Today we’ll be looking at the new Activity Completion pages within the Cireson Service Manager Portal. These pages are designed to be a landing place where you can redirect users to via email or hyperlink to provide them with a streamlined experience. Primarily, these pages are targeted at occasional users of the Portal, and not your Analysts or Administrators.
With the above in mind, the completion pages are broken out into two separate pages, one for completing Review Activities and one for completing Manual Activities. While the pages are very similar to promote simplicity in use where a user may have to participate in both activities, they do have some unique functionality between them.
Activity Completion Basic Features
Shared among both pages is the parent Work Item information. In the example below, the Work Item section shows details around the parent Work Item, allowing the reviewer or activity implementor access to relevant information contained within the parent without having to navigate separately to the Work Item form.
At the top of the activity completion page, we have the title and the status pill. This is shared amongst all the activity completion pages and gives you a quick overview of what you are working with when you browse to the page.
Just under the primary header, each section of the form has a subheader, which signifies the type of activity you are dealing with along with the Work Item or activity ID and the title.
Within the Work Item section, the user has the option to view detailed information about any related user using the (i) within the combo box.
For each of the forms, the parent Work Item section is identical between the two and looks like this:
Within each form, you can also add new action log entries to the parent Work Item, or view the current action log entries for a historical context that may help you to better complete a manual activity or approve a request.
The final functionality shared between the two forms is the action buttons in the header.
The labels of the buttons vary slightly between the two forms (review vs complete, etc.) but the functionality works similarly. The two arrows allow you to easily navigate between activities that are also assigned to you without going back to the grid if you need to approve multiple items.
Last, we have the Activity section itself, and this is where the functionality that is unique to each activity type is located.
Review Activity Completion
In order to approve a review activity, you’ll need to understand what is being requested and who is requesting it. While we can show you who and to some degree the foundation for what in the Work Item activity section, we still need to show you the specifics of the review activity itself. As you might expect, this is where the Activity Completion Information section comes in.
From here you can see that the activity is assigned to you, which allows you to re-assign the activity to someone else as needed. We can also see the activity ID and title in the subheader, along with the description box just below. Lastly, we have the Approve and Reject buttons in the upper right corner, which is shared for both activity types as mentioned above.
One other key piece is that when you make a change to an activity other than Approving or Rejecting, you’ll also need to save those changes, which can be done using the buttons in the bottom center of the screen after a change has been made.
Manual Activity Completion
Now that we are familiar with the Review Activity, the Manual Activity information will look very similar. The only substantial difference here is that you can also see and change the support group that the Manual Activity is currently assigned to.
As mentioned above, once you are ready you can complete the changes using the controls in the upper right.
If you do make changes, you’ll need to save those changes just like in the Review Activity, using the bottom toolbar.
UI and URL Access
The last bit here is how we can access the Work Item completion pages. There are three defined ways of doing this.
First, you can access it from the My Work page, by either clicking directly on the work item in the Approval tab or Manual Activity tab.
Second, you can access the completion page from the Activities tab, by selecting the checkmark icon in the desired activities row, for either a Review Activity or a Manual Activity.
Lastly, we can access the activity completion page via the URL. This is useful if you are including the link in an email, text message, or within Microsoft Teams. Here is an example: https://domain.com/ManualActivity/Complete/MA88390
The most important aspects of the URL being the desired activity type (ReviewActivity or ManualActivity) and the /Complete followed by the activity ID. This will take you directly to the page.
Summary
The Activity Completion pages for the Cireson SCSM Analyst Portal should make it easier than ever for your Analysts and end-users to complete activities through the Cireson Service Manager Portal. I look forward to hearing from you on how this works for you, and how we might improve this functionality for the future.
