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Turn off approver email for one catalog item in App Portal

We just upgraded to App Portal 2019 R1.  We were hoping we would find a way to turn off email notification for an individual catalog item.  It looks like it is still only a global option in the Site Management\Settings\Email section.

Is there some way of turning it off that we are not seeing?

Thanks!

Joan McKinley

 

(1) Solution

I'll throw a few thoughts out, and you let me know if any of these seems of interest.  Then we can go into more detail if needed.

  1. App Portal has an "Allow approvers to accept requests" feature that allows an approver (from a pool of approvers) to "accept" a specific request.  This lets other approvers within that approval group know that someone else has picked up the request and is handling it, so the others can simply ignore that request.  Other approvers will not receive email reminders to approve that request once it has been accepted.
  2. App Portal can allow an approval process to happen in an external system.  To do this, you would set up the catalog item to use the "Start deployment using API?" option.  You could then have an action tied to the "On Check Status" event that checks the status of the Remedy ticket.  If the status matches a specified value (using the "Map return value"), then the action would trigger the Start Deployment API (using the "Map action to trigger").  Alternatively, you could set up a button in Remedy that makes the Start Deployment API call, and then when the SAM team clicks the button, it would instruct App Portal to start the deployment for that request.
  3. You could set up the approval process to have a generic, unmonitored mailbox as the approver.  Emails would still be sent, but they wouldn't go to the SAM team members.  Then you can use the same process you're currently using by clicking the link in the Remedy ticket to go to the approval (except the approver would have to use the "override" option since they aren't listed as the current approver).

 

Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera. If my reply answers a question you have raised, please click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION".

View solution in original post

(6) Replies

By "approver email", are you referring to the email that goes to an approver when it's their turn to approve a request?  If so, I don't believe there is any way to disable that notification (per catalog item or globally).  You can globally disable the email to the requester once the request has been fully approved, but you can't disable the notification to the approver.

Can you explain your use case for this?  That seems like a strange behavior you're trying to achieve.  Perhaps I can help you identify a different option if I understand what your'e trying to accomplish (and why).

Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera. If my reply answers a question you have raised, please click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION".

Thanks for the reply jdempsey!  The reason why we want to do this is because we are creating a Remedy ticket "On Submit" for that catalog item.  That ticket is being passed the "View Details" variable which has the link for approving the request.   When there are enough licenses for that software, the Software Asset Management team will click the link from the ticket to approve, rather than go into App Portal "Approve/Reject" page or an email.

The reason why they want email turned off is because a team of people would receive the emails and not know how needs to work on it.  If the Software Asset Management representative grabs the ticket from Remedy with the link to approve in it, we aren't spamming people needlessly.

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

@joan_mckinley 

Excuse me for maybe asking a stupid question, but why did you decide to use the App Portal as the end-user facing front-end for software requests instead of the Remedy self-service catalog, if you want the approval process to be running in Remedy?

Thanks,

@JohnSorensenDK 

Thanks for the question.  This is just a one time scenario for us and Remedy Self-Service Catalog is $$$.  🙂  The rest of the approvals can be done via email or the portal.

Thanks,

Joan

 

I'll throw a few thoughts out, and you let me know if any of these seems of interest.  Then we can go into more detail if needed.

  1. App Portal has an "Allow approvers to accept requests" feature that allows an approver (from a pool of approvers) to "accept" a specific request.  This lets other approvers within that approval group know that someone else has picked up the request and is handling it, so the others can simply ignore that request.  Other approvers will not receive email reminders to approve that request once it has been accepted.
  2. App Portal can allow an approval process to happen in an external system.  To do this, you would set up the catalog item to use the "Start deployment using API?" option.  You could then have an action tied to the "On Check Status" event that checks the status of the Remedy ticket.  If the status matches a specified value (using the "Map return value"), then the action would trigger the Start Deployment API (using the "Map action to trigger").  Alternatively, you could set up a button in Remedy that makes the Start Deployment API call, and then when the SAM team clicks the button, it would instruct App Portal to start the deployment for that request.
  3. You could set up the approval process to have a generic, unmonitored mailbox as the approver.  Emails would still be sent, but they wouldn't go to the SAM team members.  Then you can use the same process you're currently using by clicking the link in the Remedy ticket to go to the approval (except the approver would have to use the "override" option since they aren't listed as the current approver).

 

Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera. If my reply answers a question you have raised, please click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION".

@jdempsey, thank you for the suggestions!  I think we will look at the first option:  Allow approvers to accept requests.  

We actually do have a Check Status in Actions.  Osa helped us set it up a couple years go when we first installed App Portal.  But we hadn't thought of it using it in the manner you suggested below.

Even the last one is a good suggestion.  We had thought of something similar - we created a distribution list of just a few SAM members that would be grabbing tickets and only send the approval email to them rather than the entire team.  We added that AD group as approvers via "User Groups" in the "Approval Groups" then applied that to a Workflow.

We will definitely achieve what we want between all these ideas.

Thanks!