Summertime!

It’s also time for a new release – Service Market 6.0.8! We’ve concentrated mainly on fixing stuff in this release, and so a lot of issues (some new and some old) have been resolved. Hopefully even some that you’ve been waiting for! This means not much new functionality will come out of the box, but behind the scenes a lot of the functionality is more stable.

We’ve also continued to explore integration with Office 365, and have some working example solutions built with our Product Question and Powershell building blocks. Please make an inquiry if you’re interested in what can be done.

Since there’s not much else to say about this release we’ll take a look at a typical Product as a service concept, that’s available, if you go through a few hoops. Please have a go if it suits your environment and let us know if it’s something you think should be in a coming standard release:

Setting a user’s AD Thumbnail Image through self service

This is now possible by utilizing the new Image question, the new JSONAttributes generator and some tweaking of the Request Service workflow. This is a brief description of how it can be done:

  1. Create a new Product Question with the type Image. It should have the ActiveDirectory area and “thumbnailPhoto” attribute (if that’s what you want to set).
  2. Create a new Product Question with the type User.
  3. Create a JSONAttributes Generator with one input called “objectId”, and “thumbnailPhoto” in the Valid Attributes box.
  4. Create a Request Service Product, set it as active and add the two product questions from steps 1 and 2.
  5. The user question should have the Generator from step 3 selected with itself mapped to the input, and Get from logged-in (or target, if that suits you better) user checked.All in all, this is what steps 1-5 should look like in Product Administration:CaptureUserImageConf
  6. Open Workflow Manager, and open the WM_Request_Service workflow
  7. Add a GetIdentityForUser activity from the AteaSpintop.Activities.AD namespace, preferably after the SendServiceVendorMail activity, and map the UserId property to the Order.RequestingEmployeeId property, and ADServerName to the ADServerName property of the Workflow.
  8. Add a SortQuestions activity from the AteaSpintop.Activities.Question namespace, and map the Order parameter to the Order property of the Workflow.
  9. Add a SetADAttributesFromQuestions activity from the AteaSpintop.Activities.Question namespace, and map
    ObjectSID to the SID output property of the GetIdentityForUser activity in step 7
    QuestionAnswer to the QuestionAnswer output of SortQuestions in step 8
    DefaultDomainController to the ADServerName property of the WorkflowCapturePROPs
  10. Save, and compile the workflow after incrementing the version number.
  11. You are now good to go! Navigate to Request Service and add your product to the cart. Try changing the image and submit the order.CaptureServiceImage

Amazing, isn’t it? In a production environment, you would probably want your own dedicated Service and maybe workflow to do this. This is also perfectly possible, and will be covered in detail in a later post 🙂

Happy installing and upgrading, and don’t forget telling us how this little experiment went!