Multi asset by ticket, how to?

[Support Team]

Re: Multi asset by ticket, how to?

Rayman, I think that these may be two different items. RangerMSP does track the entire service history for each Asset. Simply visit the Assets Tickets tab and you get an entire list of all tickets that are related specific, and only to, this specific Asset. This way that technician should not spend the time reinventing the wheel for an issue that has already been handled for the device, they should simply review past tickets for this specific Asset, again, this is already supported and working well.

Actually, with multiple Assets per a single Ticket we are somewhat afraid of breaking this consistency. Supporting this will mean that when you visit the Asset History to see past Tickets you'll see Tickets that are also related to other Assets, not only this one, and this might be confusing when you open the Ticket and read its resolution only to find out that it has nothing to do with the Asset you're interested at. Having said that, we do see the point and how it may help to support multiple Assets per a single Ticket and we will evaluate our options.

Thanks for all your feedback.

[raymond]

Re: Multi asset by ticket, how to?

Commit, as kindly as I can say it, you are simply not getting it... everyone here is saying the same thing: we need to be able to link a ticket to multiple assets so that we can quickly look at an asset and see ALL the work that was done to it. Six things to consider:

1) The concern "Supporting this will mean that when you visit the Asset History to see past Tickets you'll see Tickets that are also related to other Assets" is entirely a non-issue, in fact that is the whole point -- that's exactly what we want!!! Tickets get linked to an asset only if the tech decides it's relevant before manually linking it. THIS WILL EXPONENTIALLY IMPROVE ASSOCIATING AND FINDING INFORMATION ACROSS THE BOARD!!!

In fact, having it link to multiple assets might actually lead to a faster solution in the field! For example, if a tech works a ticket and they touch two obvious assets in the process (say a workstation and antivirus) then later realizes the solution involved an asset that nobody thought would be connected (maybe the firewall was the problem because it was blocking packets), then they may decide that the ticket really only needs to be linked to the antivirus asset and the firewall asset. The next time someone is having issues with antivirus, they would look at that asset and possibly see the link to the firewall... bam -- a much quicker solution!

2) The number of times that a ticket touches more than one asset is frequent... understanding this fact is critical!

3) The comment about "breaking the consistency" doesn't really mean much given that the current asset link in a ticket does nothing other than create a link... why in the world wouldn't you want to improve this function and expand on it? Does your phone only link to one person/phone number? When you search the internet, do you only get one result back? When you look at your credit card statement, do you only see charges from one vendor?!?

4) Again, remember that the tech must create the links -- if folks only want to limit things to a single asset, then they only link it to one asset!

5) The modification is super simple to implement: add an Assets tab to Tickets (just like there is a Tickets tab in Assets) and delete the Asset field in the ticket... super simple! Heck, I would then make a case to move the Contract field back up where the Asset field is so that it matches the same location it is charges (now we are talking about keeping things consistent).

6) This single modification will go a looooooooooooong way to improving the "search" capability for CommitCRM in a serious and global way... seriously!!

Please, (please, please!) allow us to link multiple assets to tickets...

//ray

[nattivillin]

Re: Multi asset by ticket, how to?

I see commit's issue with breaking the consistency, from a programming POV. I just don't think they see how each of our tickets touch multiple assets and how we NEED it to be that way.

Just today i went in for a simple printer issue, and ended up touching 4 assets. The printer, and the 3 desktops that couldn't print. Since I cant link the ticket to 4 assets, what do we to doCommitCRM? Maybe that have a better way to do it that we are not considering.

Since we cant link them properly, we choose not to add the asset to a ticket that touches many. Otherwise we have no consistency on our end. This is definitely not ideal because if it happens again, i would like to click on the printer history and see there are several assets involved with this printing issue. This would help the next tech jump to the end of the trouble shooting because they can see what we did already with EACH ASSET.

This is an issue of programmer meets field tech. This is how we need to use it, so you have to figure out how to make it work :)

[raymond]

Re: Multi asset by ticket, how to?

Being able to track technically what is happening to an asset is undeniably huge (as we are all saying) but there are other benefits to being able to link multiple assets to a single ticket such as when ordering maintenance renewals. For example, if we have 3 firewalls that need to have security services renewed, we create a ticket to not only track the charges (which is usually one single order times three) and labor, but also the order process and status (either by attaching documents, forwarding emails through the email connector or via history notes) – this lets us quickly determine if we have a quote, did it get ordered (from which vendor and sales person), was it delivered, etc. Unfortunately we can't link this ticket to all three assets which kills the ability for us to reverse lookup where we are in the renewal process of a specific asset... we have to remember what's going on or worse, hunt and peck through the client’s tickets to see what’s up... (yikes)! This renewals process happens ALL of the time, for both software and hardware assets...

And if I’m going to continue on this path, let's not miss tracking charges per asset... think about the power of this option: list all charges and filter on asset... WOW!!! Being able to see in a cursory way how much an asset is costing to maintain... just think about how powerful that would be when talking with a client about replacing an old workstation/printer/switch/firewall, etc. I fully understand that this last idea is much more involved programmatically because there currently is no way to filter charges by asset (yet) but just think of the possibilities... dang!

I keep coming back to what I think is the main point here: implementing this would be super simple to do (add an Assets tab and remove the Assets field from tickets) and have huge benefits.

thanks again!

//ray

[Support Team]

Re: Multi asset by ticket, how to?

We do not argue with what you posted nor can or should we. We are here to service your needs and requirements. Yet, from servicing all users and helping and many different scenarios we do see several points where such a change might cause problems to users and this is why we say that we evaluate and consider this feedback.

For what it worth, from technical perspective things are, by far, more complex than what one may imagine - database, APIs, system reports and user customized reports, templates, forms, Web interface, Online Services, Email Templates, Quick preview, filters you define, etc. - are all referring to a single database field of an asset in the ticket. Plus, the RMM links will break as well as the plugins (developed by RangerMSP or by third parties) rely on the Asset field being a field in the Ticket.
A Multi-Asset per Ticket will completely break this and will require plenty of changes both from our side, 3rd parties (RMM) as well as from user perspective (all of the custom reports/filters/online-services/etc. you configured for tickets that are based on the Asset field).
Naturally we've handled more complex cases, however, we wanted to clarify that it is a much larger project than it seems and therefore it is being considered in comparison with other requests.

Thank you all for keep posting your feedback. We highly appreciate it and learn from it.