| A Newsletter about Remedy at NC State University | January 2002 |
In This Issue:
Remedy Server 4.5.2 Installed
During the holiday break, the Remedy server software was upgraded to version 4.5.2. This upgrade provides some new features on the development side that will enable us to further improve the user interface.
The currently reccommended clients can be download from the NC State Remedy Project Page, or from the Remedy Corporation Download Page.
Remedy Corporation purchased by Peregrine
In June of 2001, Peregrine Corporation announced its intention to acquire Remedy Corporation. This transaction has been completed. As of today, we do not expect any major impact on NC State's deployment of Remedy products other than a potential increase in our licensing fees.
Improvements to the Solutions Database Interface
A number of changes and bug fixes have been made to the Remedy Solutions database, and its associated interfaces. First, all of the existing keywords have been converted to lower-case, as are new keywords as they are added. This should make it easier to find the solutions you are looking for.
Additionally, the results returned when searching from the Solutions tab on the Calls form are now ordered correctly (most recently-used first), and the solution status is now correctly displayed.
Remedy keeps track of the "last several" solutions that you have associated with calls. These solutions can be displayed using the "Recent" button on the Solutions tab of the Calls form. This display has also been improved as described above. You can control the number of solutions that Remedy remembers through your Remedy User record.
Recently, our remedy system has come under attack from a variety of internet email worms. From time to time, the system receives these worms from folks who have one of the various Remedy email addresses in their address books. When they get infected, they inadvertantly send us a copy of the email worm. Fortunately, many of these worms are easy to spot, and we are able to recognize them and remove them from the system. We will keep watch for new worms, and filter them out as they appear.
RemedyWeb URLs in Remedy Notifications
Those of you who receive email notifications from Remedy may have noticed that these notifications now contain a RemedyWeb URL. This URL will take you directly to the relevant call if you have a properly configured JAVA capable browser. With the availability of Remedy client version 4.5.2, we now have control over the background colors that are used to present the various types of Remedy screens (search, modify, etc.). This functionality was available in older versions of the client software, but disappeared for several releases. Its back now, and beginning on February 1, 2002, we will enable this functionality from the server. So, after the effective date, if you would prefer to see your Remedy screens in different colors, you will be able to do so. The interface for specifying colors in Remedy is found in the "Tools->Options..." menu under the "Colors" tab. This functionality is only available in the Remedy client version 4.5.2 or later. Continuing in February, ITD will be offering monthly Remedy training. The first Thursday of each month from 9:00 - 11:00 AM will be the designated time. The training will take place at the ITD training facility in the Avent Ferry Convention Center. We will alternate monthly between "Introduction to Remedy at NC State" and "Advanced Remedy Topics", continuing with an Introduction to Remedy on February 7. The training is open to any NC State Remedy user, at no cost and with no preregistration required.Special training sessions can be arranged as requested. Please contact the campus Remedy Administrators to make these arrangements.
During the past few months, there has been an increase in the amount of unsolicited email (SPAM) directed toward the Remedy system. There is no practical method of recognizing and ignoring many of these messages, so the next best thing is to move them into the TRASH workgroup.
There are no acknowledgements, notifications or surveys associated with the TRASH workgroup, so just move them and forget them. Also, by getting them out of your workroup, they won't skew your call statistics.
Miscellaneous Enhancements and Bug Fixes
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Repeating Notifications -
Traditionally, the "Dormant" and "No Call Owner" (NCO) notifications
that Remedy sends have been setup to deliver once, and then
quietly remove themselves from the system. Some of our Remedy
users have asked for notifications that will repeat, at specified
intervals, until a particular condition changes. To satisfy
these requests, we have developed repeating "Dormant" and
"NCO" notifications. For example: If you wanted to notify a
workgroup member that there was a call in the workgroup that was
"Critical" priority, and no one had taken ownership of it, and
you wanted the notification to be sent hourly, as long as the
call remained unowned, we can now do that. Similarly for a dormant
call of a specified priority.
Please contact the campus Remedy Administrators if your workgroup could benefit from this type of notification. (12/26/01)
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NDS Login data -
In an effort to gain a better understanding of the root cause of the
Windows profile corruption problems that we have been experiencing
in some of the public labs, we
have developed an interface between the NDS login data and our Remedy
system. We hope that be observing where our customers
are logging in, we may be able to detect a pattern in the failures.
Please contact the campus Remedy Administrators if access to this data would be helpful to your organization. (12/19/01)
Additional details about this integration can be found at:
http://remedy.ncsu.edu/project/ndslogs
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New options for inbound email -
The Perl scripts that comprise the interface between the Remedy system
and our campus email has been enhanced to allow for additional
options. It is now possible to establish an email address that will
result in creating a call with a particular priority or to create
a call that is associated with a particular Remedy Product.
Please contact the campus Remedy Administrators if you would like to take advantage of these new options. (09/20/01)
- Broadcast facility to convey critical information to logged-in Remedy users
- Support for attachments in Remedy