Service management

Service management is a planned module for teams that answer requests from other people: a help desk, an IT team or an operations team. It is a separate stage after the core product and has not started. This page says what the module will cover and what you can use in Orbit today for request-style work.

What is planned Planned

It is a distinct module and not an extension of a project board. Customer authorization will be separate from the licensed access of agents.

Area	Planned scope
Customer portal	A branded help centre with a service catalogue, groups of request types and access controls
Request types	Types that map to work types, portal fields, hidden defaults and statuses that customers see
Customers	Customers submit, follow, comment on, attach to, cancel and share requests. Customer organizations, participants and agent licences have separate authorization.
Replies and notes	Public replies and internal notes never cross their visibility boundary in the API, e-mail, search or live events
Queues	Agent queues from a saved query and sort, with columns, groups, counts and SLA urgency
SLAs	Timers with start, pause, stop and reset conditions, goals by query, business calendars, holidays and daylight-saving time
Intake	Requests from e-mail or chat, without duplicates and with threading kept
Approvals and knowledge	Approver groups with quorum and decisions by portal or e-mail, and knowledge articles suggested to customers
On-call and incidents	Schedules, rotations, escalation policies, incident declaration with responders and a timeline, and a service registry
Changes and problems	Standard, normal and emergency changes with risk, approvals, a change calendar and freeze windows, and problem records with known errors
Reports	SLA compliance, queues, volume, time to respond and resolve, and customer satisfaction

A virtual agent that answers customers from knowledge articles is planned for a later stage still.

What Orbit offers today

Orbit has no portal, no customer accounts and no SLA timers. For internal and simple request-style work you can combine these built features.

A project from the service template. The Service internal requests template creates a project of ordinary Orbit work for internal requests. It is not a customer portal and has no SLA engine. See Your first project.
Forms. A form turns answers into work items. You can share it with people who are signed in or with anyone who has the link, with daily and per-sender limits. A person who is not signed in gets a confirmation and a reference, not the work item itself. See Forms that create work.
Workflows with approvals. A workflow can include approval steps with approvers, a quorum, delegates and an audit trail. The Business process approval template uses them. See Workflows.
Notifications. Schemes tell the assignee, the reporter or a group about each change. See Notifications and e-mail.
Reports. Created-versus-resolved and resolution-time charts show how fast requests close. See Dashboards and reports.
Incidents from monitoring. In Pulse you can declare an incident from an alert or by hand. You set its severity and commander, follow its timeline, and link Orbit work and a postmortem page in Folio. This is the incident feature of Pulse and not part of the planned module. See Incidents and postmortems. Pulse and Folio do not yet run on every company address; see Organizations, sites and roles.

Automation can assign, label and comment on work as well. It is in development, see Automation rules.

What you cannot do yet

Publish a help centre for customers, or give outside customers customer-only accounts.
Define request types or queues, or measure a response with an SLA timer.
Schedule on-call rotations or escalate an alert to the person on call.
Run a change calendar with freeze windows.

Planned work is on the roadmap. Dates are not promised.