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Best Practices - Business Rules

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General tab

Note: Business Rules by default run all day 7 days a week from 12am to 11:59:59pm .

  • Consider how often do you want to receive the alert:
    • If you want to receive an immediate notification (Alert, Email, etc.) when an event occurs, set it to occur Daily and running every 1 minute;
    • If you don't need an immediate notification, set your interval accordingly to when you want to see it (ex. every 5, 10, or 20 minutes);
    • If you want business rules to run during business hours, change your occurrence to weekly and choose which days you work on and change the start and end times to be your business hours (ex. starting at 9:00am and ending at 5:00:00pm);
  • Business rules can cause strain on the database server depending on how many business rules you have running and how often they run. If you have a lot, try not to have too many running every 1 minute;.

Conditions tab

The general idea is to have criteria that is as specific as possible. Specific rules run faster and cause less strain on the database server.

  • Consider the status of the request you are looking for:
    • Are you looking for all open or all closed requests?
    • If you are looking for open requests, where is the request located?
      • If the request has been recently logged, look specifically for a status of "In Dispatch"
      • If the request is in a queue, you won't have a status of "In Dispatch" so limit it to "In Queue" if you want unassigned requests or "In Service" for assigned requests
  • In most cases, you won't need to review all requests every time the rule runs. Try to limit the rule to run only on recently submitted requests or recently updated requests. You can do this using the criteria "Greater than or Equal to Last Time Rule Ran" which checks to see if there are new requests that match the given criteria since the rule ran last.
    For example, if you are looking for:
    • recently submitted requests, use Time Logged Greater than or Equal to 'Last Time Rule Ran'
    • recently updated requests, use Memo Time Logged Greater than or Equal to 'Last Time Rule Ran'
    • requests that have recently moved from Dispatch into a queue folder, use Time Dispatched Greater than or Equal to 'Last Time Rule Ran'
    • recently closed requests, use Time Closed Greater than or Equal to 'Last Time Rule Ran'
      (Note: When you are creating a business rule for the first time that uses 'Last Time Rule Ran', there is no timestamp (on when the business rule ran last) so you will want to preview the query results to view how many requests would be affected before saving and running the rule. To prevent it from running on too many old requests, you can add a secondary criteria such as: AND FieldName Equal to 'Today' (so that it only looks at requests that match this condition today). After the rule runs at least once, you can remove this extra condition.)
  • Use as much criteria as you need as the more you have, the faster it will run

Important!
Always preview the query results before activating the rule to make sure you are getting the expected results. Business rule changes cannot be undone. You can only create additional business rules to try and undo what the previous business rule did so be very careful!

Workflow tab

Consider what you what to happen to the request when the business rule runs. If you just want a notification to go out, the Workflow tab can be skipped.

  • If the conditions of the business rule are looking for a custom field and you want the notification to use data from the custom fields, consider specifying the same Form Type that you specified in your criteria in the Conditions tab. This will allow you to use variables from the Custom Form in your notification template. If you don't specify a form type, you can only add in all custom form data in a predetermined format to your notification.
  • If you want to assign these requests to a Support Rep, you must specify a queue folder first. This will unlock a list of Support Reps who currently have access to that queue in the Assign Work field.
  • If your conditions are specifying closed requests, ensure that the "Close" option is also enabled. This will prevent requests from being re-opened.

Notifications tab

What types of Alert do you want to receive (Alert, Email, Text Messaging, Reminder) and when do you want to receive them?

  • Re-notification Interval, use this to specify how often you want to receive emails
    • (Default) No-renotification - only send a notification once when all criteria are met
    • Everytime the rule runs - If the criteria is met, the next time the business rule is run, send the notification again until the criteria is not met
    • Every X hrs Y Min after the initial email notification - While the criteria is still being met on this business rule, send an email on a given interval until the criteria is not met
  • Allow Reply to Update Request - Enabling this feature forces you to use the system email account's subject line which in turn, allows the recipient to reply to this notification and update the service request with their response
  • Add Trace Memo - Enabling this feature, adds a memo entry to the service request saying that the email was sent and who the recipients were (great for tracking purposes)
  • If you have created a template before or one similar, you can use the Existing tab to use them again. If you wish to make changes to the template and save it as a new one, make sure you choose Copy so you don't overwrite the existing one.