Make the ServiceDesk Plus Self-Service Portal Your Own

My colleague thought that you might like to know a little more about how to personalise the Self-Service Portal for your organisation. We've previously discussed the option for using the Translation files in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to customise the portal text in this blog. However, were you aware that you have an element of the ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus self-service portal page that you can modify for your own purposes?

If you're happy coding a bit of HTML you can edit the Portal Usage section to your own ends:





















Perhaps you'd like to advertise some of the elements of your Intranet or SharePoint portals, provide links to useful external websites and resources or add some dynamic reports of current help desk performance. Either way you're going to need to edit the 'SelfServiceHelp.html file' located in the <Product Home>\custom folder. The default content of this file is shown below:


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> 
<HTML> 
<HEAD> 
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8"> 
<TITLE></TITLE> 
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="LibreOffice 3.3  (Unix)"> 
<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="0;0"> 
<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="Umasankar N"> 
<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20111229;11590000"> 
<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="umashankar n."> 
<META NAME="CHANGEDBY" CONTENT="umashankar n."> 
<STYLE TYPE="text/css"> 
<!--
P { color: #000000; font-family: "Verdana", "Arial", "Helvetica", sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal }
H3 { color: #000000 }
H3.western { font-family: "Helvetica", "Arial", "Geneva", sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal }
H3.cjk { font-family: "WenQuanYi Micro Hei"; font-style: normal }
H3.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Hindi"; font-style: normal }
-->
</STYLE> 
</HEAD> 
<BODY LANG="en-IN" TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#ffffff" DIR="LTR" STYLE="border: none; padding: 0cm"> 
<H3 CLASS="western">Portal Usage</H3> 
<P>Self-Service Portal enable users 
</P> 
<UL> 
<LI><P>To create requests for any failure or degradation of a
service or request for a new resource or new service</P> 
<LI><P>Track status of existing requests 
</P> 
<LI><P>Search knowledge base articles from Solutions</P> 
<LI><P>View any pending approval actions</P> 
<LI><P>View organization announcements</P> 
<LI><P>Add notes, attachments for existing requests</P> 
<LI><P>Reply for existing requests</P> 
<LI><P>Personalize the display language, date / time format from
Personalize section</P> 
<P><BR>NOTE : The content of this section can be configured in
SelfServiceHelp.html file under &lt;product_home&gt;/custom
directory.</P> 
</UL> 
</BODY> 

</HTML>


You're pretty much free to change the HTML content between the main <BODY> tags (within the confines of the Portal Usage page area of the self-service portal of course). Just be aware that you might need to flush your local Internet browser cache to see the wonderful new content you've produced. 

Here's an example of a dynamic chart of the current live Incident request status from ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus displayed in an iframe:






















Hopefully I've managed to demonstrate you can be pretty creative - enjoy!

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