As a partner who has delivered award-winning Cherwell Self Service Portals, CIHS recently had the honour of being invited to speak at one of the Cherwell Service Management special interest group sessions.
Jamie Girvin from Manchester Metropolitan University provided the Portal Showcase, giving a great insight into the process they went through at MMU to arrive at the current iteration of their Self Service Portal.
I was asked to discuss Cherwell Self Service Portal implementation from the perspective of Best Practice. This was covered by a case study and a demonstration of a previous implementation, covering the engagement, design specification, feedback, POC, testing and delivery.
During the demo, I demonstrated a number of the unique design features and functionality improvements that we delivered. Many of the questions taken at the end of the session were requests for more information on how we implemented.
So, in response to that, we’ve decided to release some of our internal documentation to help Cherwell users take advantage of the same enhancements…
Service Catalogue Shortcuts
If you’re taking advantage of the 3-tier classification system, you may occasionally find that under some classifications, there’s only one single Subcategory to choose from within a Category. To reduce customer frustration, this customisation provides a convenient shortcut directly to the relevant Specifics form without forcing the user to drill down to view the single Subcategory choice.
We know this internally by the less snappy title “How To – Make Service Catalogue Category view launch the specifics form if there is only one Subcategory“
This set of instructions covers implementation on to an on-premise CSM v9 environment – where this customisation was initially developed. Instructions for a v10 instance are somewhat different.
As described in the document, implementation of this for CSM v9 or v10 requires a few minor code changes to the Self Service instance. As such, Cherwell-hosted SaaS customers may not be able to take advantage of this functionality. Any customers using CIHS-hosted SaaS can ask us to take advantage of this enhancement and we’ll handle the deployment for you.
mApp – Bubble Badges
Bubble badges are iOS-style notifications which are used to drive engagement. They should work as a call to action for the user,
alerting them to the fact that there are activities which they need to perform, or that there is important information which they have not yet seen.
We’ve implemented this mApp a number of times across a range of Cherwell systems, driving engagement with great success.
Although we’re not yet releasing the full mApp publicly, the documentation provided gives detailed insight into how the mApp was put together and provides a great deal of best practice information on how this functionality should be implemented.
