A friend asked me if it is possible to show the status of a related review activity in the “All Open Service Requests” view? After a while we realized that a requirements was to show the status of the last review activities, so if there were multiple review activities we just wanted to show the last one. The reason why they needed this view was that customer called service desk and asked about service requests. With a view like this the operator could easy see if all the manual review activities was completed, if the service request was still waiting on more approvals or if someone was building/working on the requested service.

We started by extending the Service Request class in Service Manager with two new properties, one to show the last review activity status and one to show when we last updated that status.

We use a runbook to update these properties

Comprehensive description of each activity in the runbook

1. Monitor Date/Time. The runbook runs every 30 minutes
2. Query Database. Truncates a database that is used to store data temporary. The runbook use a database table to store review activity information temporary.
   
3. Get Object. Gets all open Service Requests, from the extended Service Request class.
4. Get Relationship. Get related Review Activities for each open Service Request
5. Update Object. If there are no related review activities it will update the “LastStatus” property with “No Review Activities”
6. Get Object. If there are related review activities it will get the review activity and write review activitiy and Service Request information to the database
7. Junction is used to merge all threads together to one
8. Format the current time/date to a format that works with Service Manager
9. Query Database. Query the database to get last review activity for each Service Request and status of it
10. Update Object. Updates each Service Request that is in the database with review activity status

The result in the Service Manager console can look like this

You can download my example runbook and Service Manager class extension here, 20130616_SRStatus

Note that this is provided “AS-IS” with no warranties at all. This is not a production ready management pack or solution, just a idea and an example.