Activities

Introduction

Activities are a central component of the Hornbill solution and are provided both through the collaboration features, and from many of the line of business applications which you may install on your Hornbill Instance.

Activity Types

Activities can come in various forms but are summarised as follows:

Manually Created Tasks
Business Process Human Tasks
Authorization's

Creating Activities

Business Process Human Tasks and Authorization's are created using the business process designer and more information about these can be found via the related articles links

Manually created tasks can be created from the My Activities view, My Activities Side Bar view or from various views in line of business applications such as from requests in Service Manager, from Documents in Document Manager or on Configuration Items in Configuration Manager

Activity Templates

If configured a drop down of available activity templates will be presented.

Choosing a template will populate the title, description, outcomes and or add checklist items to the activity if these have been configured in the activity template
Activity templates can only be created and managed by users who have the Activities Template Manager role
Templates are a quick way to populate repetitive activity content when creating new activities

Activity Attributes

Title - The Activity name
Description - Details relating to what need to be completed in the activity
Personal - Option to mark the activity as private
Schedule - Option to set a schedule for the reoccurrence for the activity
Category - Select the Category for the Activity, and in turn it's defined outcomes - you can create your own Activity Categories and custom outcomes from the Manage Activity Categories link in the related articles section.
Priority - Optionally set a priority for the activity (optional)
Assign To - Select if the activity should be assigned to a named user, role or group and select the relevant user, role or group accordingly
Starts On - Optionally select when the activity is required to start - select a date and time or choose the All Day option
Due On - Optionally select when the activity should be completed by. With a Due Date and time selected, an option to set reminders for the assignee and owner will be presented
Add Checklist - Optionally create a checklist and checklist items which need to be completed as part of the activity
Attach File - Optionally attach files relevant to the activity you are creating

Viewing Activities

Once Activities are created, they can be viewed by their assignees in various places:

My Activities
My Activities Side Bar
In line of business application views
Hornbill Mobile

Activity Notifications

Notifications relating to new activities will appear in the My Activities Side Bar and will be indicated by the tab turning Orange
Notifications can be viewed on the Hornbill mobile, and both Banners and Badges can be used to indicate new Activities have been assigned

Completing Activities

Activities can be completed in the following ways:

Clicking on the activity title, will show the options to edit, and complete the activity as well as show any defined checklist's for the activity.

Tick any checklist item to indicate it is complete (this will show visually against the activity as a progress bar reflecting the percentage of the checklist items which are marked)
Click on complete to choose a relevant outcome for the activity and provide any supporting information

If required use the Follow Up button no completing the activity to schedule another activity
Record the time spent on completing the activity* With Timesheet Manager installed, this time spent can be automatically added to the users timesheet
Mark if the activity should be flagged as a chargeable activity

Click on Edit, to change attributes of the activity

Click on the Tick in a box icon to go straight to the compete view for the activity
Click on the entity hyperlink to be taken to the entity against which the activity has been created (if present), this could be a request, document or ci from installed line of business applications

Plug-ins

Timesheet Manager

Activities - Record the time spent in completing activities through the Days / Hours / Minutes time spent feature of an activity and have the time recorded automatically in the users timesheet.

Service Manager

Experimental Feature

This feature allows a user to complete tasks that are assigned to another person. Supporting teams of a service that is associated to a request will be respected otherwise if a request is not associated to a service, then the user can complete tasks that are assigned to the user's team(s) members. System Setting: app.experimental.advancedRequestTaskCompleter