How is "Owners Only" comments supposed to work?
I read in the
Dell KACE K1000 System Management Appliance Version 5.4, Service Desk Administrator Guide p. 49
Adding owner-only comments to a ticket
You can add comments to a ticket that only ticket owners can see by selecting the Ownersonly
check box on the each ticket’s detail page. To disable this setting, clear the Owners-only
check box. Other ticket owners have permission to clear this box and might not read the
comments before doing so. Therefore, Dell KACE recommends you do the following:
• Always use discretion in these comments.
• Have a clear, well documented policy for changing this setting.
However, in our actual experience, we find that the only person getting the "Owners Only" comments is just the one individual actual "Owner" listed on the ticket. We thought that using "Owners Only" would go to all cc:'d Help Desk admin's on the ticket, but not out to the users. Everyone on the help desk is has a "Help Desk Ticket Owner" tag.
What are we missing here?
-
I believe that it means that the comment can only be seen by owners. Not sure about how it triggers ticket rules or not. - lmland 11 years ago
-
I unchecked everything, saved, and then re-checked everything the way I wanted it to work and tested with a new ticket and things seem to be working as expected. - jschu67 11 years ago
Answers (2)
Owners Only hides the comment from all accounts besides those designated as ticket owners via a Service Desk label. In the Queue settings you'll see "Ticket Owners By Label" to designate which label will flag an account as a ticket owner in that Queue.
Comments:
-
We have "Ticket Owners by label" set to "Help Desk Ticket Owner" as a tag, and all of our help desk users are tagged to it. Yet still, when we do an Owners Only comment, no one but the actual ticket owner gets an EMAIL on the comment.
Are you saying that the intended functionality is to hide the comment if a non-help desk user was to be viewing from within the service desk portal itself? Does this not govern how emails fire as well? <confused> - jschu67 11 years ago -
It is designed to just hide the comment from non owners. It should not be sending emails based on the Email on Events checkboxes. Is there another ticket rule set up that might be doing the emailing? - nshah 11 years ago
-
We have done extensive testing and have proven to ourselves that when we change ticket owners and hand the ticket around and place comments, some with the Owners Only checkbox checked and some without, the comments with Owners Only only go to the current ticket owner and the cc's do not get the emails, even though the cc's are admins and ticket owners by label and cc's are turned ON to get comment update emails. The only other rules we have are the standard EmailOnClose, CustomerResponded, and ReopenTicket, which shouldn't apply here. We also have a category CC which only applies to when brand new tickets land from user emails to the help desk we all get CC'd for the new ticket items. Any other information I can give you? - jschu67 11 years ago
The Owners Only flag when set on the ticket will allow anyone who is capable of being an Owner to VIEW the comments. If the currently assigned ticket Owner is getting an email with the Owners Only Comment, that action is happening from the queue settings regarding Email on Events. I would guess you have it set to notify Owner on Comment or Any Change.
Comments:
-
Yes, that is correct. We have Owner and Ticket CC both set to "Any Change". And now my co-workers I am testing with are saying that they are getting duplicate emails for every change.... - jschu67 11 years ago
-
So, like I said, now we are getting DUPLICATES of every comment..... any thoughts on what I did? - jschu67 11 years ago
-
Our experience has been that using Any Change isn't very effective. When you look at the list of Events most cover what you'll need. We also found instances where we had Any Change AND Comment selected we were getting two emails. I believe if Any Change is selected none of the other Events should be selected for that ticket participant.
You can set Any Change just for the Owner then set only the Comment event for the Ticket CC. - jmarotto 11 years ago-
So, wondering how KACE is defining "Owner" in the Email on Events section. I unchecked "Any change" on Owner, and only have "Comment" on Ticket CC, and my cohorts are still getting duplicate emails on comments. Is that because the cc's are ALSO Help Desk Ticket "Owners", even though they are not the current "Owner" of the ticket??? - jschu67 11 years ago
-
So, to update my confusion - I have completely removed all checkboxes from Ticket CC. I did a test comment. And the 2 help desk people I had CC'd on the ticket both got email alerts, but at least this time they only got One. My guess is that they are being alerted because they are "Ticket Owners" by virtue of being tagged as Help Desk Ticket Owners - and so were getting one email for that, and then another for being CC;s. But that leads to then how are we supposed to get comments out to CC users if doing so causes duplication to our help desk.
I think I am going to open a DELL KACE help ticket on this.
Thanks for your help. - jschu67 11 years ago-
You also might reach out to your original JumpStart trainer and see if they can assist you in best practices for email alerts. - mpace 11 years ago
-
Ok, thanks for the guidance. I will tweak as suggested. - jschu67 11 years ago
-
I would also create a New Ticket for each test as there are times where a database flag will be set based on one criteria, you make a change at the queue level, but the flag doesn't get removed. - jmarotto 11 years ago
-
@jmarotto - Thanks for this as well. I think something got stuck as you mention, because I unchecked everything, saved, and then re-checked everything the way I wanted it to work and tested with a new ticket and things seem to be working as expected. I think I can go ahead and close this thread as answered. Thanks, all for your assistance. - jschu67 11 years ago
