23.3 enhancements and patches

(Controlled availability customers only) Leverage BMC HelixGPT chat for a conversational experience when searching for information from knowledge articles

BMC HelixGPT chat, powered by the generative AI capabilities of BMC HelixGPT, provides a powerful chat-based search experience to service desk agents.

Instead of manually searching for knowledge articles, agents can type in their questions in BMC HelixGPT chat and get contextually relevant, summarized answers.

Faster availability of information helps agents make faster decisions and perform necessary actions. Thereby, improving case resolution time and increasing agent efficiency, service desk productivity, and customer satisfaction.

For more information, see Leverage BMC HelixGPT chat to search for information.

Pin knowledge articles, copy a response, and send an email from the Ask HelixGPT tab

As a service desk agent. you can perform the following tasks on the Ask HelixGPT tab of an incident screen:

• Pin a source knowledge article to the incident.
• Send the generated response in an email message to a customer or other IT user so that they can resolve the incident.
• Attach the pinned knowledge article or a file to the email message.
• Copy a generated response.

These capabilities save your time and enhance your user experience. You need not navigate to other tabs or screens to pin knowledge articles or email the generated response. Thereby, enabling you to communicate and collaborate with your customers and coworkers faster and more efficiently.

For more information, see Resolving-tickets-with-the-help-of-Ask-HelixGPT.

Optimize cost while leveraging the Ask HelixGPT capability by disabling initial resolution summary

By default, BMC HelixGPT generates responses when an agent clicks the Ask HelixGPT tab on an incident screen and when the agent asks questions on the AskHelixGPT tab.

To generate each response, an API call is made to the Large Language Model (LLM). Each API call is associated with a cost, which depends on the LLM you select.

You can optimize the cost by disabling the initial resolution summary so that a response is generated only when an agent asks a question, limiting the API calls to answer the questions.

For more information, see Configuring-Ask-HelixGPT-for-BMC-Helix-ITSM.

View AI-based risk assessment for your change requests

As a change manager, view the overall risk factors associated with a change request in the BMC Helix Innovation Studio-based calendar. The AI-based risk factor prediction is based on similar change requests implemented in the past and helps you make well-informed decisions about approving, holding or rejecting a change request. Therefore, it saves your effort and time to evaluate change requests manually.

For more information, see Assessing the risk for a change request.

Open a record from a PWA ticket, asset, or people profile screen in a new window or tab

You can directly open records through a click of a link that is available in certain fields in tickets, asset records, and people profile. For example, you can click an Assignee name in an incident ticket to open the Profile page of the assignee.

PWA screens provide right-click options to open a record from a ticket, asset, and people profile in a new window or tab so that you can view the record and also retain the page from where you opened the record. 

For more information, see Differences-between-the-classic-Smart-IT-and-Progressive-Web-App-screens.

Relate existing outages or create related outages for the associated CIs directly from an incident or a change request

In Progressive Web App (PWA) screens of an incident or a change request, create related outages for the associated CIs directly from the Related items tab. Also, search for an existing outage for one or more CIs associated with an incident and relate these outages to the incident directly from the Related items tab.

Creating these relationships makes planning and scheduling associated tasks easier, with all the relevant information available in the incident or change request. For more information, see Relating items to incident requests.

Eliminate redundant efforts in asset assignment using automation

Leverage asset automation to automatically relate People records, location and contracts with any newly reconciled asset. After you create an automation, it runs on multiple assets in your environment simultaneously, reducing the manual efforts of asset assignment. 

To learn more, see Automating tasks by using Asset automation.

Search for multiple CIs with a comma-separated list

As a ticket assignee, you can search for multiple configuration items(CI) across incident, problem investigation, work order, task, asset, and known error tickets simultaneously by entering comma-separated CI names. This feature helps you save your time and focus more on other critical issues.

For more details, see Performing bulk actions or single row actions in Ticket Console.

Optimize ticket analysis by viewing all pinned knowledge articles together in tickets

A new filter is introduced to display all pinned knowledge articles together in incident, problem investigation, work order or known error tickets at a glance. Ticket assignees pin the most helpful knowledge articles that they refer to while resolving tickets. While analyzing tickets, the filter saves your effort of browsing through pages to find the pinned knowledge articles.

For more details, see Resolving tickets with the help of knowledge articles.

Automate processing of failed inbound emails for creating or updating records

If an attempt by the email rule engine to process an inbound email for creating or updating a record fails, you need not create or update the record manually. Use the auto-retry and manual retry capabilities to automate the process of reattempting failed inbound emails for creating or updating records.

For more information, see Configuring-maximum-attempts-to-process-inbound-emails-automatically and Manually-retrying-failed-inbound-emails.

Receive notifications for emerging major incidents in Real-time incident correlation clusters

As a major incident manager, receive notifications for emerging, potential major incidents in clusters so that you can assess their overall business impact. It saves you from constantly monitoring the real-time incident correlation dashboard, helping you to use the time to address other critical issues. By using this feature, you can address the issues early, potentially reducing the business impact.

For more information, see Incident correlation.

Use regular expressions in stop words to generate quality clusters for efficient problem investigation and incident analysis

While generating Proactive problem management and Real-time incident correlation clusters, define patterns of stop words by using regular expressions to identify and remove irrelevant incident information (words and sentences). Using regular expressions in stop word generates better quality clusters, reducing the overall effort and time for problem investigation and incident analysis.

For more information, see Configuring incident correlation to detect similar incident clusters and Configuring proactive problem management settings.

(Controlled availability) Quickly create service models by using blueprint templates

Leverage BMC Helix Service Modeling to quickly create service models by using predefined blueprint templates. Seamlessly integrate topology data from multiple sources to easily build comprehensive, dynamic service models. For more information, see Creating-service-models-by-using-blueprints.

Improve reconciliation job performance when processing a large number of CIs

Use the RE ID Service to improve the speed and efficiency of large reconciliation jobs by processing the identification activity on a separate pod. For more information, see Reconciling-a-large-number-of-CIs .

Additionally, the RE ID Service filters duplicate CIs from the source dataset before running the identification a ctivity, making the overall process more efficient. For more information, see Identification-activities-to-match-instances-across-datasets. 

Run Atrium Integrator Spoon on Pentaho 9.x

Pentaho is upgraded from 6.x to 9.x. Upgrade your Atrium Integrator Spoon client to run on Pentaho 9.x. For more information about upgrading the Spoon client, see Using-the-Atrium-Integrator-Spoon-client .

New classes and attributes added to the Common Data Model

The BMC Helix CMDB Common Data Model is updated with new classes and attributes under the BMC_BaseElement class and new attributes under the BMC_BaseRelationship class. These classes and attributes support the impact analysis and incident creation processes in BMC Helix NetOps. For more information, see Summary-of-changes-to-the-Common-Data-Model.

Copy an existing release request into a new release request

Create a draft release request with the information copied from an existing release request. Select the information you want to copy, edit the copied information as required, and save it. This way, you can save time instead of creating a release request from scratch.

For more information, see Creating a release request by copying an existing release request.

Customize bulk actions and row actions views for Shared Ticket Console and Asset Console

Copy the default out-of-the-box views and customize them to your needs. In addition to the existing views available for customization from the Manage Views screen, you can now customize the bulk action views for Shared Ticket Console, asset action views, and in-row action views for Asset Console. 

For more information, see Customizing-Shared-Ticket-Console and Enabling and configuring the Asset console.

Ability to configure date and time format as per user preference

Instead of using the local system settings, you can configure the preferred date and time format by using the AR System User Preference form. You can set one specific date and time format for the whole organization by using this configuration. 

To learn more about this feature, see Configuring-date-and-time-formats.

Group clusters with multiple categorical fields for problem investigation

As a problem coordinator, configure one-time and recurrent jobs to group clusters based on multiple categorical fields in the Proactive Problem Management dashboard. You group clusters to view the details of recurring incidents, and analyze incident patterns which aid in the overall problem investigation.
For more information, see Proactive problem management and Resolution insights overview.

Estimate the complexity of incidents in a proactive problem management cluster

As a problem coordinator, view the average resolution time and average effort it took to resolve the incidents in a cluster. Use these operational metrics to predict the complexity of incidents in the cluster, and determine your time and effort required to perform problem investigation.
For more information, see Proactive problem management and Resolution insights overview.

Efficiently identify critical clusters

As a problem coordinator, you can quickly identify the proactive problem management clusters with high number of incidents that need to be prioritized for problem investigation, thereby saving overall time and effort.
For more information, see Proactive problem management and Resolution insights overview.

(Controlled availability customers only) Leverage BMC HelixGPT generative AI to get real-time, summarized information for resolving incidents faster

BMC HelixGPT provides you a conversational experience to find information when working on incidents. Instead of reading through the knowledge articles, you can ask your incident-related questions to BMC HelixGPT and get real-time summarized answers.

Use BMC HelixGPT to resolve your incidents faster by getting reliable, summarized answers.

Faster resolution of incidents leads to increased agent efficiency, call center productivity, and customer satisfaction.

For more information, see Finding information to resolve incidents by using BMC HelixGPT.

Progressive Web Application (PWA) screens for release

To offer a customizable dynamic modern UX that exactly fits your needs, the support for Progressive Web App (PWA) screens has been extended to release requests.

PWA screens are already available for changes, work orders, incidents, assets, broadcasts, problem investigations, and tasks. For more information about PWA screens, see Progressive Web Application (PWA) screens.

For more information about enabling PWA screens and managing releases, see Enabling Progressive Web Application screens and Managing releases.

Relate tickets and assets in bulk in Shared Ticket Console

Select multiple tickets in Shared Ticket Console and relate them to other tickets, or assets, by using bulk actions. This saves the effort and time required to manually create relationships for each ticket.

For more information, see Managing your work by using Ticket Console.

(Controlled availability customers only) View AI-based risk assessment for your change requests

As a change manager, view the overall risk factors associated with a change request in the BMC Helix Innovation Studio-based calendar. The AI-based risk factor prediction is based on similar change requests implemented in the past and helps you make well-informed decisions about approving, holding or rejecting a change request. Therefore, it saves your effort and time to evaluate change requests manually.

For more information, see Viewing data by using the Calendar.

(Controlled availability customers only) Automate asset management

Instead of manually updating the assets, configure automation rules to automatically relate People records, locations, and contracts with any newly reconciled asset. You can configure multiple automations or one automation with multiple rules to update the assets in your environment. To learn more, see Automating tasks by using Asset automation.

Access the in-app help from any screen

In-app help (Self-help) has shifted to a movable widget that is available on every screen. The widget provides access to a product tour, interactive guides, instructions for setting up and going live, and more. It has been streamlined to provide the most useful content. In addition, you can continue to find answers to your questions in the online documentation or from our YouTube playlist.

Create videos in BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround

Users with knowledge worker roles can capture the screen when they create or edit articles in BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround. While recording the screen, users have the option to add narration from the microphone, audio from the system, and video from the webcam.

The video recording tool is readily available within BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround. Therefore, users can capture the screen without the need to download and set up third-party software. This built-in tool provides an effortless way to capture the screen with maximum efficiency.

For more information about the video recording tool, see the Create a video in BMC Helix Knowledge vNext help article. To learn how to access help articles for BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround, see Accessing product documentation provided by help articles in the BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround documentation. 

Department information displayed for filter suggestions

In BMC Helix Innovation Studio based Shared Ticket Console, Asset console and Calendar, when you start typing in filters, a list of suggestions are shown. These suggestions for Named List filters include department information displayed below, along with the email IDs to help distinguish filter suggestions with same values.

For more information, see Managing-your-work-by-using-Ticket-Console, Accessing and navigating the Asset console, and Scheduling changes by using the Calendar.

Take advantage of the upgraded BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround interface

Users with knowledge worker roles can benefit from the enhanced application interface when they open BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround from BMC Helix ITSM to view or create articles. 

With the upgraded interface, users enjoy extended capabilities as they can get more information about articles in BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround. For example, they can quickly see related content and possible duplicate articles, or assess article quality by completing the standard checklist.

For more information about how BMC Helix ITSM users with knowledge worker roles can leverage the upgraded BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround interface, see Leveraging-knowledge-from-BMC-Helix-Knowledge-Management-by-ComAround.

End-of-product-support information

Starting from 23.3.01 version, in the Asset console, you can view the following end-of-support dates:

End of Extended Support (EOES)
End of Life (EOL)
End of Security Support (EOSS)
End of Support (EOS)

You can add these fields as visible columns and filter by these dates in the Asset console. This helps you to manage the lifecycle of the assets easily by using the Asset console. For more information about Asset console, see Accessing and navigating the Asset console.

Display start and end dates of tickets in Calendar side bar

In the BMC Helix ITSM Calendar, built on the BMC Helix Innovation Studio, you can view the date ranges in the side bar. You can directly view the start and end dates of the planned activities without opening the tickets. You can configure the calendar component to view the start and end dates of tickets by turning on the Show dates ranges toggle switch.

For more information, see Enabling and configuring the calendar.

Add BMC Helix bot by default to the Microsoft Teams chat

When you click Launch ChatOps from any incident ticket, you can add members and launch a Microsoft Teams chat. You can add the BMC Helix chat bot to the chat group and get details related to the incidents quickly.
You can either manually add the chat bot, or you can now configure the ChatBot-Id CCS parameter to add the bot to the Microsoft Teams chat by default.

For more information, see Launching ChatOps for collaboration.

Export a list of incidents from Real-time incident correlation clusters for offline analysis

As a service desk agent or a major incident manager, you can select and export a list of incidents from Real-time incident correlation clusters that you want to analyze offline. You can then share the exported list of incidents with other users for detailed analysis or a second opinion of your analysis.
For more information, see Identifying clusters of incoming incidents.

Detect major incidents in the Proactive problem management clusters

As a problem coordinator, you can instantly check if any cluster in the List view of the Proactive problem management dashboard has a major incident in it. You can save time and effort to manually discover the major incidents in clusters.

For more information, see Proactive problem management and Resolution insights overview.

Search and relate an original incident that is not available within the Real-time incident correlation cluster

As a service desk agent, you can search for an incident that is unavailable in the Real-time incident correlation cluster, and mark the incident as an original to one or more incidents available in the cluster. You need not navigate away from BMC Helix ITSM Insights to perform this association and therefore it saves your effort and time.

For more information, see Identifying clusters of incoming incidents.

Consent for data collection

When you log on to BMC Helix ITSM Insights for the first time, select whether you want to allow the product to collect information about your product usage. By default, data collection is enabled.

For information about how to change data collection settings, see Modifying consent for data collection.

High availability of CMDB Portal

Even when the platform-fts-0 pod that handles all administrative requests is down, you can still access CMDB Portal with limited functionality. For more information, see Accessing and navigating the CMDB Portal .

Use Shared Ticket Console to quickly view or modify tickets

The Shared Ticket Console is built on the BMC Helix Innovation Studio and offers you a modern UI that you can customize according to your requirements. Use multiple filters to find your tickets quickly and use bulk actions to update multiple tickets simultaneously or to open the tickets in multiple tabs. For more information, see Managing-your-work-by-using-Ticket-Console.

Configurable ITSM calendar with a modern UI experience

The BMC Helix ITSM Calendar, built on the BMC Helix Innovation Studio, combines rich filtering and preset capabilities with a modern UI experience. Out of the box, the calendar supports Incident, Change, Problem investigation, Release, Task, Outage, and Business Event. 

BMC Helix ITSM Calendar provides the following key features:

• Calendar is highly configurable and is extensible to other ticket types.
  For example, you can configure the Work Order ticket type to be displayed in the Calendar and customize the views for work orders.
• Get real-time insights into service models created in BMC Helix Discovery and BMC Helix CMDB.
• Collision detection in Calendar helps you manage and resolve the potentially harmful conflicts between the change requests. 
• Send emails to change coordinators directly from the popover view of a change ticket to plan for outages and to resolve collisions. 

For more information, see Enabling and configuring the calendar and Scheduling changes by using the Calendar.

Streamlined documentation structure

Starting with version 23.3, we have restructured the documentation of BMC Helix ITSM to help you find the documentation for the ticket types that you work on. 

To learn more, see Where-did-the-Smart-IT-documentation-go

Access the in-app help from any screen

In-app help (Self-help) has shifted to a movable widget that is available on every screen. The widget provides access to a product tour, interactive guides, instructions for setting up and going live, and more. It has been streamlined to provide the most useful content. In addition, you can continue to find answers to your questions in the online documentation or from our YouTube playlist.

Create a new asset by copying an existing asset

When you create a new asset, instead of filling up all the details for the asset, you can copy the details from an existing asset by the click of a button. It greatly saves time and effort required for such repetitive tasks and increases efficiency. To learn more, see Creating and updating assets.

Perform bulk actions by using the Asset console

Select multiple assets and perform the following actions in bulk to save your time:

• Relate people - Relate multiple assets to a person, support group, or organization along with their relationship role.
• Update asset - Update out-of-the-box and custom attributes for assets belonging to different classes.

You can also update class specific attributes for Computer System, Application, and Processor, when you select only the assets belonging to a same asset class.

For more information, see Performing bulk updates.

(Controlled availability customers only)
View the Audit log information for any ticket

Viewing the complete audit log information helps the service desk agents gain all the information about a ticket on a single window in Progressive Web Application (PWA) screens . When list of changes and updates are made to selected ticket, an audit entry is created to track the changes. You can view this Audit log information directly in the PWA screens of the ticket by setting the arsystem.pwa_enable_auditlog CCS parameter value to true. For more information, see Viewing the audit log

Share your custom view presets with other users in Asset console

Share the custom view presets you created in Asset console with multiple users so that they can use these view presets without having to re-create them. Sharing the custom views presets helps improve efficiency and consistency.

For example, as an asset manager, you can create a custom view preset to view all Down computers and share this custom view preset with your team, so that they can use the same view preset for tracking the assets. 

For more information, see To share a custom view preset.

Filter the clusters based on quality in the Proactive problem management dashboard

Cluster quality slider is introduced in the Proactive problem management dashboard to help you quickly filter the clusters. While performing a root cause analysis, you can use the slider to view clusters of certain quality range of the clustering job.

For more details, see Proactive Problem Management.

View the resolution summary of incident groups in a cluster

As a problem coordinator, you can view the incidents that have a similar resolution grouped together in a cluster along with their resolution insights. Without opening every incident in BMC Helix ITSM to see how they were resolved, you can quickly get a high-level resolution overview of incidents. You can also view the knowledge articles that were used to resolve the incidents.

For more details, see Proactive Problem Management.

Use presets to reuse your dashboard filter preferences

As a service desk manager or a major incident manager, you can select and save your filter preferences, such as Assignee Support Group, and Urgency as presets in the Real-time incident correlation dashboard. You need not manually select your filters. Instead, just select a preset to view clusters based on your filter preferences. You can also share your preset with other users.
For more information, see Managing-filter-presets.

View and track the number of jobs created by each user in BMC Helix ITSM Insights Dashboard

As a problem coordinator, determine the overall productivity of users by viewing the number of jobs associated with each of them. The widget displays the number of jobs, the type of jobs, and their last date of execution for each user. You can filter the results based on the support company and date range. 

For more information, see Tracking ITSM Insights usage in BMC Helix Dashboards.

Share your Proactive Problem Management job configuration with other users

As a problem coordinator or problem manager, you can share your job configuration with other users such that they can analyze the most impactful set of recurring incidents. Use the capability when you want other users to generate similar clusters using your job configuration for root cause analysis. It saves their time and effort of creating a job from scratch.

For more information, see Sharing-proactive-problem-management-jobs-with-others.

Attributes to store end-of-product-support information

Store and view the end-of-support dates for the hardware and software products in your environment. The following attributes are added under the BMC_BaseElement class in the Common Data Model:

• EndOfExtendedSupport 
• EndOfLife 
• EndOfSecuritySupport 
• EndOfSupport

The information for these attributes is populated by BMC Discovery. For more information, see Summary-of-changes-to-the-Common-Data-Model.