Scopes

Introduction to scopes

When a ticket passes through a process there are several positions it has to pass, all in a pre-defined order. For example, in a service desk environment, the ticket comes in as new ticket, then it has to be pre-qualified (in our example: are there any SLAs which have to be taken into consideration, is it a VIP customer?). Subsequently, the engineer can work on the ticket and might put it on hold for a while. Then the ticket should be closed, either as positive, with solution or negative, without solution. Those major steps of the process are represented as scopes in ConSol CM workflows. See the following figure for an example workflow.

Figure 26: ConSol CM Process Designer - Workflow with scopes

Within each larger process step (i.e., within each scope), there can be one or more activities, e.g., during pre-qualification, first the required parameters are set, the ticket has to be accepted, and a receipt notice is sent. There are regular activities which form a defined sequence of steps which have to be performed, and there might be scope activities which are available as long as the ticket is in the scope, without a strictly defined position in the process. Both types of activities are described in detail in the section Activities. Here, only scopes are explained.

A scope can be part of another scope or - seen from the opposite point of view - a scope can contain sub-scopes.

A scope can have various types of triggers, e.g., a mail trigger fires whenever an email to a ticket, which is currently in the scope, has been received. Please see sections Mail triggers, Time triggers, and Business event triggers for details.

Defining a new scope

In order to define a new scope, i.e., to add a new scope to the workflow, grab the scope icon in the palette and drag-and-drop it to the workflow at the position where you would like to locate it. Activate it with a double-click. Then you can add new activities or other elements or drag existing activities/elements into the scope. When you connect elements by drawing arrows, the entry and exit points of a scope are defined automatically.

Figure 27: ConSol CM Process Designer - Automatically generated exit and entry points in scopes

When you have defined/added the new scope you can define the scope's properties, see next section.

Properties of a scope

Scope have the following properties:

Scopes and views

Views, i.e., the selection criteria for the ticket list(s), are defined based on scopes. For a detailed explanation of views and view definition, please refer to the respective section in the ConSol CM Administrator Manual.

In the present context, i.e., when you define scopes in the workflow, it is important to keep in mind which views might be required later on. For example, the mechanism of new, active, and pending tickets is based entirely on the scope and view definition:

That means, whenever a view is required to display only a certain sort of tickets, a scope has to be defined.

We strongly recommend not to define views which contain closed tickets!

The number of closed tickets will grow considerably during work with the application. Therefore, the view of closed tickets would always reach the maximum number of tickets allowed for a view (which can be defined using a system property). This can have negative influence on the performance of the Web Client and in most cases the desired tickets will not even be among the first 50 or 100 tickets.

Conclusion: A view of closed tickets does not help and might decrease the speed of the system for the engineers. Only in test environments, a view for closed tickets might be an option.

Scope sort index

The sort index defines the order of the tickets in the ticket list in CM/Track V2 if the ticket list is sorted by scope. This setting applies when the user selects Scope in the Sort by drop-down list above the list of tickets.