 4me Connect, allowing specialists to call other users with audio and video. This feature has now received a major update: instead of a video-calling feature with a chat option, ...
It is now possible for organizations to receive quantitative feedback from the users of the services about the perceived quality of those services. Account designers and account administrators can create surveys for people to rate...
Reports in 4me can contain several series of data at the same time, presented in different graphs, sometimes even of different types. While this is a very powerful way to present data, it sometimes helps...
With the 4me BMC Client Management Connector our customers have another smart solution to add and maintain reliable asset data in their 4me account. BMC Client Manager (BCM) Asset Management software monitors all systems on...
Timestamps are essential for defining when a certain event occurred. Many different formats for timestamps exist, depending on the needs of a system’s users. ISO 8601 is an international standard covering the worldwide exchange and...
Since the Financial Manager role is authorized to update the financial information of a number of record types, a person with this role can now also import the financial information of those record types. This...
4me now supports the WebP image format for avatars. WebP is an image format that has a better size to quality ratio than other common image formats. Avatars for persons can now be uploaded in...
Skill pools are groups of people who share a specific capability. A fixed hourly cost can be attributed to a skill pool to help project managers estimate the cost of tasks for which the specific...
Data security issues should be reported and taken care of as swiftly as possible. Organizations that work with both 4me service management and the Open Raven data security platform will therefore be pleased to learn...
Request templates can now be filtered by change manager and by change template. This can be useful, for example, when someone from the organization needs to find request templates that are linked to a specific...
To give organizations more insight into how time was spent within a specified date range, and what the accumulated cost for that time spent was, four new reports and two new filters have been added....
It is common for 4me customers to outsource the setup and maintenance of their 4me accounts to a 4me partner organization. To facilitate this, the customer can share the Account Administrator role of its 4me...
It is now possible to create an automation rule that looks up the agile board of a team. This makes it possible, for example, to create an automation rule that places a request on a...
When the Financial Manager role was introduced, it was authorized to maintain the information in the ‘Financial Details’ section of product, CI and person records. From the account’s Records console it could only access the...
Request templates are now accessible by automation rules. This means that organizations can now automatically apply a request template to a new or existing request. Request templates can be selected within automation rules using the...
Since the beginning of last June, it has been possible for end users to withdraw their request in 4me Self Service, when they no longer need the request to be completed. A few more enhancements...
To allow people to customize what they see in views, they can now specify which columns should be included in table views. They can also dictate the order in which these columns are presented. Customizing...
Some small enhancements have been made to make the ‘Account Trust’ view more user friendly for accounts that have a lot of trusts with other accounts. When the trusted account is a support domain, the...
To give insight into how request registrations are distributed over time, two new reports have been created: ‘Registered Requests by Hour’ and ‘Registered Requests by Day and Hour’. Organizations can use the information these reports...
As part of our financial management initiative, another important milestone has been reached in the form of multi-currency support. Since many organizations have international offices, hire staff abroad and acquire assets in multiple currencies, financial...
Whenever an action is about to be taken in 4me that creates a billable user, a warning message is now displayed. This notification ensures that administrators are made aware when an action they are about...
Changes in organizations, for example when teams merge or people depart, usually mean that assignee(s) or the team of task templates needs to be updated. To accommodate organizations in these and other situations, a number...
The ability to use automation rules to look up the service provider of the service of the service instance of a request has been added. This can be useful, for example, when information needs to...
Since last month, the ability to register invoices has been extended from projects to changes, contracts, service level agreements and first line support agreements. Now, financial managers are also able to add new invoices from...
Last week it was announced that new reports on task completion duration have become available. In general, information about resolution duration for tasks, requests and other record types can be important for organizations to monitor...
Widgets are convenient tools that help organizations add meaningful content to their 4me Self Service homepage. One of the most used widgets, the User Name widget, has just been enhanced so that it self-adapts to...
Another new filter has been added to the ‘Service Level Agreements’ view of the Records console. The Coverage filter selects SLAs based on the defined group of people that are covered for a certain SLA....
It is now possible to set and update the Created by field of knowledge articles using the import functionality of 4me. This can be important for organizations that want to migrate their knowledge base from...
Reports, including all selected filters and other presentation options, can now be directly added to existing or new dashboards. This eliminates the need for a specialist to recreate these choices when the report needs to...
A new filter has been added for the All Requests view in 4me Self Service. With the Requester filter, only requests from a specified requester is shown. This filter works on the Requested For field,...
A new function has been added to the automation rules to provide more flexibility when working with strings. The Join function creates and returns a new string by concatenating the elements in an array, separated...
As most changes consist of several tasks, it can be interesting for an organization to gather data about the completion duration of the individual tasks. Two new reports have been created for this purpose. The...
A new filter has been added to the SLA reports that can be found in the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. This new filter is called ‘Request source’. It can be used to limit...
It was already possible to use a filter for change views and reports on ‘Requester organization’. Now it is also possible to apply this filter on task views and reports. This enhancement gives service providers...
When a request is linked to a change, it is possible to close the request before all the tasks related to that change have been completed. In most cases, such requests should not be completed...
Since last year it is possible to define personal views in 4me. From any of the standard views of the Inbox, Records and Setting consoles, and even from drilldown views of reports in the Analytics...
Since the previous release, invoices can be related to changes, projects, service level agreements, first line support agreements and contracts. Depending on which record type a financial manager selects, the Supplier field can now be...
SLA reports show both the target and actual level of service provided for the KPIs ‘Availability’, ‘Reliability’, ‘Responses within target’ and ‘Resolutions within target’. For people who want to know exactly how the actuals are...
When an approval task for a change or project is assigned to its approvers, 4me generates a separate approval summary for the recipients. This summary is attached as a PDF file to the email notification...
People in Iceland can now submit requests in Icelandic. 4me will automatically translate these requests into the preferred language of the specialists who open them, provided that these specialists have the Auto translation option activated...
When the account owner of a newly created support domain account goes to the Settings console and opens the ‘Account Settings’ section, this person will see that the following checkbox is not checked: Internal notes...
The Organization Region filter on dashboards now allows the selection of the region from any of the following organizations: Organizations registered in the dashboard’s account and its directory account; Organizations that are the service provider...
Invoices could already be related to projects. As another step to make it possible to break down the costs incurred by a service provider organization by service, invoices can now also be related to changes,...
Rich text fields now accept data copied from Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice Calc and Google Sheets. When cells of a spreadsheet are copied and then pasted in a Note field, or any other field that supports...
Many teams have already prepared an agile board for their members. That makes it possible for the team members to pick up work from their team’s board. Requests, problems and change tasks could already be placed...
The values of a few more fields can be retrieved and manipulated using automation rules. The product fields Brand, Category, Model and Product ID have been added to the list of fields that can be...
When someone performs a search in 4me Self Service, the search results may contain several services. For each service, 4me now also displays the support domain and service category. The extra information is mainly intended to...
SERVIEW, the German-based management consultancy known in the industry for its independent software solution analyses, has once more given 4me the SERVIEW CERTIFIEDTOOL award, this time for the latest edition of ITIL. The rigorous assessment...
Customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, can now go to AWS Marketplace to procure and set up their 4me account. AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog...
4me has been recognized as a leader among ESM tools providers in Germany. ISG’s Enterprise Service Management Tools quadrant compares software vendors for automation of cross-organizational processes based on existing functionalities, integration capabilities through standardized program...
Computer trouble can be hard to understand for non-specialist users. For this reason, most, if not all, computer repair and support technicians are familiar with the dreaded “it does not work” trouble ticket. Tier2Technologies invented...
4me has been recognized with the Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinction for IT Service Management (ITSM) tools. Being placed in the Customers' Choice quadrant of the 2021 Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer':...
