Hi helpdeskers,

There's been a bit of discussion going around at the moment about service level agreements, job timers and HelpMaster Pro Priority Manager profiles, so I thought that I would post a quick tutorial on how to automatically set the "To be completed by" date for a job.  Some of this information has been lifted from a previous post about "stopping the clock"

A HelpMaster Pro job has a "To be completed by" date field located on the "Options" tab of a job.  This date can be set in a number of ways. 

1. Set via a job template. The "To be completed by" date for a job can be automatically set by a Job Template whenever it is used to log a job.  It can also be set manually, or you can even create a Priority Manager Profile to automatically set this date, depending on criteria that you define.

A Job Template can set the "To be completed by" date for a job

2. Create a Priority Manager Profile that will automatically set it the "To be completed by date"

1. Create a new Priority Manager profile
2. Launch the Job Finder to define the criteria of what to "look for".  From the "Job Status" drop-down box, select all of the job status codes that will "stop the clock".  Click "Return results to Priority Manager"
3. In the "Actions to perform" tab of the Priority Manager profile, check the "Execute SQL" checkbox and paste the following:
   
   Update tblHelpdeskJobs Set ToBeCompletedBy = DateAdd(day, 2, DateLogged) Where tblHelpdeskJobs.PKID = <>
   
   
   
   
   This SQL will update every job that is found by the Priority Manager and directly set the "To be completed by" date field in the job.  Adjust the SQL here to suit your particular needs.  The example above add 2 days from the current date.
    
4. On the "Frequency" tab, set the frequency of this profile to execute every 10 minutes.  Select "Perform all actions EVERY TIME this schedule is run for all jobs found by this profile"
5. Check the "Is this profile Active?"
6. Give the profile a name and then click OK to save the profile.

A good use of this style of setting the "To be completed by" date is to create multiple Priority Manager profiles of this nature that will target different types of jobs and set the value to something different.

For example, you could create PM profiles to look for and set the following.

• All urgent jobs (Priority field) = set to 1 working day
• All jobs with a particular issue hierarchy setting = 5 hours.
• All jobs logged for a particular client = 1 hour.

etc.

There really is no end to the number of possibilities.  If you cannot get the HelpMaster Pro job finder to find what you're after, you can always use the "Custom SQL" feature of the Priority Manager as well.