The 'Apps' section of the Settings console has undergone a makeover. It now offers more standard integrations and presents them in a way that makes them easier to manage by administrators. This will become increasingly...
Category: Usability
Many support organizations have mounted large screens in common areas to display 4me dashboards that help employees stay informed of the current situation. These dashboards are placed in full screen mode so that they take...
The request views in the Records console now display the urgent icon for urgent requests in the first column. Similarly, the major incident icon now gets displayed in this column for requests that have been...
Request templates are prepared for types of requests that are frequently submitted. They make it easy for requesters to submit such requests. By linking a request template to a service offering, it becomes possible to...
The URLs for the authorization requests and the access token requests that are used in the different OAuth grants had to include the ID of the 4me account in which a token was generated. To...
The new Actions menu option ‘Assign Coordinator’ is now available for specialists when they open one of the teams that they are a member of. The ‘Assign Coordinator’ option can be selected to assign a...
The rule that dictates when the Configuration items field of a request becomes required has been perfected just a little more. This time, the objective was to ensure that specialists of a customer organization never...
Most 4me customers have multiple people who are able to act as administrator for one or more of the organization’s 4me accounts. From time to time the administrators can therefore find themselves working on the...
Many organizations are already making good use of the recently introduced custom collections functionality. This functionality makes it possible to give each custom collection element a unique picture. Seeing these pictures in the list of...
To help specialists when they are linking a configuration item (CI) to a request, problem, implementation task, service instance or to another CI, the status of the CIs is now also presented when a list...
A small usability feature has been added to assist users when they are about to perform a mass update of the records they selected in a view. Before executing the mass update, users can now...
Many of the actions available in the 4me toolbar and in the Actions menu can now be used to update multiple records at the same time. This extension of 4me’s mass update functionality can significantly...
The Forward button in the 4me toolbar has always made it easy for people to pass a request, problem or task to a different member of their team. Now this button can also be used...
Now that 4me Connect is available in QA for all customers, specialists will rely more on 4me's presence indicator to see when it is possible to contact a colleague. To ensure specialists can indicate when...
When people look at their timesheet in 4me, they can see all the time entries they registered. These may include some time entries for change and project tasks that they worked on. Such time entries...
When 4me offers a knowledge article to a specialist, and this article has not yet been validated, the 'Not Validated' warning is now displayed. This happens in the search results when they contain knowledge articles...
After a project task has been assigned to someone, this person can open the project task in 4me Self Service or in the 4me App, even if this person does not have the Specialist role. ...
Even though Microsoft is planning to support Internet Explorer 11 through October 14, 2025, they recommend users migrate off IE11 in favor of Edge as it is safer and faster. In Enterprise Mode, Microsoft Edge...
When someone opens a report that is based on time entry data, it is possible to drill down to a list of time entries. Such a time entries view makes it possible to inspect individual...
The views that list the reservations have been simplified to make them just a little more intuitive for specialists. These views used to offer the following three state buttons in the upper right corner: Upcoming,...
It recently became possible for directory administrators to go to the 'Billable Users' section of the Settings console in their directory account to download not just the billable users registered in the directory account, but...
4me already made it possible to generate a short URL for a request template, knowledge article, configuration item, as well as many other types of information like phone numbers, maps, SMS messages, etc. These short...
A long list of parameters was already available to add dynamic custom links to 4me's Actions menu. When designers and administrators go to the 'Custom Links' section of the Settings console, they will notice two...
A minor change has been made in 4me Self Service and the 4me App. The goal of this adjustment is to make the registration of a new request just a little more intuitive. Feedback from...
Two new reports have been added to help organizations generate an overview of amount of time, and the number of times, work is performed for each service. These new reports can be found in the...
All graphs that were available in the 'KPIs' section of the Analytics console are now available in the 'Reports' section. The advantages of having standard reports available for the KPIs are: standard reports offer more...
As part of the introduction of custom collections, the concept of a 'custom view' was introduced. The ability to define customs views has now been extended to make it possible for specialists to define their...
A minor usability enhancement has become available in the code fields that are available, for example, in the 'UI Extensions', 'Self Service Design' and 'PDF Design' sections of the Settings console. This enhancement makes a...
To make multi-factor authentication (MFA) a little easier for users, 4me now supports the use of hardware security keys, such as the ones provided by Yubico, Thetis and FEITIAN. A hardware security key does not...
Custom suggest fields recently became available with the introduction of custom collections. Custom suggest fields can be added to UI extensions when it is necessary to ask users to select a value from a list...
When a request is placed in Edit mode, the Service Hierarchy Browser (also known as the SHB or sidebar) opens automatically to provide information that may help the specialist with the request. For example, the...
4me's SCIM provisioning capabilities have been extended to make it possible for organizations to automatically include a link for starting a Microsoft Teams chat session in each 4me person record. Using SCIM, it is possible...
The minimum planned effort for the completion of a task that is part of a change or project was one minute. But because more and more tasks are executed automatically, it is now possible to...
There are some date range filters for which it makes sense to specify a date range in the future. Think for example of the 'Completion target' filter for change views, or the 'Expiry date' filter...
It is common to place the same report multiple times on the same dashboard. Different filters can then be applied to each version of the report to ensure each conveys different information. For example, the...
In 4me it is possible for someone to have SLA coverage for more than one instance of the same service. For example, a manager of a multinational organization may be covered for several payroll environments. ...
A small usability improvement now causes the status of related service instances to be displayed when a task template, change template, task or change is opened in View mode. This additional piece of information can...
The Add Reports button of a dashboard now becomes inactive when the maximum number of reports has been added to the dashboard. This small usability enhancement is intended to make it clear when no more...
When someone would open a calendar in View mode, 4me used to list all the teams and service offerings that use the calendar to define their work hours, support hours or service hours. Over time,...
Most organizations have activated single sign-on (SSO) in their 4me accounts. They rely on their identity provider (such as Azure AD, Okta or OneLogin) to ensure that people are authenticated before they can access 4me. ...
After downloading the 4me App from the App Store or Google Play, users are asked to enter their organization’s 4me account. This is the subdomain part of the URL people use to access their organization’s...
Because of the limited space available on a smartphone screen, the status is not presented when people open their watchlist in the 4me App or 4me Self Service. This made it difficult for people to...
When 4me automatically adds a note to a request, this system note may cause a notification to be sent to the requester, the specialist to whom the request is assigned, and everyone who has added...
To make sure that people do not accidentally select an inactive configuration item (CI) where it does not make sense to link an inactive CI, 4me no longer offers inactive CIs when someone is relating...
In 4me it is possible for account administrators to give each product category a small picture or avatar. This image then becomes the default picture for all products in which this category is selected. But...
By default, the option that allows people to submit requests for others used to be switched on in the 'Self Service Settings' section of the Settings console. To avoid surprises for support organizations that are...
To ensure that a consistent naming convention is used, the report 'Applied Request Templates' has been renamed to 'Requests by Template'. Similarly, the report 'Applied Knowledge Articles' has been renamed to 'Requests by Knowledge Article'....
When several filters have been applied to a view, the definitions of these filters take up a lot of space at the top of the view. To make more space available for the items that...
The filters that have been applied to a dashboard are visible at the top of the dashboard when it is in Edit mode. In View mode, however, that is no longer the case. When a...
The green dot that is displayed for a person who is currently working in 4me has become visible in more places. This helps specialists see who of their colleagues are available. They will now notice...
Because most support organizations using 4me have over 30 sites registered in their 4me account, the Site field has been turned into a suggest field. Suggest fields allow the user to enter the first few...
When people are preparing a new dashboard they use the Add Reports button to select the reports that they want to see on the dashboard Clicking on the Add Reports button causes a dialog to...
When a specialist is working on a record and someone else opens that same record, 4me's collision detection feature displays a warning. What’s new is that the specialist is now able to click on the...
In the past, customers have been able to chose from one of three different pricing plans when they decided to subscribe to the 4me service. These plans were called: Basic, Premium and Premium Plus. To...
Many specialists have already noticed that the list of available filters has become rather long for some views and reports. The request views and reports, for example, already offer well over 30 filters. To make...
The Search box that is available at the top of many dialog windows within the 4me Specialist Interface has been modernized a little. Apart from the new styling, which was introduced earlier for search select...
The view in the ‘Inbound’ Email’ section of the Settings console is used by 4me account administrators to see which email messages were sent to the 4me account of their organization. In this view, they...
The Location field of person records and configuration item (CI) records has always been a simple text field. After selecting a facility in the Site field of a person or CI record, the Location field...
A minor usability improvement has been released that makes it possible for users to recognize the purpose of a field more quickly. Whenever another record can be looked up in a field, the search icon...
When a 4me account is created for an organization, the security settings for this account now limit the file types that its 4me users are allowed to upload as attachments or inline images. By default,...
The work hours of teams, as well as the service and support hours of service offerings, are maintained in the 'Calendars' section of the Settings console by 4me account administrators. There the administrators can add...
The ability to duplicate templates has been available for a few years already. It is widely used to speed up the creation of new templates. After the introduction of automation rules for changes and projects,...
The ‘All Organizations’ view lists internal, external and trusted organizations. This has created a need to easily distinguish between these different types of organizations. When a specialist opens an organization record of a supplier or...
Specialists who are using the 4me App on their smartphone may notice the real-time collision detection feature that was already available in the 4me Specialist Interface. That’s because this feature has been extended to the...
When the table layout is selected for the Inbox views, these views by default list the major incidents on top, followed by the assignments that are marked as urgent, below which the remaining inbox items...
The sorting option 'Updated' has become available in the ‘My Inbox’ view and the ‘My Team's Inbox’ view. This makes it possible to get the inbox items that have not been updated for a while...
A very minor usability feature has been added that allows specialists to quickly look up the creation date of a record which ID is listed in a view. By hovering the mouse cursor over the...
It is fairly common that specialists need to look up the serial number of a configuration item (CI) when they are asked to work on a request. They normally do not go to the CI...
The auto translation functionality that translates notes for 4me users has been a resounding success, especially in organizations that support people who speak many different languages. The service desks of these organizations no longer need...
The recently released feature that makes it easy to copy the ID of records such as requests and tasks received positive feedback. That is why more fields now offer specialists the ‘Copy to clipboard’ feature. ...
When someone goes to the Records console and selects 'People', the view 'All People' opens by default. This view used to list all people of the account that is selected in the Account Switcher, plus...
When someone performs an import of records into 4me, the import file gets queued for processing, it then gets processed and once the import has been completed 4me sends the user an email notification. This...
It has become easier to export one or more new or updated UI extensions from QA and import them into production after they have been tested. That is because it is now possible to export...
A helpful feature has been added to allow specialists to point their colleagues to a specific note in a request, problem, change, project task, etc. When they are writing an email or when they are...
Because the IDs of records like requests and tasks can be quite long, it is time consuming to write them manually. It is much faster to copy an ID when it needs to be specified...
The 'Holidays' section of the Settings console is where administrators go to maintain the holidays for their support organization. When they go there now, they will notice that the 'Holidays' view has 2 additional columns: the...
The 'Roles & Teams' section of the Person form has been redesigned. This section is now easier to use for administrators of organizations with many 4me accounts and trusts with 4me accounts from other organizations. In...
When a specialist sets the status of a request to 'Completed', the Note field becomes required. The same thing happens, for example, when the status is set to 'Waiting for...' in a problem or task....
Previously it was not possible to include images in the feedback that end users provide to improve knowledge articles, see Provide Feedback on Knowledge Articles. Because customers have indicated that it would be helpful if...
A simple but helpful usability feature has been added to 4me's Export functionality. Now, when someone exports some records from 4me, the confirmation popup includes a link to the export job. This export job can...
The people views that are available in the Records console now show the small crown icon next to the name of each person who has been marked as a VIP. This makes the VIPs stand...
When a service desk analyst enters some text in the Requester field of the Service Desk console, 4me suggests all person records that match all or part of this text in the following fields: Name...
To show the language preference of a person, 4me used to display a circle over the person's picture with a flag that symbolized this language. This was mainly useful for multilingual service desk analysts when...
There are a few 4me forms in which the user can duplicate some of the form’s fields multiple times. Specifically, this is possible in: a broadcast for adding a translation an email design for adding...
Six additional languages were already added to 4me's popular
Handling a major service outage can be stressful. End users may have submitted many requests during the outage and most of these will have been grouped together. But after the outage was resolved and the...
When a view is opened in the Records console and a record is selected in this view, it is now possible to open the Change Calendar. This can be done by pressing the Actions button...
When a view's sort order is adjusted, the new sort order becomes visible in the address bar of the browser. The advantage of this is that when the user bookmarks this URL, the sort order...
4me’s Grouping feature allows specialists to combine multiple requests into a group. Once a request group has been created, specialists can work on this group. Any update of the request group is automatically copied to...
A system note now gets added whenever someone marks an assignment as urgent. The system note is inserted in the right sequential order in the Notes section of the request, problem, change task or project...
The Service Hierarchy Browser (SHB) is the vertical bar that opens on the right side of the screen when a request is placed in Edit mode. It is one of those unique features that 4me...
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...
Fans of the Auto Translation feature will be happy to hear that it now supports an additional six languages. That is on top of the 20 languages it already supported. Continue reading
This could be the best usability feature that no one will ever notice. When someone selects a record in a view, this record opens in View mode to the right of the view. A person...
Whenever 4me sends out an email notification to someone about a record such as a request or task, an entry is added to the audit trail of this record. This feature was implemented some time ago...
The Gantt charts of changes and projects that are managed in 4me offer a helpful graphical overview of the tasks, the order in which they should be completed, as well as their timing. To provide an...
4me records are often related to multiple other records. The unique strength of 4me is that it allows support organizations to link their 4me accounts so that they can work together. When one organization’s 4me record contains...
When a request group is set to the status 'Waiting for Customer', the requesters of the requests that are included in this group are notified. Their individual requests show up in 4me Self Service and the...
Henceforth, the Auto Translation option is switched on by default. This means that when a new Person record is created, the Auto translation box is checked. This is the case regardless of whether this person record is...
Specifying a time is relatively frustrating in most user interfaces. That is why a lot of attention has been given to making this easy in 4me. In the Time spent field, for example, it is easy...
4me’s Service Navigator could already be opened from requests, problems, changes, releases, projects and SLA reports. Now it is also possible to open the Service Navigator from change tasks and project tasks. To do this, simply...
A minor usability enhancement has been released for the Auto Translation feature. Now, when someone hovers the mouse cursor over the Translation icon, the tooltip explains which language the note was translated from. Or, if...
Many quick range options were already available in 4me to make it easy to select one of the most commonly used date ranges for a view or report. But apparently there are a few more...
When an account designer uses the Snippet feature to add a field to a UI extension, 4me now ensures that the field ID it suggests is not already included in the HTML. Even if the...
A new usability feature has been added that prevents users from accidentally closing a browser tab if that tab contains any unsaved changes in 4me. So if someone was busy submitting a new request and...
The inbox views in 4me and the request header now display the desired completion whenever a desired completion date and time have been specified in a request and the status is ‘Waiting for Customer’. Unlike...
At the bottom of the ‘My Inbox’ section, the 4me App and 4me Self Service used to list the change tasks and the project tasks that were assigned to the user and are already finished....
As previously announced, classic Self Service has now been retired. In all production, QA and demo accounts, the option 'Use classic Self Service' has been unchecked and this checkbox has been removed from the 'Self...
When the Service Desk Analyst role was given the ability to update a request’s requester (see Update the Requester of a Request), the Specialist role also got an extra capability. Specialists were already able to...
It is now possible to display a placeholder text in a rich text field of a UI extension. A placeholder text is typically used to make it easier for users to understand what to fill...
After a request has been saved for the first time, it was no longer possible to select a different person in the Requested by or the Requested for fields. That was intentional, because the person...
The option 'Service Navigator' is now also available in the Actions menu for people who are working in the 'SLA Reports' section of 4me's Analytics console. When this option is selected from the Actions menu,...
When the knowledge articles are accessed in the Records console of 4me, there are a few views available. One of these used to be called: 'My Knowledge Articles'. The name of this view seemed to...
When requests are grouped together they are linked to a request group. This makes it easy for specialists, because they only need to update the request group. Any updates in the request group are automatically...
When 4me presents a list of options for someone to choose from, it now handles special characters a little more elegantly. 4me recognizes, for example that an ö is similar to an o and that...
There are a few fields in which an option can be selected and where each option has a name that is followed by a short description. This short description is helpful when one of the...
When a request is passed from the 4me account of a customer organization to the 4me account of one of its providers and this provider sets the status to ‘Waiting for Customer’ or ‘Completed’, then...
A small adjustment has been made to the Import functionality for person records. This adjustment perfects the way 4me ensures that a new record does not get generated during an import for a person record...
When the Mail API receives an email, the body of the email becomes a note. Any note that the Mail API generates already started with the To and Cc email addresses of the inbound email....
When an existing request is opened in the Service Desk console, there are now several more options available. These options have been added to allow people to not only register new requests, but to also...
The Source and Source ID fields have been added for UI extensions. These fields are hidden, but they do show up in the audit trails and in the export files. They have now also been...
A usability enhancement has been implemented for the Desired completion field. It is now hidden by default. When it is not visible, a link is provided instead. The goal is to make sure that service...
The Time spent field has been moved to a position just above the Save button. The advantage of this new position is that people can review the information they have added to a request, problem...
It is possible to specify a date range filter for many reports and views in 4me. The limitation was, however, that the selected date range had to fall within the last 13 month. This restriction...
Problem managers periodically review the requests that 4me me has listed for them in the 'Requests for Problem Identification' view. To help problem managers go through this list more quickly, 4me now automatically opens the...
A recent performance enhancement has made it possible to open a configuration item (CI) and quickly search or browse through all its relations. Regardless of how many relations the CI has with other CIs, the...
It is possible for account designers and account administrators to share dashboards with others. When someone else opened a shared dashboard, however, it was not possible for this person to modify the filters that were...
People who are colorblind had trouble distinguishing between the gray impact icon 'Low' and the red impact icon 'Medium'. They had the same issue when 4me showed them with the gray impact icon 'High' and...
It is no longer necessary for the value in the Employee ID field of a Person record to be unique. This extra flexibility is provided for large enterprises that have multiple legal entities in different...
When someone has the Specialist role of a 4me account, this person is able to edit requests in that account. This person can, for example, update the status of a request from 'Assigned' to 'Accepted',...
When an external server is down, all webhooks that tried, but failed, to reach this server are now remembered as 'offending' webhooks. This allows 4me to include the name and 4me account ID of the...
As a follow-up to the recent improvement of the Source labels that are displayed in the request reports, the default values that 4me specifies in the Source field of requests have now also been adjusted...
There are three reports available in 4me and one in 4me Self Service (for key contacts) that break down the number of requests by source. In the past, when organizations started using 4me, they would...
The International Foundation for Digital Competences (IFDC) and 4me, Inc., provider of the 4me Enterprise Service Management service, today signed an agreement to further support and promote VeriSM™. VeriSM™ is a service management approach for the...
Two small but helpful improvements have been released to help administrators who are in charge of the webhooks that their organization has set up in 4me. The first improvement ensures that the value in the...
The VIP checkbox on the Person form has been replaced by an icon that can be pressed to mark someone as a VIP. This icon is available to the right of the Name field to...
When users go to the Analytics console and open the 'Reports' section, they will notice that a new column has been added to the list of reports. This column contains the report type icon. This...
When a view is opened that lists completed requests, it is now possible to filter this view on the satisfaction response provided by the requester. But the 'Satisfaction' filter is not the only new filter...
The Member filter has been added to the 'My Team's Inbox' view. This makes it possible for someone who is a member of one or more teams to open the 'My Team's Inbox' view and...
A minor adjustment has been made in the validation rules for the Support team field of the Configuration Item form. Because of this adjustment, this field is no longer required when the status of the...
In the past, it could happen that a user would not be able to filter a report in 4me on two specific services if these services were alphabetically far apart. That was because the user...
In the past, it was possible to see which automation rules were added to a request or task by expanding its ‘Automation Rules’ section. But just like their Audit Trail, people will mostly use this...
The Support URL field used to be included in the 'Custom Links' section of the Settings console. There it was mostly overlooked, despite the fact that it can be quite useful. This field makes it...
A small but helpful usability feature has been added for the people who maintain translations in the 'Translations' section of 4me's Settings console. Now, when they select a phrase to translate, they will see that...
A subtle usability feature has been added to the 'My Inbox' view. When this view is placed in the new multi-line layout, the value of the Team field is now displayed for each item that...
When a request is completed, the requester is encouraged to provide feedback. Doing so would take the requester to a new browser window that would either thank this person for providing positive feedback, or would...
When an end user or support specialist opens a request in Self Service and this request has already been completed, this request will now be presented in View mode. That should make the information in...
4me has a special interface for specialists who work with a tablet. It is now possible to use this interface on larger screens as well. When the width of the browser window is reduced so...
To ensure that organizations can optimize the accessibility of their 4me Self Service home page for people with disabilities, it is now possible to include Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) attributes in the Self Service...
In 4me it is possible to upload a small picture, or avatar, for specific records. That makes these records easier to recognize for users. The records for which a picture can be uploaded are: Holidays...
When a new 4me account is being populated in QA and several request templates and knowledge articles have been prepared and approved, they can be exported and imported again into the organization’s 4me production account...
The text, which was displayed when someone moved the mouse cursor over the red dot that indicates that a service is down, has been adjusted. This was necessary because it turns out that people frequently...
Service desk analysts who work for very large enterprises have reported that it is sometimes difficult to know who to select when someone with a common name calls the service desk. In such cases, the...
When a team coordinator needs to decide who to assign an urgent request to, it would help if it were possible to see who is currently working in 4me. That is now possible. When someone...
In 4me, everyone can select their local time zone in their profile. This ensures that 4me presents all dates and times (such as resolution targets) in the selected time zone. What is new is that...
Service desk analysts will notice that a small adjustment has been made in the Service Desk console. There, the User field has been renamed to 'Requester'. In addition, the button has been relabeled to ‘New...
Last week it became possible for an enterprise customer to allow a managed service provider (MSP) to register requests for the customer’s specialists, without having to make the customer’s Service Desk Analyst role available to...
The 'Copy note to change' option was introduced a few years ago. It is a helpful feature for specialists to inform the manager of a change about the information they are entering in the Note...
When a specialist opens a request that was submitted by someone from another account, the name of the account in which the requester's person record is registered is now displayed next to the name of...
A minor but helpful usability feature has been added for auditors and account administrators in the ‘Audit Entries’ section of the Settings console. In this section they have always been able to review audit entries....
Organizations perfect the categorization of their services from time to time. When they do, they are often left with a few service categories that no longer contain any services. To help them maintain a clean...
The Reference feature has become available in the Note fields of requests, problems, releases, changes, change tasks, projects and project tasks. This is an important usability feature that makes it possible for specialists to include...
People who regularly work in 4me's quality assurance environment will probably have experienced a moment of confusion every now and then where they switched browser windows and thought they were in production, but were actually...
A minor optimization has been introduced that prevents a browser notification from popping up immediately after someone submitted a request for him/herself. The reason why this popup now gets suppressed is that it could be...
A new product category has been added, because several organizations indicated a need for it. This new category is called 'Security Certificate'. It was already possible for organizations to add this category by themselves in...
An extra column has been added to the views that can contain completed requests. This column shows the satisfaction feedback that was received from the requester. A green thumbs up icon is displayed when the...
When someone performs a search is Self Service, the search looks through all the records that this person has access to in Self Service. That means that the search results may include this person’s requests,...
The views of 4me’s Inbox console have undergone a major makeover. When specialists open their 4me inbox, they will initially not notice a major change. Their inbox still presents the assignments in a table layout....
A few record types still had long lists of checkboxes. These lists have been replaced by a link that offers a list of suggestions when pressed. This makes it easier to look up and select the...
The audit trail that 4me maintains for each record provides an easy-to-understand overview of a record's entire history from the moment it was created. As records age, though, their audit trails can become quite long....
People may have already noticed that the attachment file size limit has increased significantly. In the past the maximum size of an attachment, including videos and files in the Media Library was 20 MB. This...
When a configuration manager registers a new product, the name of this product gets filled out automatically in the Name field when its brand, model and category are specified. The REST API for products now...
Sometimes an SLA is no longer considered affected by a request. That happens, for example, when the provider that is responsible for the SLA has rejected the request. Continue reading
Apart from being able to filter the configuration item views, configuration managers are now also able to perform mass updates of the CI records. This is a powerful new feature that makes it much easier...
Some people already noticed the filter icon that is now visible in the header of the views within the Records console. When a user clicks on this icon, the filter options for the view are...
A helpful feature has been added that gives service desk analysts and specialists another way to quickly find a specific configuration item (CI). Continue reading
When an organization has prepared a large number of request templates for some of its services, it can be a little cumbersome for support specialists to find the correct template in the Service Hierarchy Browser...
An interesting feature has been added to the Service Hierarchy Browser (SHB). It has always been possible to click on a child service instances in the SHB to go down a level in the service...
A few weeks ago several improvements for 4me's code editor were released. Today, the people responsible for maintaining their organization's Self Service design will be happy to hear that the usability of the 'Self Service...
The entire list of the roughly 200 icons that are used in 4me has been made available for you on the 4me Developer website. This makes it easy for designers to look up an icon...
The 'Translations' section of the Settings console has been improved. The objective of this change was to make it easier to find a specific phrase within a specific record type when it needs to be...
All information in the Service Desk console now gets presented in the preferred language of the service desk analyst whenever possible. The information that can appear in the Service Desk console and which organizations can...
The 'Current Usage' section of the Settings console has been modified to allow organizations to get a real-time view of all the billable users in their 4me account. That means that this view now lists...
The audit trails have been improved to make it a little easier to see what has been updated in fields that can contain a lot of information. The previous value and the new value are...
Users can print out 4me records (e.g. requests or knowledge articles), or they can generate PDF files from these records. They can do this, using the 'Print...' option of the Actions menu. Continue reading
When you go to 4me's Records console and select the 'People' option, you will notice that two extra columns have been added by default. Continue reading
Some of the design capabilities in 4me allow organizations to add HTML, JavaScript and CSS. They can do this using the code editor that 4me provides. A few new usability features have been added to...
The computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities of 4me have been extended again. The new feature that was added allows support organizations to use their automatic call distributor (ACD) to collect a request ID from a...
When a request is passed from the 4me account of an IT department to the 4me account of one of its managed service providers, the specialists of the MSP were already able to mention the...
The order in which the requests that are linked to a change are presented within that change has improved. In the past, the requests would be sorted by their ID. Now they are sorted first...
People use their Notification Center, which was recently introduced, in different ways. For those who prefer to be able to remove individual notifications without having to open the record for which the notification was generated, the...
4me automatically generates notifications. These notifications may inform a requester that his request has been completed, tell a specialist that someone added a note to a task that is assigned to her, etc. These notifications...
After setting up a new time allocation, it still needs to be made available to the employees of the right organizations. Only then will these people be able to select it when they are registering...
A minor, but very useful, improvement has been made in all horizontal bar charts. The labels on the vertical axis are now hyperlinked. Continue reading
The Service instance field of requests has been improved. Service desk analysts and specialists will notice this after they have placed a request in Edit mode. The Service instance field now behaves in a similar...
The Support ID field is available in each person record. This field is used by support organizations to enter a number or code that service desk analysts can ask for when someone contacts the service...
It is now possible to reactivate an expired SLA, first line support agreement or contract. This makes it possible to temporarily expire an agreement, or to activate a contract again after its status was accidentally...
The Expiry Date column has been added to the views of SLAs, first line support agreements and contracts. This column is primarily intended to provide an easy way to look up the agreements and contracts...
A helpful usability feature has been added to the 4me Learning Center. The online 4me training exercises have all gotten a progress indicator. This should give trainees an idea of the progress they have made....
After an end user has selected a service in Self Service, a list of the available request templates (or standard requests) for that service is suggested. The same screen now also offers the public knowledge...
Sometimes a new knowledge article needs to be prepared that is very similar to an existing one. If the existing article has already been translated and keywords have been added, being able to duplicate this...
After opening a configuration item (CI) in Edit mode, a configuration manager is able to relate people to it as users. That has always been possible. Now it is possible to do this the other...
In the Service Desk console, the service desk analysts were already able to open a knowledge article from the list of search results in a separate browser tab. This is done by performing a Ctrl...
Apparently, users have often felt uncomfortable about declining requests because they were uncertain about where a declined request would get routed. That is why 4me now displays a message when a request is being declined....
Automation rules can now be added directly to task templates. In the past, it was only possible to add automation rules to task templates that belong to a specific change or project template. Continue reading
The visibility options for request templates have been renamed. They used to be called 'Self Service' and 'Service Hierarchy Browser'. But because specialists can now find all the request templates in Self Service that they...
API tokens needs to be treated with great care because they allow people to access the 4me service through the 4me APIs. If someone believes that his/her API token has accidentally been shared with others, it is possible 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 new note. From now on, the notes generated by the Mail...
When an inbound email contains more than 20 attachments, only the first 20 files are attached to the new note that the Mail API generates. What's new is that in such cases the following message...
Many of the views in 4me offer some buttons in their header. These are the state buttons. By pressing a state button, you retrieve a different list of records. Continue reading
Within 4me, there are many places where it is possible to relate a record to other records. To make it easy to find the right records, 4me provides lists of suggestions. Continue reading
Since the 'Reports' section was added to the Analytics console, the number of reports in this section has been growing steadily. Right now there are already 46 reports in this section and this number is...
When a custom date range can be set for a report, the quick ranges make this very easy. Users have indicated, however, that a few more quick ranges would be useful. Continue reading
Let's say that there is an issue with the production environment of the Sales Tracking application service. The specialist who is working on the incident has determined that there is something wrong with the infrastructure..Continue...
Mentions have become so popular that people expect this functionality to be available whenever they are adding a note to an assignment. That is why Mentions are now also available in the dialog window that...
Because service desk analysts often spend most of their time in the Service Desk console, they may not see the broadcasts that are intended for them. Also, when they are assisting someone, it would help...
After a request has been declined, it is automatically reassigned. The request is returned to the team coordinator when it was declined by a specialist who works for a team that has an active coordinator....
There are some notes that 4me adds automatically to requests. For example, when a change is successfully completed, a note is added to each request that is linked to the change to inform the requesters...
End users will see a different icon for the request templates in their Self Service search results. The intent of the new icon is to signal more clearly that selecting a request template from the...
When 4me presents a list of suggestions, this list is limited to 40 records. When more than 40 records match the value in the Search box, 4me now shows the total number of matches. Continue reading
Change managers are going to appreciate this usability improvement. When someone starts to register a new change and selects a change template, 4me is now going to remember this selection. The benefit is that the...
When you open a change or project in View mode and you click on a task within the small Gantt chart that is presented at the bottom of the screen, this task is presented in...
To ensure that change managers do not unintentionally affect a change template when they update a task template, they are now warned when this could happen. A warning is displayed when a change manager opens...
Change managers have provided some useful feedback that has helped us perfect the Gantt Chart interface they use to plan their changes. The results are the following 3 usability improvements: Continue reading
4me continuously learns from the searches that people perform. Search phrases that were previously used by others are suggested only when there is a fuzzy match with what has been entered in the Search box....
The interface that change managers use to manage their changes has drastically improved. With this new interface, change managers can plan a change using a graphical representation (a Gantt chart) of the implementation plan. Continue...
When a specialist is reviewing a Configuration Item (CI) record in 4me, there is now a quick way to open a new request for this CI. By clicking on the Actions button in the toolbar...
The Resource Planning view for projects has been improved. This is the view project managers use to ensure that the project team members do not have too much work assigned to them. Continue reading
When an organization changes its name as part of a rebranding exercise, this typically affects the name of its 4me account. Fortunately, the owner of the account is able update the account's name simply by...
Most organizations that use 4me also make use of UI extensions to add custom fields to the user interface for specific types of requests, tasks, configuration items, etc. When they get comfortable with this, they want...
The editor in which the code for the UI extensions is maintained has been improved. Continue reading
The status of each knowledge article is now visible in the search results for service desk analysts and specialists. This makes it easier to spot ’New’ articles. Continue reading
Many organizations customize the information they include in the email notifications that 4me generates on their behalf. For example, an external service provider may include the name of the customer organization in the email notification...
More and more organizations are setting up multiple accounts in 4me so that all the departments that support the core business (e.g. IT, HR, Purchasing, etc.) can have their own support domain. The specialists in...
You may have noticed that 4me now shows the initials of a person when a picture of this person is not yet available. This is a little more informative than 4me's default person icon, especially...
When you send an email to 4me to open a new request, or when you reply to an email notification that your received from 4me, the text in the body of your email gets added...
A minor, but helpful, usability feature has been added to the Service Desk console. After selecting a user in the left pane of the Service Desk console, the service desk analyst sees the user's services...
4me's Change Calendar has been improved again. These enhancements were introduced specifically for organizations that implement hundreds of changes each week. When they open their Change Calendar without any filtering, the sheer number of planned...
This is a somewhat unusual blog post. Rather than announcing a new feature, this post explains how it is now possible to switch off some existing functionality. Since most organizations have not implemented Release Management,...
A support specialist may be asked how much time she spent on a specific project during a specific month, week or day. Now she is able to answer that question by going to the Analytics...
A small usability feature has been added for people who register all their time in 4me. A double-click on a date in the calendar overview of a user's timesheet now opens a new time entry....
A few useful features have been added to the 4me Change Calendar. These improvements were added to ensure that very large support organizations, which manage hundreds of services, are still able to make effective use...
The option to fill out time entries for a whole week in a single screen was already available to all specialists. Now this feature is also available for end users in 4me Self Service. When...
The Service Desk console has been improved to help service desk analysts be even more efficient and to ensure that the search results are more likely to include useful items. The first thing that you...
You probably already noticed that the buttons in 4me got a makeover this weekend. The old buttons were starting to look a little worn out. The new styling makes them look fresh again. Apart from...
For those of you who maintain several 4me integrations, we have recently added a small feature to help you manage your webhooks. When you open an existing webhook or when you start to create a...
A minor, but useful, enhancement has been made available for change managers. When you open a change in View mode, you will notice that the graphical workflow representation no longer shows the start of the...
When you need to relate one or more configuration items to a request, service instance, contract or task, you can look up these CIs by entering part of their name or label. In some cases,...
Earlier this week the new text formatting features were released. You may have already noticed that the bar with the formatting options includes one extra option when you are working in a Note field. This...
The large text fields in 4me now offer some user-friendly formatting options. Only the most useful formatting features were added, to ensure that users will almost immediately feel comfortable using them. The screenshot below provides...
Nowadays, it is not uncommon for a large IT department to support more than a hundred services. Email is often cited as an example of a service, but each department of a modern enterprise seems...
You probably did not notice that, over the past two months, your search queries were gradually redirected to 4me's new search engine. The beauty of this new search engine is that its indices get updated...
The screen that displays the results of a search has been improved a little. This was done to make the 'Refine Search' options a little more intuitive to use. These options are now revealed when...
Managers (and their substitutes) use the 'Timesheets' section of the Analytics console to review the timesheets of the people who belong to their organization. It was already possible for them to adjust the time entries...
The icons and buttons of the 4me toolbar have been redesigned to make them easier to recognize. The Edit button received a special makeover. Now, when you press this button to open a record in...
To make the record-type icons stand out more clearly in the Inbox console, the small 'form' symbol has been removed. This makes it easier distinguish between the different record types. To ensure that the 'form'...
Time Tracking functionality has been extended with a helpful feature that makes it possible to quickly register your time for a whole week. To access this new feature, click on the Time Spent Today toolbar button...
4me's computer telephony integration (CTI) feature has been refined a little more for organizations that use an automatic call distributor (ACD) to collect, for example, a customer number from the caller before passing the call...
A usability feature has been added to fields that allow a single record to be selected by entering a few characters that match the record’s name. These fields now immediately suggest up to 10 of...
Email templates are available in 4me to define the information that the automatically generated email notifications need to contain. To avoid thousands of email notifications from getting sent out accidentally, these templates do not get...
The specialists who work in a support domain account were able to look up all organizations, people and sites that are maintained in the directory account in separate views. For example, to look up an...
There are several places in 4me where it is possible to link a record to multiple other records of the same type. Multiple configuration items, for example, can be linked to a request. Similarly, an...
Did you know that it is possible to customize the support link that your 4me users see after they have submitted their email address to reset their password, or after they tried to go to...
A small but very useful improvement has been made to the rules that automatically select a team after a service instance (SI) is linked to a request. In the past, these rules already ensured that...
Since January 12, 2016, Microsoft provides technical support and security updates only for the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system. This has encouraged organizations to upgrade their users to...
Directory administrators will be happy to know that the 'Sites' option is now available in the Records console. This replaces the 'Sites' section of the Settings console. It is just easier when these three record...
Sometimes it is important that a change does not get implemented before a certain date. Change managers can use the 'Start no earlier than' field of implementation tasks to specify the moment at which the...
The Service Hierarchy Browser (SHB) provides information that could be relevant for the request that you are working on. For example, it lists the child service instances and configuration items (CIs) that the service instance...
Many system management tools have already been integrated with 4me. When they pass an event to 4me's Events API or Mail API, a request gets generated in 4me. Specialists who pick up such requests may...
After January 12, 2016, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for Internet Explorer 8. That is also the day on which the 4me service will stop supporting IE8. This does not...
To expire an SLA, service level managers have always specified the end date in the Expiry date field. The 4me service subsequently ensures that the status of the SLA gets set to 'Expired' at midnight...
There are different ways to specify who is covered by an SLA. The coverage of most SLAs is defined by selecting the organizations which employees are to be covered. Enterprises with large organizational hierarchies asked...
A nice feature has been added for administrators who maintain the near real-time integrations between 4me and other applications using webhooks. Webhooks are essentially listeners that can detect specific events when they occur in 4me...
When the work on a request has been completed, its status is set to 'Completed'. The support specialist is then asked to select an option in the Completion reason field. The value that is selected...
Each record type in the 4me service has its own icon (or avatar). These small graphics help users to identify the type of record that they have opened more quickly. Images are processed faster than...
When you are relating the service owner to a service, you are creating a link with a Person record. When there are lots of people to choose from, it can be hard to find the...
The collision detection feature, which was introduced a few weeks ago for the Inbox views, has just been extended to all consoles of the 4me service. Apart from making collision detection available for all record...
Since your Inbox console now provides real-time information, we were able to introduce another useful feature. This feature shows you a warning whenever you are working in the Inbox console on a request, problem or...
Over the past weeks we have been extending the infrastructure of the 4me service. A major component has been added that delivers real-time updates in your inbox. It makes sure that when a request, problem or...
In 4me Mobile, you may have noticed that, when you zoom in, the icons of the application remain perfectly crisp. That's because these icons are defined by vectors rather than pixels. Now you can provide...
After you have registered a product, you will see that it now automatically gets an avatar that represents its category. This image also becomes visible in the configuration items that you register based on the...
Problem managers may have noticed a small change in the 'Requests for Problem Identification' view. The 'Service' column of this view has been replaced by the 'Service Instance' column. This provides a little more detail,...
End-users are able to reopen their completed request in 4me Self Service and 4me Mobile, provided that they were completed within the past 28 days. Apparently, not all end users noticed the reopen option. To...
For a while now, it has been possible to assign an approval task to multiple approvers. When the minimum number of approvals have been given, or when one of the approvers rejects the task, the...
Most tasks are generated automatically from a task template and do not get updated by the change manager. The context for the work that someone is asked to perform is typically provided by the related...
From now on, when the status of a configuration item is set to 'Removed', its service, service instance, CI and user relations are automatically removed. Apart from helping to keep the CMDB relations accurate, this...
It is time for us to say goodbye to Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. As of September 01, 2015, end users will no longer be able to use the IE7 browser to access 4me Self Service....
There are quite a few places in 4me where it is possible to relate multiple records of the same type to another record. For example, an approval task may need to be assigned to several...
Wherever we can, we try to minimize the amount of administration required from support specialists. We don't just do that to make the support specialists happy, though. It saves organizations real money when their people...
A small improvement has been made for people who are working with problems. When a problem is opened in View mode, they will notice the Created field. This allows everyone to see when the problem...
Give this a try: Drag a file to a request and drop it onto the Note field. The file gets uploaded as an attachment. You can also do this with multiple files. You will notice...
More and more, organizations are using UI extensions to ask their users to define their requirements by filling out some required fields. That can dramatically improve the efficiency with which standard service requests get processed....
Another improvement of the UI Extension functionality has been released. This one significantly improves the presentation of the fields that organizations have added to their requests. In the past, the additional fields were presented in...
The releases of the past two weekends were focused on making the 4me service even faster. Don't get too excited, though. We are talking about milliseconds here. Performance tuning is something we dive into whenever...
In the past, when you were adding a task to a change, you could populate the task's fields by selecting a task template in the Template field. Below you can see what that used to...
You probably noticed that each note is now accompanied by the picture of its author. That allows users to find the notes of a specific person more quickly. But did you already see the little...
Another small improvement has been added to the UI Extensions functionality. This improvement makes it possible to give each UI extension a title. The Title field is located just below the Name field on the...
When you open the Affected SLAs section of a request, you will see that the affected SLAs of the providers that you work for are highlighted. The highlight color indicates how close the next SLA...
Some organizations have already been using the 4me service for several years. Each year, their list of Holiday records has grown a little longer. To help you focus on the holidays that are still relevant,...
In the views of the Records console, the color behind the targets of requests, problems and tasks now varies depending on how close they are to their due date. The colors and thresholds in these...
Many support organizations have an intranet or internet site where they describe the services they offer. Now they can include hyperlinks in these descriptions that point their customers to the appropriate request template in Self...
4me provides special features that allow IT support organizations to work together more effectively with their external service providers (ESPs). One of these features ensures that, when an ESP completes a request, this request is...
