Managing service actions

Service actions are light services associated with completed service requests or assets, and are available to end users from their My Stuff page. End users access service actions from the Actions list of a service or an asset. For more details about how items are displayed on the My Stuff page, see Setting up the My Stuff page.

Catalog administrators and internal service suppliers create and manage service actions to associate them with services.

Catalog administrators associate service actions with services, service categories and asset classes from configured external systems.

As a catalog administrator or internal service supplier, you manage service actions from the Service Actions page, which you can access by selecting Services > Service Actions. From the Service Actions page, you can add, edit, and delete service actions.  

All newly created service actions are by default inactive, and are displayed on the Inactive tab. You can activate service actions to make them available for end users, and deactivate them as needed.

If you have more than one environment with BMC Digital Workplace Catalog , you can share service actions between them by exporting service actions to local files, and importing service actions from local files.  

Comparison of service actions and services

Service actions are very similar to services because they have the following resembling components:

Components of service actions

A service action uses the same UI template as a service. You complete the required details for a service action in the same way as you do when you create or edit a service.

Process of adding service actions

As a catalog administrator, perform the following steps to add and enable a service action:

1. Create a service action.
2. Associate the service action with one or more of the following items available on the My Stuff page:
   
   • Published services—to make the service action available from the Actions list of the completed services requests  
   • Service categories—to make it available for all completed services that belong to the selected category   
   • Asset classes—to make it available for all asset classes or specific asset classes retrieved from a connected system and entitled to the end user
3. Activate the service action so that the action becomes available for selection in the Actions list of service requests and assets to which it is mapped.

The following screenshot shows a completed service request and a list of actions associated with it:    

To create a service action

1. Go to the Service Actions page, and click Create Action.
2. In the Action Name field, enter a descriptive action name, such as Replace hardware.
   The Actions Options pane is displayed.
   

3. In the appropriate section of the Action Options pane, complete the required details for the service action components.

4. (Optional) You can publish service actions and their translations for end users in different locales. For more information, see Localizing catalog items.

5. Save the changes.

To make a service action available to end users, you must associate it with services or assets, and then activate it.

To associate a service action with services

1. Open a service action that you want to map to services.

2. In the Action Options panel, click Edit next to Asset Mapping.

   The following example shows the Service Requests section:

   

3. (Optional) Map categories of services to a selected service action as follows:

   1. In the Service Request section, click Add beside Categories.
   2. From the Service Catalog, select one or more service categories, and click Add.

4. (Optional) Map services to a selected service action as follows:

   1. In the Service Request section, click Add beside Services.

   2. From the Service Catalog, select one or more services, and click Add.

Before you associate a service action with assets

You can associate service actions only with those asset classes that are retrieved from connections configured in the Application Settings > Asset Management. For details about how to configure asset connections, see Configuring services and assets to be available on the My Stuff page.

The following example shows the Asset connections sections of a service action:

Perform one or more of the following steps to associate service actions with assets:

To activate and deactivate a service action

After you have created a service action and mapped it to services and assets, you must activate it to make it available for selection by end users. You might also need to deactivate service actions to make them temporarily unavailable for selection by end users, such as when a service action is undergoing some changes.

To activate or deactivate a service action, perform one of the following steps:

• From the Actions Options pane, change the Active toggle to activate or deactivate a service
  .
  
• Click Actions and select one of the following options:

• • Activate—to make an inactive service action available to end users
  • Deactivate —to make an active service action unavailable to end users.

To delete a service action

You can delete both active and inactive service actions at any time.

From the service actions list, select one or more service actions, and click Actions > Delete.

You can also delete multiple service actions at a time by selecting multiple service actions.

If a service action is associated with a service, service category, or asset class, you will be notified about potential risks as follows:

To export and import a service action

You can export a service action to a local file, and import a service action from a local file.

To export a service action to a local zip file, select a service and click Actions > Export.

To import a saved service action, select Actions > Import, and upload the service action zip file.