The Email System: My Favorite New ITSM 7 Feature

Finally, the ITSM product offers a feature that customers have wanted for years. While Remedy has had an Email Engine for a while and you could send out automatic notifications at any point, customers often wanted a way to send out updates at any time, and link that e-mail to the request.

Both Change Management and Service Desk 7.0 include a feature called "Email System" (as well as an equivalent feature called Paging System). Choosing the option from the sidebar opens up an dialog where one can compose an email, selecting a recipient from the people involved in the request (assignee, requester, etc) and inserting values from the request (Summary, Description, Request ID). After sending the e-mail, the contents are tracked in the Work Info tab.

I had actually written a customization for ITSM 6 that did most of these things. What I like best about Remedy's implementation of the requirement is that you can adapt it for use with any app - there are no changes to the Change or Incident forms since it is a separate dialog box, and the fact that they came up with the idea for field-value replacement.