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Hiding menus from the Service Manager ribbon in the Outlook Console

Csaba_RozinyakCsaba_Rozinyak Premier Partner IT Monkey ✭
in Outlook Console

Hi,

My customer will soon need to turn off all the available options such as tasks, menus, etc. for creating new Incidents, Change Requests, Service Requests and Problems throughout their Service Manager implementation, while maintaining the possibility of modifying and closing existing tickets. While disabling tasks and navigation menus is easily achieved in the Cireson portal and within the Service Manager console (e.g. through a user role), the Outlook Console does not seem to have any central admin setting to disable the Outlook Console menu "Create" on the Service Manager ribbon in Outlook, nor is it possible to remove Create tasks from the right-click menu.

Is there a workaround for the Outlook Console or does anyone have a good suggestion as to what would achieve a similar result? I was thinking about a registry setting that could perhaps be forced with a GPO to be disabled but such a registry entry does not seem to exist either.

Thanks in advance!

Csaba

Answers

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    James_AtanceJames_Atance Cireson Support Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
    Hi Csaba,

    This is not possible as they are hard coded in the installation, and can not be altered.

    James
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    Tom_HendricksTom_Hendricks Customer Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    That certainly would be a terrific feature, though.  This is a contributing factor to why I have sadly not deployed the Outlook console to our analysts.  The acknowledged bugs with the calendars and the fact that the forms do not match the portal forms are the others.  I get incredibly positive feedback from people who see it installed on my machine, until I have to explain how it actually works.

    It has all the makings of a truly fantastic product--it is 95% there, IMO--but it is unfortunately undeployable for us.  It sounds like my users and @Csaba_Rozinyak's customer would really benefit from some attention to this product.
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    Csaba_RozinyakCsaba_Rozinyak Premier Partner IT Monkey ✭

    @James_Atance Thank you for your response. Having gone through the admin settings and registry entries for the app I had known before I submitted this question that it was not possible to turn off or hide create functionality or any other menu within the app and it's right-click menu for that matter. I have been looking for a workaround of any sort to prevent analysts from creating new tickets through the app while still maintaining the possibility of updating existing tickets. It is as easy as removing a tick from one check box per class in the Analyst portal, and I'd love to see a similar feature in the Outlook Console. Especially with the Service Request class my customer has had challenges over the years. On a side note, I do agree that there are other challenges with the product such as that @Tom_Hendricks is mentioning here.

    My question was if there was a better way, not necessarily directly from within the app, than uninstalling the entire app. But I have got the impression that we have no options inside or outside of the product that would achieve a similar result. So in our case I think the only way forward is to uninstall the entire add-in. It is a workaround of some sort since my customer's analysts will still be able to make modifications in their tickets through the Service Manager console. However, we do lose the possibility to add e-mails to tickets right from Outlook and other useful functionality between Outlook and Service Manager.

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    Tom_HendricksTom_Hendricks Customer Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
    @Csaba_Rozinya, I have forbidden the use of the console in our environment, except for administrative use by a very small number of people.  I have stumbled across a few well-intentioned users who thought they were supposed to use the console and had been sending some rather strange tickets as a result.

    I am planning to block the console using the firewall, except for members of a certain group.  Since I haven't tested it yet, we will have to see how well that works in practice, of course.  Have you already tried or considered something similar to this for your customer?
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    Csaba_RozinyakCsaba_Rozinyak Premier Partner IT Monkey ✭

    @Tom_Hendricks Yeah, we have also seen some weird tickets created via the Outlook Console over the years :). Your test with the firewall seems intriguing. Once you have tested it, please let us folks know in this thread how it worked out :).

    In our case my customer has made a quick decision of preventing new users from ordering the application and also decided to get it uninstalled from all machines using ConfigMgr. My customer counts roughly 5-6000 users worldwide but only about 40 analysts have the Outlook Console installed today, with probably even fewer actually using it. Due to my customer's long-term plans with ITSM removing the Outlook Console altogether will not be a setback.

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