Understanding the Use of Hashtags in Spiceworks
How to Setup Automated IT Checklist Tickets in SpiceworksSitting down with my IT staff for our weekly meeting, we wondered together if Spiceworks could create a recurring task with a checklist so we could manage daily/weekly/monthly operational IT checks via the ticketing system. Turns out you can cobble together a fairly advanced configuration to get a scheduled task to copy an email template file to your SMTP server on the appropriate interval to generate the desired tickets with checklists. From there you can manage the tickets and their checklists as a standard Spiceworks ticket. Reading through the Spiceworks community posts is a real treat. There are so many helpful pros out there willing to give of their time to share useful walkthroughs with the rest of us. Some of those articles are linked to below. Along the way to getting this completed, I found some details that I thought would be helpful to others. Sometimes we in the tech community take it for granted that someone knows how to do something seemingly simple, like setup a scheduled task. Most of us may know how to do that stuff, but a couple gotcha’s stuck out for me and I have included them in the article. We started Googling and came across a few things right away. Here’s what we learned in the first few minutes: Checklists are now built-in to Spiceworks!Since 7.5 this plugin () is now included!You must enable the plugin in Spiceworks under Settings > Manage Apps if you are to use itOther people have written about it on Spiceworks great read, and helped me with ideas for my own processWe pretty much did what was mentioned here, but did things slightly differently and I wanted to fully document how we accomplished our goalAfter the initial web search results, we set out to see if we could patch together a system using checklist templates applied by category and the built-in hashtags to automatically categorize and assign the daily tickets as they came in. Here’s what our environment looked like as we started the process: Spiceworks on-prem installation running on Windows 2012 R2SMTP Server on-premSMTP relay email from address setup as an Admin on Spiceworks (important for later)Ticket Checklist enabled under Settings > Manage Apps Understanding the Use of Hashtags in Spiceworks [Gotcha #1] In order to use hashtags in Spiceworks tickets (“Tickets Anywhere”), you must be an admin in Spiceworks. End-users cannot use the hashtag commands for obvious reasons. So, if you’re sending from an address that is not a Spiceworks admin and your hashtags aren’t working for your new recurring checklist tickets, this could be the reason.Once we setup the SMPT relay email address as an admin on our installation, we were ready to get cooking. This way we can include hashtags in the body of the email to categorize and assign the new checklist tickets as they come in.Before setting up your checklists templates, I recommend adding matching categories to your Spiceworks configuration. This way, when you create the email template that will generate your IT Checklist Tickets, you can assign the email to a category to which you can automatically apply a checklist template.We added categories zChecksDaily, zChecksWeekly, zChecksMonthly… ect.[Gotcha #2] Where is the save button? There is no “Save” button here in Spiceworks, it just saves it on the fly for you. Now when I create my checklist templates, I’ll be able to use the option to apply the template to tickets that fit the new categories. Setting up Checklists and Templates[Gotcha #3] From an existing ticket (we just created a new ticket for this purpose and called it Test Ticket), select the Checklists option on that ticket in Spiceworks. That’s right, there’s no Settings > Checklists or configuration tab, or whatever. Get over it. Go to an existing ticket and then go to the Checklists section of that ticket. On an existing ticket, you can of course just add new tasks, but below that area you can add an existing template or create a new template. Create a new Checklist for each task list interval you want. Below you can see my DailyChecks template.When working with a checklist, you can drag and drop each task to rearrange, so don't worry about the order in which you create each task.Note that as you create a new checklist template, you can also select a ticket category to which you can apply that template. [Gotcha #4] Note that if you select this option on an existing category, all closed/open/future tickets in that category will now have that checklist added to the ticket. This is why I recommend using a completely new set of categories and checklist templates. Next step is on to the email template itself. The Email TemplateWe are using a simple .txt file on the SMTP for the checklist email templates, and we are storing them in a folder at C:\adminshare\emails\%foldername%. Yes, you can use .txt files, you don’t need to use .eml files for this procedure.In our case I set up 6 folders: C:\adminshare\emails\dailyC:\adminshare\emails\weeklyC:\adminshare\emails\monthlyC:\adminshare\emails\quarterlyC:\adminshare\emails\semiannualC:\adminshare\emails\annualIn each folder we placed the following file appropriately named “Checklist%interval%.txt,” as in, “ChecklistDaily.txt, ChecklistWeekly.txt, ChecklistMonthly.txt…, etc.”Those .txt files are very simple as follows, with only the category being different in each… Here’s the text from the daily: Text version if you want to copy/paste: FROM:ourSMTPrelayaddress@TO:ourHelpDeskEmail@ SUBJECT:Daily IT Checks#category zChecksDaily#assign to SoAndSo (I assign it to my help desk lead. If he’s out on PTO, another guy will grab it)#waiting (I put it in a waiting status so it doesn’t count against the clock)#cc myEmailAddress@ (I want to keep track on these)#due today @12pm (I set a time due for noon)That’s all there is to it. The “zChecksDaily” category would change to “zChecksWeekly, zChecksMonthly, etc.”The Batch FileCreate a simple batch file for each checklist interval. To create a batch file, open Notepad and enter something similar to the following (this is a shameless copy of the article I mentioned earlier, found here) HT MFord66215@echo off @set errorlevel=0 cls echo. echo "Daily Checklist Generator" echo "Generates emails to helpdesk to perform tasks." echo. echo "Usage - Daily_checklist.bat ( debug )" echo "Adding the debug command line parameter turns echo on and enables pauses" echo. echo. echo "EMails checklist items to a helpdesk email account." echo "Designed to be a daily task run from a centralized server." echo "Sends the email using the SMTP engine" echo. echo "MFord66215 - Spiceworks 'How-To' publication":Begin @if "%1%"=="debug" echo "DEBUG DETECT!" @if "%1%"=="debug" echo on @if "%1%"=="debug" echo "Begin Process" @if "%1%"=="debug" pause:PROCESS @if "%1%"=="debug" echo Process@copy c:\AdminShare\emails\daily\*.txt C:\inetpub\mailroot\Pickup>nul:The line immediately above this one is the copy command for my daily .txt file that generates the email.In Notepad, save this file as a .bat … Choose Save As, then change the Save as type field “All Files” and add the .bat extension to the end of your file name. Note the location of the .bat file so you can call it in the scheduled task. The Scheduled TaskBefore creating your scheduled task, have an idea in mind for what you need to accomplish. In our case, we simply want to copy the .txt files from the folders mentioned above on a schedule that matches their frequency. To copy the corresponding file, we’re going to use a batch file that launches a simple copy command. We are performing this operation on the SMTP server that will send our template email to our Spiceworks help desk. Things to keep in mind: [Gotcha #5] The user account used to run the batch file needs Full Control permissions on the Pickup folder mentioned below[Gotcha #6] The user account used also needs “Log on as a batch job” rights in your server’s local security policyThe default directory for picking up email on Windows 2012 R2 SMTP standard configuration is:C:\inetpub\mailroot\Pickup. Default permissions on this folder will prevent your copy from working, even if your task is run with elevated permissions, because of User Account Control. You haven’t disabled UAC, have you? =)We created a new local user (not wanting to use a domain admin account) to run the tasks called “taskadmin.” The account does NOT need to be a local administrator. We then gave full control NTFS permissions to “taskadmin” on the Pickup folder. Our scheduled .bat file works without issue.To give the “taskadmin” user “Logon as a batch job” rights you have to open the Local Security Policy editor (this is essentially local group policy) and navigate to: Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment > Log on as a batch job. Here’s what that looks like: For daily task checklists, we want the task to run at a certain time each day. For weekly tasks, we’ll do that weekly, and so on. We’ll walk through the daily scheduled task in this article, and you can extrapolate from there how to do your weekly, monthly, and other recurring IT checklists.Open Task Scheduler on your server and create a new basic taskGive the task a name, and enter a description if you’d like toWe’re working on the daily one here, so leave it at DailyWe run ours at 7:30 AM, but choose whatever works for your teamNext screen you want “Start a program”Then browse to the location of the .bat file you created in the step aboveClick Next and then check the box “Open the Properties dialog….”Here you change the user to the newly created taskadmin user or whatever you created and you also change the Security option to “Run whether user is logged on or not.” You do want the task to run whether the user is logged on, right? Once you click OK to save your changes, you’ll get prompted for the password of the new user you created earlier in the walkthrough. Hope you documented that password! =)Ok, now your scheduled task should be complete and you can run it as a test to see if it works. Select it in the tasks view and click “Run.” In a few minutes, you should get an email with your new daily checklist attached! Phew! I know that was a lot, but I wanted to provide a detailed walkthrough for how the process worked for us. Please leave a comment or share a walkthrough of your own to benefit the community! Thanks! ................
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