When you really need a useful description in ServiceDesk Plus

Do you often struggle to get your service team to enter meaningful information into a request description other than ‘Done’ or a copy and paste of the request subject?

Here’s a little trick we employed with one particular client to get the team into the habit of considering what they were actually entering into the description field in a request in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.

This little trick employs ‘Field and Form Rules’ on either an Incident or Service Request Template. In this particular case, we were concentrating on the default Incident Template available under Admin > HelpDesk Customizer > Incident Template > Default Request

We used a little custom script as an ‘On Form Submit’ rule to check the entered content of the description field. By retrieving the Subject and Description text we can check the length of the description and also if it matches the subject line:

var desc_text=$CS.getDescription();
var subj_text=$CS.getValue("SUBJECT");

var len = desc_text.length;

if((len<=5)||(desc_text===subj_text)){
   $CS.stopFormSubmission();
alert(‘Come on folks – a little detail please … ;0)’);
}

Note: If you’re ever unsure of what script commands will work in the scripts area just look up information relating to JQuery commands.

So now when the team go to raise an Incident in ServiceDesk Plus and they get a little lazy they’ll get a nice helpful prompt!

Don’t forget you can copy Field and Form Rules across multiple Incident templates if you need to by using the ‘Copy Rule’ function:

Note that you will, however, need to recreate the rule on an existing  Service Template first before you can then copy it across multiple Service Request templates.

Enjoy!

Try out ServiceDesk Plus today and see how it can improve your help desk.

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