It’s time for a new release of Service Market! This time it’s 6.0.7. We continue our quest for the ultimate automated self service portal, and we’ve added a few more features to help us along the way:
OS/platform filter for Software – Software can now be filtered on Tags and depending on the target computer certain tags will be pre-selected. The filter is set by default on a best effort basis using the SCCM and the user is able to “opt out” by clearing the filter.
If we get a bit technical, we could have a look at a new table in the database: ProductTagsOsMapping. This table is used to map from the rather technical names for OS’s that SCCM uses internally (and which we sniff out from there) to a more user friendly tag name which can be used to tag up your software. We have pre-populated this table with most Windows versions, but feel free to add more default OS’s, e.g. MacOS. Feel free to contact us with suggestions and questions regarding this!
Offerings can now connect to an ad group or OU – We’ve had a secret AD group functionality regarding Offerings for a while, but now we’ve made it official. Through the Offerings administration service you can now connect an offering to AD groups and or OUs. Users will automatically get access to offerings based on these if they are configured. For example, this makes it easy to have a Product offering for each country, if the users are placed in country OU’s for example. This is also a part of our ongoing mission to make our Department logic optional, and make it possible to base this kind of business logic purely on AD (or other systems’) information.
Request Product Beta Toolkit – In this version we’re also taking steps towards making a more flexible service concept happen. Let’s call it Request Product, a configurable generic complementing our standard services. Making use of recent feature updates like custom workflows, powershell scripts and generators, it’s now possible to set up a Service product to perform a lot of stuff. To help with this there’s a new Image Product Question, a new Password type for text boxes, and a few generators that will populate Product Questions depending on attributes. All of them take an identifier and a list of attributes to fetch as input, and will (should if you write your own Powershell) return the attributes as properties in a stringified JSON object. There’s also new or updated Workflow activities to help performing the services.
You can also set up the Service table to get (some) products directly in the menu, by adding a new row. The magic happens in the new QueryString column, where you can tell the RequestGenericService usercontrol which product to go to. (For the curious it’s the “p” or “d” parameter which should be set to the productID, try it out for yourselves to see the difference).
Examples of where this might come in handy could be customized services where you can set AD attributes (like Thumbnail Image) arbitrarily, or automate through external systems with Question forms running Powershell in the back-end. Nearly everything (of course) is possible! 🙂 We’re happy to assist you with trying this out, contact us with a use case in mind and we’ll se what we can do. Note that these features have yet to make into the documentation, but any questions will be answered as soon as possible!
Happy installing and upgrading!