Approving business requests

BMC Digital Workplace provides access your company's services through a unified catalog, which houses a familiar online ordering experience. Users visit the Catalog to request business services, such as a password reset, a software or mobile app installation, or changes to employee status. IT departments benefit by spending less time on fulfilling routine service requests. This topic describes the approval process for business requests.

Business request approvals

When end users request a service in BMC Digital Workplace, the approval request is routed to all the required approvers according to the rules of the approval process. Approval rules are defined in BMC Remedy Action Request System Server, in Approval Central. For more information on approvals, see  Approval Server concepts  in the AR System 9.1 documentation. 

The following roles are involved in the approval process:

• Process administrators who set up and modify approvals

• Users requesting approval (requesters)

• Users approving requests (approvers or alternate approvers)

When an approver receives an approval request, the approver can either approve, reject, or place a request on hold. You can configure BMC Digital Workplace to prompt the approver to enter their password before continuing. Approvers can also choose to add a comment when rejecting a request.

Pending approval requests are displayed in the approver's News Feed timeline; on their Approvals page in  My Activity; and in the bell notifications.

The approval request contains the following information:

• Request ID, Summary, Icon, Priority, Description, Status fields

• Requested By username

• Approve, Reject, and On Hold buttons.

Demonstration videos

The videos in this topic demonstrate how to configure BMC Service Request Management approvals and how to view the approval requests in BMC Digital Workplace

Part 1: This video (4:55) shows how to configure the Manager and Person types of approvals.

Part 2: This video (3:41) shows how to configure the Group and Custom types of approvals.

To configure approval notifications

Requesters and approvers are notified of changes for all types of approval requests when logged in to BMC Digital Workplace. Some of your business users, however, may prefer to receive notifications only for certain types of service requests. You can limit the approval notifications that users receive when they are logged in to BMC Digital Workplace. The approval configuration applies to your entire organization and cannot be used to set preferences for individual users of BMC Digital Workplace. In a multitenant environments, you can have separate configurations for each tenant.

To configure approval notifications:

1. In the BMC Digital Workplace Admin, select Configuration > Enable Features.
2. From Approvals, select the approval for which you want to enable approval request notifications. 

The user will receive notifications only for the specified service types.

To hide the On Hold button

A business user who is an approver can choose to either approve, reject, or put a request on hold. If your business needs specify that a request not be put on hold, you can choose to disable the on hold option by hiding the button.

1. In the BMC Digital Workplace Admin, select Configuration > Enable Features.
2. From Approvals, clear the Put Approvals on hold option. 
   Approvers will no longer have the option to place requests on hold.