The new version includes significant improvements in email usability, automatic email request/response handling, enhanced Visual Process Manager (VPM), a new watched call facility, better support for currency and decimal handling, enhanced supportability functions and numerous usability and performance enhancements. Hornbill has developed the new features as a result of feedback from customers to improve usability and simplify administration tasks. As well as the many new features, a complete overhaul of the date/time handling features within the system including full support for ISO8601, the internationally accepted global standard for date, time and time zone representation has been adopted across the board as well as fully configurable user profiles for local time zone and local settings to support Hornbill’s rapidly growing base of international and global, multi-site customers.

Within Version 7.2, the way in which email messages are routed to mailboxes and/or folders within the Supportworks system is now a highly configurable rules-based system. For service desks that have a large number of mailboxes and users, the manual routing of email between folders, users, groups and teams can be very time consuming. Administrators can now set up rules to do most of this fully automatically. Not only can mails be routed to specific mailboxes but further rules can be applied to have the system perform actions automatically in response to emails received, acting on the content to drive the rules. For example, logging a new ticket, updating the database or sending any automatic response from a pre-configured set of context rich formatted email templates is now all possible with relatively minor configuration. Automating these processes reflects the trend in many large organisations for people to communicate using email, and provides a framework to fully automate many typical email requests from customers.

The new ‘watched’ calls facility within Supportworks is useful for supervisors and managers who need to review specific items from particular customers. A tab can be created “My Watched Calls”, enabling you to mark a ticket so you can keep an eye and be informed on its progress throughout the lifecycle of the ticket.

Enhancements have also been made to make the VPM and Visual Process Management Engine (VPME) even easier to use for the system administrator. The VPM was introduced with the earlier version 7.0 to provide a graphical way of defining functional business processes without having to write code or script. This approach meets one of the basic concepts of ITIL, enabling users to more easily automate and manage operational business and processes.

Gerry Sweeney, of Hornbill Systems “From the very early days Hornbill’s founding principles remain true – to provide the very best product in its specialist area that is sympathetic to the user.”

“Hornbill’s approach is to maintain a focus on what the customer needs throughout its product development activities, the user experience is key to everything we do. By listening to our customers and incorporating their feedback into our development process, Hornbill continues to deliver what our customers are looking for. I am particularly proud of the technical and QA teams behind the Supportworks solution. Apart from the new enhancements, a very notable feature of this recent release has been the relentless drive on improvement in product quality; Supportworks is rapidly becoming a very special product”