This section contains information about enhancements in version 18.08 of BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite.

BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite enhancements

The BMC Cognitive Service Management feature is enhanced for creating incidents and change requests. When a ticket is created by using an email sent by a user, the BMC Cognitive Service Management feature scans the email subject or content of that email and applies the relevant ticket template to that ticket. For more details, see the following topics:

Creating an email generated incident request

Creating a change request by using email

Configuring BMC Helix Cognitive Automation

For guidelines to train Cognitive Service, see Training data for BMC Helix Cognitive Automation.

BMC Remedy with Smart IT enhancements

In Smart IT 2.0 and 18.05, specific user actions could trigger provider action. Starting with Smart IT 18.08, as a Smart IT administrator, you can configure provider action based on the logical conditions defined in an expression. If the information provided or modified by the Smart IT users meet the condition that you have defined in the configuration, the provider action is executed and the following message is displayed:

A new check box, Execute On, has been introduced in the Add/Remove Actions screen of Incident View so that a Smart IT administrator can define a logical expression while configuring a provider action. For more information, see Configuring provider action.

You can use the following functions when configuring provider action expressions: ISREQUIRED, ISREADONLY, ISHIDDEN, ONCHANGE. You can also use the existing expressions for configuring provider action. For more information, see Dynamic expressions for configuration.

Starting with Smart IT 18.08, the BMC Cognitive Service Management is enhanced with the following features:

• When a service desk agent is creating a ticket in Smart Recorder, BMC Cognitive Service Management scans the description and auto-populates the relevant category.
• The BMC Cognitive Service Management feature is now available for mobile clients. The Recommendation option is now available for population of the categories.
• The following topics explain these features in detail:
  • Handling tickets dynamically with Smart Recorder
  • Applying categorization to tickets and resources
  • BMC Helix Cognitive Automation

In Smart IT 18.08, the following configuration parameters have been added:

For more information, see Centralized configuration.

When you create an Incident or a Work Order by using a template, the text that you enter in the template is retained and the template description is appended to it. In versions earlier than 18.08, the texts used to appear in the same line after a space. The following image shows the modified template text position:

Knowledge article is enhanced to display the Status and the Version of a knowledge article in the knowledge search result. The Status and the Version of a Knowledge Article are displayed in the Global Knowledge search and in the Recommended Knowledge through Smart Recorder. This helps users to select the appropriate version of knowledge article from the search result. The following table shows the new fields:

Prior to 18.08, if a Knowledge Article was longer than the one line displayed, it was not possible to see it without opening the actual article in preview mode. You can now view two lines. If you hover over an article, you get a tooltip showing the full title. This means that you don't have to open each record to read the full title. In Android and iOS Smart IT applications, the first three lines of a Knowledge Article are displayed.

BMC Remedy ITSM Deployment enhancements

In BMC Remedy 18.08 release, full installers are not available for installing or upgrading the BMC Remedy 18.08 Suite applications, such as BMC Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM), BMC Remedy Service Request Management (SRM), and BMC Remedy Service Level Management (SLM). You can upgrade BMC Remedy applications such as ITSM, SRM, and SLM from their previous (18.05) versions by using deployment packages. This new approach results in a significantly faster and easier upgrade. To upgrade from earlier BMC Remedy application versions (for example, 8.1, 9.0, or 9.1), you must first upgrade to the version 18.05 (by using the 18.05 application installers) and then upgrade to 18.08 by using the deployment packages.

A deployment package contains data, object definitions, and binary files. You can deploy a package in your environment by using the AR System Deployment Management Console that provides a single method to promote data and definitions effectively and reliably across all servers in a server group.

Installing BMC Remedy 18.08

Install BMC Remedy platform by using the 18.08 installer and install BMC Remedy applications by using the 18.05 installer and the 18.08 deployment packages. The following table summarizes the supported installation methods:

For more information about installing, see Installing.

Upgrading to BMC Remedy 18.08

Upgrade BMC Remedy platform using the 18.08 installers and upgrade BMC Remedy applications using the 18.08 deployment packages. To upgrade applications directly to version 18.08, the minimum supported BMC Remedy application version is 18.05.

To upgrade BMC Remedy Suite applications to 18.08, you must first upgrade them to version 18.05 and then deploy 18.08 changes using a deployment package. Download the 18.08 deployment package from the EPD and apply the changes. 

For information about applying a deployment package, see Applying a deployment package.

The following table summarizes the supported upgrade methods:

The following graphic summarizes the BMC Remedy upgrade process from version 18.05 to 18.08:

If you are using BMC Remedy version 9.1.x or 8.1.x, the process for upgrading BMC Remedy is as follows:

The following graphic summarizes the BMC Remedy upgrade process from version 9.1.x to 18.08:

For more information about upgrading, see Upgrading.

The external version number that is displayed on the installer screens and the product pages is 18.08.00. BMC uses version 9.1.06 for internal purposes. 

BMC Remedy product version is displayed as 9.1.06 in the following files:

BMC Remedy Single Sign-On enhancements

As a Remedy Single Sign-On administrator, you can use HTML to customize the end user login page. This provides an ability to embed an URL to the Intranet portal or to reset the password from the end user login page. For this, enter the required HTML code for the login page in the Extended Login page information (html) field under the Branding sub-tab.

For more information, see Rebranding the end user login page.

You can now control the number of simultaneous logins per user (per realm) by adding the required number of session quota for a particular realm. You can also decide whether to invalidate the older session or not let the user log in to a new session based on the number of logins allowed.

For more information about session quota, see Configuring realms. For information about troubleshooting, see Troubleshooting login and logout issues.

As an RSSO administrator, you can now use your administrator account to create multiple RSSO administrator accounts in your organization so that each administrator has their own login. In the Admin User Management tab, you can manage the accounts, such as removing accounts or locking and unlocking accounts.

For more information, see Setting up Remedy SSO administrator accounts.

As a RSSO administrator, once you add multiple administrators, you can block the accounts of those administrators through the Remedy SSO Admin console. At a server level, you can set the number of incorrect password attempts by an RSSO administrator account before the account gets locked out. This is for security purposes to make sure that there are no unauthorized logins. Additionally, you can also unblock the locked administrator accounts manually through the Admin User Management tab on the Remedy SSO Admin Console.

For more information, see Remedy SSO server general configuration.

You can enable single sign-on when users cross launch and access an application from another application through Iframe even though the applications are deployed on two different RSSO servers. The application on the originating server constructs a URL to initiate cross launch of the the target application on the target RSSO server.

To allow the originating application to open target application through Iframe, a new field, ALLOW-FROM Domain(s), is added on the Realm > Authentication tab in the Remedy SSO Admin console. For more information, see Configuring the pre-authentication mechanism and Enabling cross launch for applications integrated with different Remedy SSO servers.

As a RSSO administrator, you can configure the OAuth authentication by adding multiple URIs, so that the client can be redirected to different URLs. You do not have to deploy the each individual client multiple times for different URLs.

For more information, see Configuring OAuth 2.0.

BMC Remedy Smart Reporting enhancements

From this release, if you have not installed BMC Remedy IT Service Management on the AR System Server, using the BMC Remedy Smart Reporting Admin Console, you can onboard up to seven users from the Smart Reporting Custom App Users group to BMC Remedy Smart Reporting. The Smart Reporting Custom App Users group is created in this release for users that do not have BMC Remedy IT Service Management installed on the AR System Server and want to access BMC Remedy Smart Reporting. For onboarding all such users that do not have BMC Remedy IT Service Management installed, ensure you add them to this group.

Additionally, the BMC Remedy Smart Reporting User Sync utility synchronizes these users to BMC Remedy Smart Reporting.

For more information, see Onboarding users using the BMC Remedy Smart Reporting Admin console and Automatically synchronizing BMC Remedy AR System users to BMC Remedy Smart Reporting.

BMC Remedy AR System enhancements

When you want to monitor any key metric on a regular basis, you can choose to customize the Server Group Dashboard of the Remedy Management Console by configuring any out-of-the-box flashboards on your server. The objects on the server group dashboard are now displayed through a flashboard with HTML rendering. HTML rendering offers more configurations to view the server group statistics. For more information, see Customizing the dashboard of the Remedy Management Console.

There is no change in the flashboard rendering for the rest of the forms.

BMC offers content-level precheck for a package. Content-level precheck helps you add a more specific check to the package by checking a condition that you have set at the form level.

For example, when BMC offers a patch for Remedy IT Service Management and you are not using Remedy Asset Management, deploying a package containing fixes for Remedy Asset Management might result in errors. You can define a content-level precheck that will prevent deploying the Remedy Asset Management patch from being deployed in your environment.

The below screen illustrates the RDA:DeploymentPackageCheck form with the Content Deploy option.

For more information, see Content level precheck.

BMC Remedy Atrium Core enhancements

You can configure the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for CMDB, which are Integrity and Completeness. You can define the classes that you want to exclude while processing CIs for Integrity and Completeness. You can also exclude datasets and classes while processing the Datasources utility. The classes and CIs that are excluded are shown as tool tips on the CMDB Dashboard.

For more information, see Configuring Key Performance Indicators for CMDB

You can assign users to groups on the AR server to restrict users' access to specific features of the new CMDB UI. For more information see, Providing users with permissions to access the new CMDB UI using groups and roles.

What's changed in this release

In this release, note the following significant changes in the product behavior: