Account trusts allow organizations to establish trusted relationships with other accounts in the business ecosystem. They empower organizations to collaborate securely and efficiently with external entities, extending their service management capabilities and promoting effective communication...
Category: New Feature
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is an identity and access management security method that requires two forms of identification to access data. Users of the 4me® Service can set up 2FA to securely access 4me, from the...
Sometimes, end users of the 4me Service need to be able to see more information of a record than they are able to out of the box. This could be the case when an end...
4me is a knowledge-centered service management tool. This means that gathering and reusing knowledge lies at the heart of the system. End users are presented with solutions to common issues and specialists are encouraged to...
An end user or a monitoring tool can submit requests by sending email to the email address of a service provider organization’s 4me account. This is taken care of by the Mail API. This way,...
Earlier this year, 4me introduced the Support Chat feature, which enables end users in 4me Self Service to start a chat with a specialist from the Service Desk team. This feature has now been given...
When the 4me service is set up and it is used by multiple support domains of the same organization, a directory structure is created with several support domain accounts. If, at any time, it is...
Since the start of this year, 4me® has introduced several enhancements to make it easier for managed service providers to use the 4me data to generate invoices for their customers. One of these was the...
In most column and line charts, a new visualization option ‘Show horizontal line at…’ is now available. Selecting this option prompts the user to enter a number. A horizontal, dashed line is then added to...
When the 4me Shop was introduced at the end of last year, it was only made possible for people to order something for themselves. It didn’t take long before requests started coming in for 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....
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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 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...
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...
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...
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 @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...
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 standard integration with Stefanini's Sophie is now available as an app. Sophie is a virtual agent with natural language capabilities for human-like user support. She provides 24/7 first-level support. Sophie can help end users...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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,...
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...
The filter 'Desired Completion' has been added to all request views and reports. This filter can be used to exclude all requests, except for the ones that have a value in their Desired completion field...
When a user has opened a request and an administrator deletes one of its notes, this note would remain visible until the user would close the request or refreshed the browser tab. This does not...
The 'Request Templates' view can be accessed by going to the Records console and selecting the option 'Request Templates'. This view now offers two more filter options. The filters that have been added are 'Team'...
The 4me Virtual Agent is now able to interact with end users in the Finnish and Turkish languages. Any user who has his or her language set to 'suomi' or 'Türkçe' will now be addressed...
Every team can prepare an agile board so their members can pick up work from this board. Request and problems could already be placed on an agile board. Now tasks that are part of a...
After someone has submitted a request, it can happen that the requester no longer needs the request to be completed. As long as the request has not already been completed, it is now possible for...
A new role has been become available in 4me accounts that are on the Premium pricing plan. The new role is called 'Financial Manager'. It is intended for people who maintain the financial information for...
The find(request, …) and find_all(request, …) operations of automation rules now also look through the Source ID field of requests. This means that these operations can now also be used to find a request that...
It is now possible to create automation rules that add a note to a problem when specific conditions are met. This automation rule feature was already available for requests, changes, tasks, projects and project tasks. ...
In the fall of 2020, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was rolled out, which replaced Universal Analytics (UA) as the default for digital analytics measurement in Google Analytics. This also meant that the old UA Tracking...
The Strikethrough option has been added to the text formatting bar. This makes it possible to present text with a horizontal line through its center. This makes it easier to indicate to others which words should...
It is now possible to give text a color in every rich text field of the 4me service. To make use of this feature, select the text which color needs to be adjusted and press...
A few more text formatting options have become available. The new options are primarily intended for support organizations that want to perfect their knowledge articles, but they are available in all rich text fields, including...
When the Agile Boards functionality was introduced a few weeks ago, only requests could be placed on agile boards. Now it is possible to also work on problems from an agile board. There is no...
Many people have asked for the ability to create tables in knowledge articles. This is now possible. In fact, tables can be inserted in all rich text fields, including the Note fields. To insert a...
Organizations can customize the information that is included in the email notifications that 4me sends out on their behalf. This is done by account designers and administrators in the 'Email Templates' section of the Settings...
A new option has been added to the 4me Self Service menu. The new option is called 'My Services'. Selecting this menu option takes the user to a section that lists all the services...
Assignments that are placed on an agile board eventually end up in the board's last column (e.g. the 'Done' column). Once they have reached this column, work on them is completed and there is no...
After an agile board has been set up for a team, this team may want all work that is assigned to the team to be placed in the first column of its agile board. This...
A new field has become available on the Risk form. It is a date field with the label 'Mitigation target'. This field allows organizations to prioritize their risks by setting a target date by which...
Another advanced SLA tracking feature has been added to the unique SIAM capabilities that 4me offers. As with any of 4me’s advanced features, this one is also best explained using a simple use case. In...
The 'Organization Navigator’ section has been added to the Analytics console. This new section makes it possible for people using the 4me Specialist Interface to get an overview of their organization's structure. The navigator can also...
It is now common for 4me customers to manage hundreds of SLAs in their 4me account. For managed service providers (MSPs) that use 4me the number of SLAs is typically in the thousands. Because of...
Many customers have asked to make it possible for requesters to track the progress of their requests, even when they are linked to a change. Such requests would only show the requester that the status...
The views that list organizations now have an addition filter called 'Business unit'. This new filter can be used to limit the organizations to just those in which the Business unit box is checked. Naturally,...
The to_date_time operator recently became available to allow automation rules to work with values entered in custom date-time fields. Now account designers and administrators can take things a step further with the in_time_zone(…) function. This...
The ‘Reports’ section of 4me’s Analytics console already offers organizations well over 300 standard reports that people can filter and group to meet their specific needs. Now 3 deceptively simple-looking metric reports have been added...
Thanks to the suggestion of one of 4me’s larger enterprise customers, a new hidden field called ‘Rejection count’ has been added to change approval tasks. This field counts the number of times a change task...
When an automation rule retrieves the value of a custom field, this value is always considered to be a string (i.e. just text). To be able to use the values entered in custom date-time fields...
Many email notifications that 4me sends out include the last note of the record for which they are generated. If this note includes inline images, these images are also visible in the body of the...
The UI Extensions functionality of 4me makes it possible to add custom fields to many record types. By linking a UI extension to a product, for example, it is possible to add custom fields to...
There are a few reports that make it easy for service provider organizations to see if there are any requests from customers on which they are spending an exceptional amount of time. These reports are:...
Reports that are based on data from open requests, problems, releases, changes, change tasks projects and project tasks could already be filtered using a filter called ‘Target indication’. All of these reports can now also...
Most organizations want to encourage their employees to use the self-service portal when they need some help. That way, people will be offered knowledge articles with which they might be able to help themselves. And...
For organizations that want to take an agile approach to managing their workload, 4me now introduces the ability to create agile boards. Whether an organization prefers Kanban or Scrum, both are agile methodologies that will...
It has been a while since the ability to filter reports by custom field values was introduced. Now that it is has become possible to group the data in a report by a filter, it...
Several customers indicated that they would like to be able to filter views and reports by service owner. That is why the 'Service owner' filter has now been added. The 'Service owner' filter is available...
An important new analytics capability has been added that makes it possible to break down the data in a report by the same values that can be selected when a filter is defined for a...
Organizations that automatically maintain the 4me person records of their employees using 4me’s SCIM provisioning capability were already able to set the language preference for these people. Now they can also set their auto translation...
A new analytics feature has been added that makes it possible to transform a horizontal bar chart into a pie chart or vice versa. There are already many horizontal bar charts and pie charts available...
Organizations with part-time employees can use 4me's import functionality to load the out of office periods during which these people are not going to be available. That way, the part-time workers do not need to...
People who have the Key Contact role are able to access reports in 4me Self Service and the 4me App, provided that reports have been activated in the ‘Self Service Settings’ section of the Settings...
A useful filter has been added for configuration managers. The new filter is called 'Product category rule set'. This sounds fairly complicated, but 4me account administrators will recognize the term 'rule set' from the 'Product...
A new trigger has become available for automation rules that are created for request templates or requests. The new trigger is called 'On request template update'. In the past it was not possible to trigger...
The media library, which is available in the Settings console, makes it possible for people to store files such as images and videos in their organization’s 4me account. After a file is stored in the...
It is now possible to specify the number of items that users are allowed to select in the suggest fields of UI extensions. When selecting the Multiple values checkbox for a UI extension suggest field,...
A few more reports have been added to help configuration managers prepare their dashboards. The reports that were added can be found in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. They are called: Configuration Items by...
The filter 'Knowledge article' has been added to the following two reports to make it possible to track the feedback received on a specific knowledge article over time: Negative Feedback on Knowledge Articles Positive Feedback...
A new timesheet settings option has been added. This option makes it possible for administrators to prevent 4me from sending notifications to people whose timesheet is incomplete. By default the new option 'Notify people when...
People who have the Specialist role have always been able to update the assignment of change tasks. Now they can do the same with project tasks. This makes it possible for specialists who receive a...
When Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning is activated in an OpenID Connect single sign-on configuration, a new person record is automatically generated when someone who is not yet registered in 4me is trying to access 4me Self...
The trigger 'On satisfaction update' has become available for request and request template automation rules. This new trigger is especially useful for service providers that want to notify people after a requester has indicated to...
The unique ability that allows 4me customers to link up their 4me accounts with the 4me accounts of their managed service providers (MSPs) can be found in the ‘Account Trusts’ section of the Settings console. ...
Just-in-time (JIT) provisioning of user access has been supported by 4me for a few years already. 4me's advanced single sign-on capabilities have also supported OpenID Connect for a while now. What's new is that 4me allows...
When someone sends an email to the inbound email address of an organization's 4me account, the 4me Mail API will process it. In most cases, this results in a new request getting generated and the...
The filter 'Keywords' can now be applied to the views and reports of request templates, knowledge articles and services. This makes it possible to exclude all the records that do not include a specific word...
The service and service instance views now have a new filter called ‘First line team’. This filter makes it possible to limit the services or service instances listed in a view to those that have...
Last week the ‘Coordinator’ and ‘Manager’ columns were added to the team views. This week, the filters ‘Coordinator’ and ‘Manager’ have become available in these same views. For organizations with many teams, this can make...
Auto translation is one of the most beloved capabilities of 4me for organizations that support people in multiple languages. This functionality now supports 3 more languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 38....
People who have the Administrator or Auditor role of a 4me directory account or standard account (i.e. not of a support domain account) can now open the 'Billable Users' section in the Settings console to...
When specialists go to the Records console and select ‘Teams’, they will notice that the ‘Teams’ view has been renamed to ‘All Teams’. The new name was needed to differentiate the default view from following...
4me's support for OAuth 2.0 has been extended to allow developers to build applications that need to interact with 4me, but which should not ask a 4me user for permission to use his or her...
To make it easier for organizations to collect the evidence their auditors ask for, two filters have been added to the views in the ‘Audit Entries’ section of the Settings console. The two filters that...
An exciting new feature has been added to 4me's change management functionality. This was one of the features that this year's customer advisory board (CAB) members decided to assign a high priority to. The objective...
The map function is new to the automation rules. It can be used to work on arrays, just like other array functions like select, reject, count, etc. Here is an example of how the map...
The filters that are available in views and reports for date fields now make it possible to look up records in which a date field is empty. This allows configuration managers, for example, to identify...
Knowledge articles are often created from completed requests. More specifically, these knowledge articles are created from the note that contains the request’s solution information, see Introducing Knowledge Management. In the past, when a knowledge article...
The 'Customer Reports' section of the Analytics console offers service provider organizations a powerful real-time overview of how well they are performing for each of their customers. The bottom section of each monthly customer report...
Support for OAuth 2.0 has only just been introduced and now a new feature has been added that makes it easy to rotate OAuth tokens. An OAuth token is generated whenever someone creates a personal...
The SLA reports that are available in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console can now be filtered by business unit. When a business unit is used as a filter, the report includes only the...
The 4me service now offers support for the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow. This flow makes it possible for developers to have their application ask a user for permission to access 4me on behalf of...
The change views in the Records console and the change reports in the Analytics console can now be filtered by 'requester organization'. The requester organization of a change is defined as the organization of the...
The menu option 'My Projects' is now available in 4me Self Service and the 4me App for all end users who have been added to at least one project task by a project manager. This...
A major new capability called 4me Connect has been added to the 4me service. Specialists can use 4me Connect to call other people. To do so, they can use the new ‘call’ icon in the...
An important financial management report has been added. It is called 'Cost of Time Spent by Service'. This report shows how much a service provider is paying per service for the time its people spend...
The find_all feature that was recently added to 4me's Automation Rules functionality has been improved further. There are now two flavors. The one that already existed is used to look up all records from a...
There were already quite a few reports that visualize a breakdown of completed work in a pie chart. A typical example is the report 'Completed Requests by Category'. But customers have asked for similar reports...
It was already possible to filter project tasks by team, but most project tasks are assigned directly to individuals. Now that the 'Assignee' filter has been added for the project task views and reports, it...
End users are now able to look up the assets that their organization has made available to them. When they open 4me Self Service or the 4me App, they will see a new option in...
Three more filters have become available in the Inbox console. The new filters are called: Organization Requester Requester VIP The organization is simply the organization that is linked to the requester’s person record. But it...
Directory administrators will be happy to hear that they are now able to see not just the activity and usage of the people registered in their directory account, but also of the people who are...
When people go to the Analytics console, they will notice that the 'KPIs' section has disappeared. This section had become obsolete when all KPI graphs also became available in the 'Reports' section. These standard reports...
When finalizing the conversion of the graphs that were available in the 'KPIs' section of the Analytics console, customers noticed that there were four that were not yet available in the 'Reports' section. These reports...
It has been a while since skill pools were introduced. A skill pool is a group of people who share a specific capability. Project managers have been assigning tasks to skill pools when they are...
4me’s automation rules are now able to look up an address from a site. This makes it pretty easy to set up an automation rule that, for example, is triggered when a task is assigned...
A few releases ago, it became possible to use the UI extension functionality to add custom suggest fields in which multiple values can be selected. The automation rules now provide the ability to not only...
A new knowledge management feature has been released. This new feature makes it possible to ensure that a knowledge article will no longer be available from a certain date. This can be useful, for example,...
Organizations with operations at many geographically dispersed sites may find it useful to see whether there are considerable differences in support performance between sites. The following two reports have been added to the 'Reports' section...
Several new reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console to help organizations generate an overview of the records that are in danger of not meeting their target. The following two...
A new knowledge management report has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. This report can be used by support organizations to see how actively knowledge articles are being added and maintained...
Most 4me customers make use of the ability to add custom fields to 4me's user interface. To do this, they define UI extensions for specific types of requests, changes, configuration items, etc. Some of the...
It has long been possible for service providers to give their key contacts the ability to access some reports in 4me Self Service or the 4me App. These reports already allowed key contacts to click...
Three new date filters have been added for the configuration item (CI) views and reports. These filters make use of the following date fields and have the same name: License expiry date Start date (=...
The filter 'Service level agreement' has become available for the service instance and service offering views. This makes it possible to quickly look up the service offering or service instance of a specific SLA. The...
The Mail API parameters source and sourceID are now also used to determine whether a new request needs to be registered for an email that was sent to 4me, or a note needs to be...
When a request is initially linked to a service instance, but is later linked to another service instance that is not hierarchically below the previous one, the affected SLA for the first service instance is...
To allow organizations to track the success of their change and project management processes more easily, two reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These reports track the following KPIs:...
Support organizations are now able to add another interesting report to their SLA tracking dashboards. The new report that has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console is called 'Outage Duration by...
Two new SLA reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. The first is the 'Current SLA Targets' report. It shows the number of affected SLAs of the support organization that...
Developers within the 4me community will be excited to hear that the 4me GraphQL API has been released. Like 4me's REST API, this new API can be used to retrieve and update 4me data. The...
The following four reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console to help organizations keep track of their SLA performance, as well as the SLA performance of the service providers they...
It has been possible for some time already to hand over the support responsibility for a configuration item (CI), which is registered in the 4me account of its financial owner, to a team of a...
The time entry export files are special because many organizations rely on the data in these files as input for their automated internal chargeback or billing process. To make it easier to include information about...
To allow organizations to track more KPIs on their dashboards, two more reports have been made available in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These two new reports look for requests that have been...
A set of eleven line charts has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These standard reports can be found there under the following names: Registered Requests Completed Requests Registered Knowledge Articles...
Since it became possible to create custom dashboards in 4me, customers have been asking for the possibility to add the KPIs, which are available in the 'KPIs' section of the Analytics console, to their dashboards. ...
Organizations can extend the user interface of their 4me account by adding custom fields to some of their records. People who have the Account Designer or Account Administrator role can do this using 4me's UI...
UI extensions can be used to add custom fields to, for example, all problem or person records. But when the SCIM automation rules or 4me's REST API would be used to populate the custom fields,...
The ability to make reservations in 4me has triggered the need for some reports. To satisfy this need, the following reports have been added: Reservations by Configuration Item Reservations by Person Reservations by Reservation Offering...
A few months ago it became possible in 4me to easily distinguish between internal, external and trusted organizations. The next logical step would be to allow the organization views and reports to be filtered by...
It was already possible to filter request views and reports by 'Satisfaction' to look for requests with a dissatisfied requester. But it was not yet possible to reduce the number of requests further to those...
Now that it has become possible to report over much longer date ranges, the need to track trends by quarter has cropped up. To make this possible, the interval option 'Quarter' has been added. This...
It has been a while since the introduction of dynamic filters for views, reports and dashboards. Now, one more dynamic filter has become available. It is the 'Current account' filter, which can be used to...
Many organizations provide support to their people in multiple languages. Such organizations maintain the information they make available in their self-service portal in multiple languages. The people who act as the translators of this information...
A major new capability has become available in 4me to make it possible for organizations to allow their people to reserve certain configuration items for a period of time. To explain how to make use...
4me administrators are now able to add an extra layer of security to the payloads their webhooks send out. They can do this by creating a webhook policy in the 'Webhook Policies' section of the...
When providers register their services in 4me, they also register at least one service offering for each service. Each service offering defines the targets, terms and conditions for the SLAs that will later be registered...
Two reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These report can be used to see how often specific types of changes or change tasks are created: Changes by Template Tasks...
Another set of problem management reports has been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. This set is made up of the following reports: Active Problems by Manager Active Problems by Team Halted...
A new REST API capability has become available that allows administrators to delete SCIM Users. Deleting a SCIM user may be necessary after the configuration of an identity provider was updated and the link between...
4me is renowned for its SLA reporting. Before each release, automated scripts test over 100 scenarios to ensure that even edge cases cannot negatively affect the accuracy of the SLA reports. There is one edge...
In the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console there are a number of SLA reports that allow support organizations to look at the average time it takes to provide a response or resolution. These reports...
The 'Service' filter for task views and reports is now a little more intelligent. Rather than only looking for tasks that are part of a change that is linked to one of the selected services,...
Last week, the presence indicator became visible in more places within the 4me Specialist Interface. This makes it possible to see who is currently active in 4me. But when assistance is needed from a specific...
SLA reports can now be filtered by the current value in the Member field of the requests for which the affected SLAs were generated. The Member filter has also been added to the view in...
The filters available in the change task views and reports are now also available in the change calendar. This makes it possible for change managers to focus on specific types of changes or tasks that...
A few more filters have been added to make it possible to reduce a list of change tasks to those that are part of a change that matches specific attributes. Specifically, the following filters have...
Nearly all enterprise organizations that use 4me now have a directory account with multiple support domain accounts. Some have just two support domains - one for IT and another for HR. But there are already...
As announced during the 4me Connect 2020 event, 4me now makes it possible for all people who have access to the 4me Specialist Interface (i.e. auditors, specialists, designers and administrators) to generate personal access tokens....
The reports that are based on the data of Affected SLA records now have two additional filters. These new filters allow the SLA reports to be filtered by the first line team or support team...
The following four filters have become available for the Account Designer and Account Administrator roles in the 'Automation Rules' section of the Settings console: Change template Task template Project template Project task template The first...
The ‘Knowledge manager’ filter has been added to the knowledge article views and reports. This new filter makes it possible to limit these views and reports to knowledge articles that are related to a service...
To help configuration managers maintain the information about their assets in the configuration management database (CMDB), the following reports have been added: Configuration Items by Site Configuration Items by Location Configuration Items by Service Instance...
The filter ‘Known error’ has become available in problem views and reports to include or exclude the problems in which the Known error box is checked. This makes it possible, for example, to quickly look...
Four new reports have become available for generating visual overviews of the contracts that are registered in 4me. Several contract reports already existed, but now the following reports have been added: Contracts by Category Contracts by...
4me account owners are able to specify how quickly someone's 4me session should be terminated after that person stopped working in 4me. The idle session timeout can be set in the Security section of the...
Some support organizations prefer to switch off the email templates that ensure that people receive a notification after a note has been added to a record that they are responsible for. When these 'Note Added'...
The report 'Request Completion Duration' has been added to allow support organizations to see how long it typically takes them to resolve requests. This report simply looks at the time it takes for a request...
The following three reports have been added to help organizations keep track of the time they spend on each project, as well as the cost of this effort. Cost of Time Spent by Project Time...
Project managers have always been able to add a set of new tasks to an existing project by going to the project’s Gantt chart and applying a project template. All the task templates which are...
Imagine a situation where a large enterprise has a shared service center that supports the IT departments that are located in the countries in which the enterprise operates. The shared service center may, for example,...
It has become very easy to look up all the task templates that are part of a specific change template or project template. The filter 'Change template' is now available in the task templates views...
The filter 'Completion reason' has been added to the reports that make use of the SLA resolution target data of affected SLAs. This makes it possible to limit these reports to the data from affected...
Another useful report has been released. It is called ‘Time Spent by Request Category Over Time‘ and can be found in the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. This report can be useful for support...
Automation rules are now able to call webhooks, enabling these webhooks to deliver a custom payload to a target server. Why this is such a powerful new feature is best explained with an example. Let...
Another filter has become available for the request views and reports. The new filter is called 'Requested for VIP'. This filter makes it easy to limit the requests in a view or report to those...
Account administrators have the ability to remove notes. This makes to possible for them to act when someone accidentally included sensitive information in a note, or attached a file that contains information that should not...
Three new reports have been added to support the problem management practice of support organizations. The new reports can be found in the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. These three reports are called: Requests...
The 4me REST API capabilities have been extended again, this time to support developers who want to automate the retrieval, update and/or creation of automation rules. They can now use the new Automation Rules API...
An extra feature has become available for organizations that use the SAML protocol to give their people single sign-on access to 4me. This new feature allows them to add an extra layer of security by...
A new Boolean property has become available for automation rules. This property makes it possible to ignore internal notes that have been added to requests. The new property is called public. The screenshot below presents...
The UI extension functionality in 4me is used to add custom fields to a form. This capability has now also become available for the Release form. This means that organizations can add some additional fields...
A very helpful filter has become available for 4me administrators. This new filter allows them to quickly look up all people who have one or more specific roles of their organization's 4me account. This new...
It recently became possible to add information to the organization records of external customers and external providers. Because some providers have many external customers, there is now a need to efficiently add information to the...
A few basic knowledge management reports have been added to help organizations manage their knowledge articles. The five new reports are: Knowledge Articles Knowledge Articles by Service Knowledge Articles by Status Registered Knowledge Articles Registered...
Now that every provider organization can set up its risk register in 4me to manage their risks, they will have a need to track the performance of their risk management practice. That is why a...
Yet another filter has become available. This new filter is called 'Updated' and it makes it possible to use the date on which a record was last updated to filter the views in the Records...
As part of their compliance efforts, organizations practice risk management. They do this to ensure that they identify potential risks in advance, analyze these risks and take precautionary steps to eliminate them, or at least...
A new feature has been added to help provider organizations that use 4me's time tracking functionality for internal chargeback or invoicing their customers. If these organizations have activated effort classes, they will now see the...
The request reports have always ignored request groups. The request groups were not counted because they are merely placeholders to which multiple requests can be related. So the request reports only counted requests that were...
The ID column has been added to the notes export files. Having the ID available in the notes exports can be useful, especially now that 4me is linking notes to time entries. This makes it...
Because most support organizations are not only tracking their SLA resolution targets, but also their SLA response targets, the following three reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console: Average Time...
Three new change management reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These three new reports are: Registered Changes by Type Open Changes by Type Completed Changes by Type Because organizations...
Two new reports have been added to make it possible for support organizations to create their own dashboards for tracking the performance of their service desk team. These new reports can be found in the...
For developers who build integrations with 4me, a new section has become available in the Settings console. This new section is called 'Webhook Deliveries'. To access this section quickly, just type web in the Search...
It was already possible in 4me to filter project views and reports by program. This is important for program managers who want to keep track of all open projects that are part of their program. ...
A few more reports have been added to help configuration managers maintain an accurate CMDB. The reports that were added are: Configuration Items by Service Configuration Items by Supplier Configuration Items by Support Team For...
The Time spent field of a request, problem, change task or project task now becomes required whenever text has been entered in the Note field. Some organizations, however, require a note that justifies the effort...
When a managed service provider (MSP) has linked its 4me account with customers that have their own 4me account, they are able to relate the organization records of those customers to their SLAs, but they...
There were already several reports on SLA performance, but all of those horizontal bar charts and pie charts show the performance for a single date range that the user can specify. Because it might also...
The ‘All Out of Office Periods' view can now be filtered. The following filters can applied to this view to help administrators find specific out of office periods more easily: Business unit Organization Organization region...
The following two reports have been added to allow them to be added to a dashboard that tracks the performance of the service desk: First Call Resolutions by Member Service Desk Only Resolutions by Member...
When someone attempted to log in to 4me several consecutive times with an incorrect password, his or her access to 4me is temporarily blocked. This is a basic security measure that stops people from trying...
4me's Webhooks API has been extended to allow organizations to build near real-time integrations that use the time entry data in 4me to update their financial application. This is especially useful for managed service providers...
It has been a while since new fields became available for 4me's email templates. A new field has just been added, though. It is the Supplier request ID field. When an organization has set up...
A new parameter has become available that allows administrators and account designers to define automation rules that look up the person who is currently acting as the coordinator for a team. This parameter makes it...
A new option has been added to the 'Contact Details' section of person records for chat links. This new option makes it possible to add a chat link for Microsoft Teams. The option is called...
4me's SCIM Provisioning capabilities make it easy for organizations to automate the maintenance of their employee information in 4me by linking their 4me account with their identity provider, such as Azure AD, Google SSO, Okta,...
Many customers have asked for the ability to filter the request views and reports by the person for whom a request was submitted. To make this possible, the Requester filter has been added. This filter...
Two more filters have become available for filtering the SLA reports that are available in the ‘Reports’ section of the Analytics console. The first makes it possible to limit the affected SLA records that are...
The'Reports' section of the Analytics console provides quite a number of reports that are based on the Affected SLA records. These reports can be found easily by entering sla in the Search box above the...
Even though requests can only be related to a single service instance, an incident in one service instance may actually affect multiple service instances. That is why it may be more useful for organizations to...
When people applied filters to a view or report, they were not always able to select from all the records of their support organization. The suggestions that would be offered when looking up records to...
There were already two reports that provide an overview of requests by organization, where the organization is the organization that was linked to the person record at the time it was selected in the Requested...
It is now possible to filter the request templates view and reports by the communities that are allowed to use the templates. The visibility options for request templates are 'End users' and 'Specialists', so the...
As an extra security measure, people no longer automatically get an API token when their person record is created in the 4me. Going forward, an API token is generated for a person when he/she first...
An advanced SLA feature has become available for enterprises with multiple support domain accounts, for example for their IT, HR and Finance departments. This feature becomes available when one support domain registers an SLA for...
The service level agreement reports that are available in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console could already be filtered by the SLA's customer organization. That filter is simply called Customer. The customer of an...
The single sign-on (SSO) integration capabilities of the 4me service have been extended to also support the OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocol. 4me already supported the popular SAML specification to make it easy for organizations to...
When people are planning to be unavailable to work on assignments, they are now able to specify this in 4me. They can do this by opening their profile in 4me Self Service, in the 4me...
It was already possible to filter requests, change tasks and project tasks by target indication. Now problem views and reports can also be filtered by target indication. To bring the list of target indication options...
The Keywords field was already available for knowledge articles and request templates. The Keywords field has now also been added for services. This allows support organizations to do some search engine optimization (SEO) to help...
Configuration items (CIs) cannot only be related to a service; they can also be linked to a specific service instance of the service that they are related to. Software CIs can even be linked to...
Now that skill pools can be defined, it has also become possible to provide the members of a skill pool SLA coverage. To explain why this is useful, let's take an example where a company...
Not too long ago it became possible to assign project tasks to teams. Now another project management feature has become available. This one allows project managers to assign tasks to skill pools. A skill pool...
It is now possible to create an automation rule that automatically looks up the service instances of a service. This makes it possible, for example, to automatically add all the service instances of the service...
The Auditor role has the permission to see all records in an organization's 4me account, but it cannot add or modify records. This role can now also export all the records that it is allowed...
More and more provider organizations are integrating their 4me account with their billing system. They may, for example, create an item in their invoicing tool for each project task. That allows them to sync the...
An additional filter has been made available for request views and reports. The filter is called 'Organization region'. It allows support organizations to limit a report to the requests that were submitted for people who...
Three new reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These reports make it easy to look up the number of requests that are linked to a service instance of an...
The ability to filter people by manager became available last week. This week another filter has become available for the people views. The vast majority of enterprise organizations that use 4me set up one directory...
4me administrators and designers are now able to open the 'Automation Rules' section of the Settings console and only export some of their organization's automation rules. This can be especially useful after a few new...
The 'History' section of the Configuration Item form now provides a bit more information. When this section is expanded, it now displays the status of every request, problem or task that is linked to the...
Most support organizations have a major incident management process that requires them to perform additional activities for incidents that they consider 'major'. This was one of the many topics discussed during this year's CAB meeting. ...
A little while ago it became possible to use the values in the custom fields of UI extensions to filter views and reports. Because some custom fields may have been given the same name as...
A new requests view has become available in the Records console. This view makes it easy for support organizations to look up all requests that were passed to external providers. The name of the view...
The people views in the Records console can now be filtered by manager. The 'Manager' filter was added to make it easy to find all people who have the same manager. By filtering the list...
The Created At and Updated At columns have been added to the export files for person records. These columns are available in both the Comma-separated values (.csv) and Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) formats of these export...
Two special reports have been added to the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. These reports are intended to provide organizations the ability to quickly find the changes that are likely to go, or have...
A useful feature has become available for all reports in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console. This new feature allows people to look up all records that are included in a report. To access...
One of the results from the customer advisory board (CAB) meeting last month was that more knowledge management reports are needed. The report that most people asked for has now been delivered. It can be...
The knowledge article views in the Records console can now be filtered by several extra filters. These include the four visibility options that were recently added (i.e. Internal specialists, Covered specialists, Key contacts and End...
The views that list a support organization's knowledge articles now have two additional columns to show when an article was originally created and when it was last updated. These columns have the headers: Created Updated...
It has become possible to link a request template to a change template, even when the change template is not linked to a service. This allows the same change template to be used for multiple...
The Mass Update functionality was introduced several months ago for configuration items. Now it has been extended to request templates. This makes it possible for service desk managers to not only create many similar request...
Many people have been looking forward to see how 4me's development team would incorporate native chatbot functionality in the 4me service. Today, everyone can see how the 4me's service-oriented data structure and tightly integrated KCS-based...
It was already possible for 4me account administrators and designers to include custom fields in a UI extension that allow users to select an organization, site or person record. Because these fields behave just like...
Change managers may be happy to hear that the options that are available in the Type field of changes and change templates are now fully customizable. Historically, the options that the Type field provided were: Application...
Account administrators and account designers now have an extra view in the 'Dashboards' section of the settings console. This new view is called ‘Dashboards Created By Me’. This additional view makes it easier for them...
When a request template is placed in Edit mode, it used to be possible to link it to a change template which Justification field is empty. This would lead to a situation where the request...
An extra email template has become available. Account administrators and designers can find it in the 'Email Templates' section of the Settings console. It is disabled by default. When this template is enabled, 4me sends out an...
4me automatically takes a snapshot of a project each time a new phase starts. These baselines tell project managers whether or not their projects are still on track. A new option has become available that...
The ‘Current SLA Targets’ section of the Analytics console is the best place for a service provider organization to check whether any of their requests are in danger of violating an SLA target. To offer more...
Many reports in the 'Reports' section of the Analytics console are based on data from affected SLA records. From these reports people can drill down into views that list the affected SLA records that were used...
In addition to the earned value charts that have been added to the baseline, there are two more charts available now to help project managers track the progress of their projects. These other charts are the...
4me's support for the Earned Value Management (EVM) methodology has been extended. It now offers two graphical representations that visualize whether a project is progressing as planned. These graphical representations are the Earned Value chart and Earned...
4me already offered managers some reports to keep an eye on the expiration dates of first line support agreements (FLSAs), SLAs and contracts. These reports can be found in the Analytics console under these names: Upcoming...
The ability to delete (or redact) notes used to be reserved for the 4me administrators of the account in which the Person record of the person who added the note is registered. If someone whose Person...
The REST API for calendars has been extended. It can now also be used to add, update or delete the hours of a weekday in an existing calendar record. The details of these new API capabilities...
The Automation Rules functionality now offers two more functions for the manipulation of text strings. These the two functions were specifically added to complement the upcase and downcase functions that were already available. The upcase function replaces...
Because several customers asked for it, 4me now provides administrators the ability to import time entries. This can be useful, for example, for external people who provide their timesheets at the end of each week or...
The UI Extension functionality makes it possible to add custom fields to 4me records. It was already possible to allow people to search through the content of custom fields. Now it is also possible to apply custom...
Two new filters have become available for the problem management reports. The two new filters that have been added are: Team Member These filters make it easy for problem managers, team coordinators, service owners and...
It was already possible to filter request views and reports by configuration item (CI). Now it is also possible to filter these views and reports by the product of the CIs that are linked to...
Normally, a knowledge article offers helpful instructions for all people who rely on the service for which the article was written, regardless of the instance that people use of this