Services And The Service Catalog
A service is one thing a requester can ask for. The Service Catalog is the list of services a requester can see. This page covers creating categories and services, and what a service sets on every ticket raised against it.
Before you start
- You need SystemAdmin access. Department Admin is not enough.
- Sensitive changes ask you to re-enter your credentials first. This is called step-up verification.
- The owning department must be enabled.
- Any workflow, service-level agreement (SLA) policy, or fixed owner you intend to set as a service default must already exist and be active.
What a service configures
| Setting | Effect on a new ticket |
|---|---|
| Department | The department that owns the ticket and controls who can work it. |
| Category | Where the service appears in catalog browsing. |
| Default workflow | The status lifecycle the ticket follows. |
| Default SLA policy | The first-response and resolution targets applied to tickets raised on this service, in preference to the department's own selection. See below. |
| Fixed owner for new tickets | An owner assigned when nothing earlier assigned one. |
| Intake questions | The custom fields the requester answers at submission. |
| Ticket email detail | How much ticket detail outbound email may include. |
| Customer requester visibility | Whether Customer Portal requesters can see the service. |
A default applies to new tickets only. Changing a service default does not rewrite the workflow or SLA of a ticket that already exists.
Ticket email detail takes one of three values:
| Value | What outbound ticket-update email carries |
|---|---|
| Standard email detail | May include safe ticket detail and approved before/after values. |
| Minimal email detail | Says only that something changed and tells people to sign in for details — no names, values, attachment names, comments, or sensitive detail. |
| No ticket update emails | Ticket-update email is blocked for this service entirely. |
Use Minimal or No ticket update emails for services whose subject matter should not travel in email — HR, payroll, legal, salary, privacy, or regulated work. See Mail for how this sits alongside the installation-wide disclosure and category controls.
The Default SLA policy applies, but it can fall through silently. A ticket raised on this service takes the service's Default SLA policy — provided the service is active, sits in the ticket's department, and the named policy is itself active and inside its effective dates. If any of those is untrue the product does not warn you: it quietly falls back to the department's own policy selection instead. So a ticket can end up on different targets from the ones the service names, with nothing on screen to say so. See Service-level agreements.
Create a service category
A category groups services for browsing. It grants no access.
- Open Service Categories. The list shows active categories, inactive categories, and their order.
- Select Add category.
- Enter a Category key. It must begin with a letter and contain only letters, numbers, or underscores.
- Enter the Display name requesters will see.
- Enter the optional Reference prefix, Description, and Sort order.
- Select Create category once. The new category appears in the list.
- Set the sort order of the surrounding categories so the browsing sequence is the one you want.
Requester browsing shows active categories only. Select Pause category to remove a category from browsing. Pausing keeps its configuration and does not change existing tickets.
Create a service
Open Services. Filter the list by department, category, active state, or name.
Select Prepare a new service.
Set the owning Department and the Category. The category list marks a paused category (Inactive). Choosing one does not make it visible to requesters.
Enter the Service name, the description operators see, the sort order, and the catalog icon.
Set whether the service creates child action items.
Set the defaults you want, or leave each empty:
- Default SLA policy (optional) — chosen from the service's department.
- Default workflow (optional) — chosen from the service's department.
- Fixed owner for new tickets (optional) — one active person with Work or stronger access in that department.
- Ticket email detail.
Select Create service once.
Reopen the service and confirm the saved department, category, and defaults.
To change a service later, open it and select its edit control, then Update service.
Changing or clearing a service's Default workflow is refused if it would strand a live ticket — one sitting in a status that would then have no outbound move. The message names the count and the status key. Give that status an outbound move in the replacement workflow, or move the affected tickets first, then retry.
The department you choose limits which workflows and SLA policies the default lists offer. If a workflow or SLA policy you expect is missing, it belongs to a different department or is not active.
Disable and restore a service
- Open the service in Services.
- Select Disable service.
- Confirm the service no longer appears in requester browsing.
Select Restore service to return it. Disabling does not delete the service, its intake fields, its project-role mappings, or the tickets already raised against it. Before disabling, check which requesters use the service and which project-role mappings depend on it.
Customer Portal visibility
Internal requester visibility and Customer Portal visibility are separate settings. A service visible to internal requesters is not automatically visible to Customer Portal requesters. Some services can never be shown to Customer Portal requesters — for example, a service whose intake form contains a project reference or a user picker. See Customer Portal.