Using Email to create Service Request

Owned by Enterprise IT
May 29, 2024
3 min read

From DENALI SP3 Release onwards, a Service Request (SR) can be created via Email. This feature provides you the additional benefit of creating SRs without logging in to the SummitAI application. The following figure illustrates the high-level steps to configure the parsing logic and other key functionalities.

Figure: Admin Functionalities

Target Audience

The Email to Service Request feature is primarily designed for Administrators. This will help the administrator to understand how to configure the email to SR parser rules.

Key Features

The key features provided by E-Mail to SR are:

  • Administrator
    • Configure Mailbox
      • The first step is to configure the Mailbox to which the Emails sent needs to be converted to an SR.
    • Define Notification Parser Rules
      • Define the Parsing Keys using which you can configure the conditions. You can define Parsing Keys by ‘Line’ or ‘Free Form’.
        • Example for Parsing Keys by Line: To extract a word ‘server’ occurring on line 2 in email you have defined user-defined key ‘server’. This will check for the occurrence of the word ‘server’ on 2nd line of the email body.
        • Example for Parsing Keys by Free Text: To extract a word ‘disk’ occurring anywhere in email between the predecessor word ‘critical’ and successor word ‘issue’ you have defined user-defined key ‘Category’. This will check for the occurrence of the word ‘disk’ present between the words ‘critical’ and ‘successor’.
      • Define single or multiple conditions with a combination of ‘OR’ / ‘AND’ as a parsing logic and map it to a Service Catalog. For example, if Subject contains ‘HR’, move it to ‘HR’ Service Catalog.
      • Map the user-defined keys to Service Request attributes such as Workgroup, Priority, etc.
    • Significance of Order Number
      • Capability to specify execution order number for parsing rules. If there are multiple rules to which the Email matches the condition then the execution of parser rule depends on the order number. The lowest order number will have the highest priority.
        For Example, Rule A with order number ‘1’ is mapped to ‘Windows’ Service Catalog and Rule B with order number ‘2’ is mapped to ‘Linux’ Service Catalog. If the email matches both rules then Rule A is given priority and executed since it has the lowest order number.
    • Educate End Users by sending Broadcast Email
      • Capability to send a broadcast email to all the users for using the Mail to SR feature.
  • Analyst
    • Email Attachments and Change History
      • Provision to view email sent by the user as an attachment in Service Request.
      • Track the Notification Parser rule that created the request/incident in the Change History of Service Request.
      • The Attachments added by the user in the Mail can be viewed in the Service Request Details screen.
    • Image in Mail-to-Ticket

      Earlier, whenever the user drafts the mail body description and adds an image in the mail body to raise the ticket, the added Image in the mail body is displayed as an attachment in the ticket. Since it was shown as an attachment, we could not understand what the user intended to say and which image he is referring to.  

      From TahoeSP3 onwards the Image included in the mail body description while raising the mail-to-ticket is displayed in the description of the ticket, which gives the user more clarity to understand and visualize the problem.  

      Similarly, the HTML content in the mail body would be appearing in the description. 

      You can see the following screen of the Service Request ticket. You can use the Show More link next to the Description box that displays Description pop-up of the ticket with the Image attached in mail body.


      Figure: Description pop-up

      Note:

      You can only have the Image in the Description pop-up or Description box of the ticket if the following key is added to the Web.config file and the value is true. 

      <add key="IncludeImageInMailBody" value="true" /> 

      • This Image in Mail-to-Ticket is applicable only for Exchange Mailbox Server Type.
  • End User
    • Enabling End Users
      • End users can refer to the Broadcast email or use the New Service Request home page to identify the conditions based on which Service Requests will be created from emails.

Limitations

The limitation for configuring the Email to SR feature is:

  • Email to SR Parser does not work for Service Catalogs with mandatory custom attributes.