USD – Intranet – NEIL PARKHURST

I have a requirement in Unified Service Desk (USD) to optionally show a customer’s intranet within a tab, often useful for a call agent as the company intranet may typically be one key source of all manner of information about how to manage customer queries. Plus they can easily see photos of last year’s Christmas Party!!!

The steps involved were;

Create an option.
Create a hosted control.
Create an action.
Trigger the action when USD loads.

STEP ONE – Create an option.

Within the USD settings, I selected the options area and created a new option called “Intranet”.

The value was then set to the url for the intranet. (Or my blog in this example!)

STEP TWO – Create a hosted control.

Next you will need a hosted control (tab) to act as the container for the hosted control. Mine is shown below. Notice that the USD Component type is “Standard Web Application”, the hosting type has been selected as “IE Process”, the application is global and the display group is MainPanel.

Note: You could also select Internal WPF for the hosting type. I have just found that IE Process seems to work better for standard web pages. But try either. (One may work better for your particular Intranet!)

STEP THREE – Create an action.

So next I needed an action to optionally display the intranet page. Details are below.

My order was 15, this was to sequence the tabs I needed when USD loads. (See next step!)

The hosted control is Intranet, the one we just created.

Action is navigate.

Data contains a line to set the url to “[[$Global.Intranet]g+]”. This sets the url to be the one we created as an option in step one.

Next I set the condition on this action to be “[[$Global.Intranet]g+]”==”” The effect of doing this is that the intranet tab will only show if the intranet option exists.

STEP FOUR – Trigger the action when USD Loads.

Finally (“almost”) I needed to show the Intranet tab when USD loads. For this load your global container hosted control. And under the events find DeskTopReady. Then in this add the action that has just been created.

My DesktopReady event looks like the one below. You can see that I actually call quite a few actions, this is why I gave the action order 15. As the sequence of actions is significant. Yours might look simpler than this!

STEP FIVE / SIX – Optional!

You may want to add an action to the desktop event to prevent users from closing the Intranet tab. (If you do this, don’t forget to repeat the condition on the Set User Can Close action.)

You may also want to create a navigation tollbar that will have home, back and forward buttons. (If you have a home button you may find that a “GoHome” action take you to your browser home page, so I called the navigate action from my home button!)