Workflow capabilities: Four new admin tools
Growing a service catalogue often means rebuilding the same workflow from scratch, writing plain-text descriptions your users skim past, and watching requesters submit tickets that don't actually answer the question you needed answered — often because a generic field name left them guessing what to enter.
Four related improvements to Service Desk administration tackle this together: duplicating existing processes, formatting service descriptions with rich text, renaming the ticket description field per service, and renaming the Object field per use case.
What's new
Duplicate an existing process
A new Duplicate process action in Service Desk administration lets you create a new process as an exact copy of an existing one — same workflow statuses, transitions, and properties, with ticket fields reused rather than recreated. The copy is automatically named (for example, "Incident (Copy)") so you never confuse it with the original, and the source process stays untouched. You then only adjust what's genuinely different, such as the resolver group for a new service.
Format service descriptions with rich text
Service descriptions in the catalogue use rich-text editor, so you can add headings, bullet points, and hyperlinks instead of a dense block of plain text. Existing descriptions are migrated automatically, and the short one-line description and tooltip keep their current plain-text behaviour.
Rename the ticket description field per service
The main text field on the New Ticket form no longer has to say "Description" for every service. Administrators can give it a custom, service-specific label — for example "Business justification" for an access request, or "Incident symptoms" for an incident — while the underlying field, storage, and rich-text behaviour stay the same. If no custom label is set, the form falls back to "Description" as before.
Rename the Object field by use case
The Object field on the New Ticket form no longer has to read "Object" for every service. If a service defines an object type, the field can be named automatically to match it (for example "Printer" or "Laptop"), and administrators can override the label with a custom name for specific scenarios. The updated name shows everywhere the field appears on the form, and localization keeps it in the requester's language.
How it helps in real life
Standing up a near-identical service in minutes
Situation: You need a "VPN Access – Contractors" service that's almost identical to your existing "VPN Access – Employees" process, just with a different resolver group.
What you do: Duplicate the existing process, change the resolver group for the "New" status, and reuse a structured, rich-text description with a link to the relevant knowledge base article.
What you gain: A new, consistent service live in minutes instead of rebuilding a workflow and description from scratch.
Getting complete information on the first submission
Situation: Requesters filing a "Change Request" ticket often leave the generic "Description" field with a single vague sentence, so solvers have to chase clarification.
What you do: Rename the field to something like "What's changing and why", and rewrite the service description with a bulleted list of exactly what information is required.
What you gain: Requesters know what to write the first time, reducing back-and-forth and speeding up resolution.
Getting the right object selected the first time
Situation: A "Printer Support" service uses the generic "Object" field, so requesters aren't sure whether to enter the printer model, asset tag, or location.
What you do: Set the object type for the service and let the field rename itself to "Printer", or apply a custom label such as "Which printer?" for extra clarity.
What you gain: Requesters pick the correct object on the first try, reducing mislabelled tickets and follow-up questions.
Administration and setup
All four capabilities are configured directly in Service Desk administration: trigger duplication from the process list, edit descriptions in the service's Description field, set a custom label for the ticket description field per service, and rename the Object field per service or object type on the New Ticket form.
Available now
These improvements are available in ALVAO Service Desk, Start Edition.
We'd love to hear how these changes work for your service catalogue and what would make configuring services even easier.