This is part 2 in our Cireson Service Manager Portal (SMP) Add-Ins series. Learn about the concept of Add-Ins in part 1, Get Functionality Fast with Cireson Portal Add-Ins.
You can now improve the Service Manager Portal (SMP) home page experience in a way that won’t take a lot of time: introducing HomePage Widgets Add-Ins! These widgets are part of Cireson’s Add-in collection—extensions that enable functionality with little or no code. They help you realize benefits of customization without experiencing challenges around upgrades, management or the need for specialized knowledge.
Why Should You Use the Homepage Widgets Add-In?
Most software comes with out-of-box options. The Cireson Portal for Service Manager (SMP) offers three home pages, but most customers want a way to personalize and restructure the homepage to better fit organizational and user needs. You can use some simple custom code to make basic modifications to any of the out-of-box homepages, you use complex code to design your own bespoke pages, but both are difficult. SMP has a built in page builder to drop widgets onto but all of the out-of-box widgets are built for dashboard reporting, not for end user and analyst landing pages.
The Homepage Widgets Add-In give you compact, easy, flexible way to define your own layout and user experience (without time-consuming customization). You can define a bespoke page, showing the information, offerings and articles you want to display, meaning your users or analysts can get to what they need easier and quicker.
With HomePage Widgets Add-In, you are able to build pages that can:
- Create different experiences for analysts (example: display work item and related data) and end users from various departments (example: display service catalog, featured knowledge base articles).
- Display key resources in one dynamic view.
- Bring important data to the surface, so that it takes fewer clicks to get to valuable content.
- Combine homepage content with charts and counters from out-of-box widgets.
The cool thing is that this Add-In contains multiple widgets that help you accomplish what you want. When you install the HomePage Widgets Add-In, you get:
Welcome Message Widget
Depending on the time of day, users are greeted with “good morning” or “good afternoon.” It can be configured to also display a custom message and closed with a click.
Catalog Browser Widget
Users can navigate the service catalog by browsing by category and service offering.
Service Catalog Search Widget
Request offerings and knowledge base (KB) articles are returned using this search widget.
Top or Favorite Requests Widget
Help end users find common/popular service request offerings—or requests they have previously favored in the out-of-box home page using this widget. End users can get a horizontal or vertical view of selected articles.
Top or Featured Articles Widget
Admin-selected articles or those with the highest view count can be displayed with this widget.
Work Item Card Widget
View work items in a dense card format, along with My Requests, My Work or saved search results.
You can find settings and instructions on installing and configuring this Add-In in our HomePage Widgets Add-In KB article.
This is part 2 in our Cireson Service Manager Portal (SMP) Add-In series. In part 3, we’ll cover the Page Filter Widget, part 4 will detail the WordCloud Widget and in part 5 we’ll show you how to create your own widget. To get an overview of Add-Ins, check out part 1 in our Add-in series, Get Functionality Fast with Cireson Portal Add-Ins.
