1.   New Halo Best Practice Course Now Available

A new HaloITSM Best Practice course is now live and available in YU Learn.
This course is designed for both new and experienced agents. It guides you through recommended workflows for triage, ticket handling, communication, and resolution, providing easy-to-follow processes that enhance back-end consistency and metric gathering.

You can access the course right away, but please note that some of the processes covered rely on new features outlined below, which won’t be available until August 19, 2025.

2.   Changes to the Halo Client—Coming August 19, 2025

New Panes and Workflows

On August 19, 2025, we will introduce new interface panes and updated workflows to give you better visibility and control while working on tickets.

• Other Open Tickets Panel: Located in the end-user details pane, the Other Open Tickets panel allows you to easily view all other open tickets submitted by a user. It helps you quickly spot duplicates, recurring issues, or related requests.

• Resolve IT Workflow: The updated Resolve IT workflow now prompts agents to complete essential categorization fields (Service, Service Request Category, Action, and Cause Code) before resolving a ticket. This ensures tickets are closed with accurate and consistent metadata, supporting better reporting, root cause analysis, and service improvement.

Enhanced Ticket Actions in Halo—Coming August 19, 2025

To support best practices and improve both communication and SLA tracking, we’re releasing updated ticket actions in Halo. These new, intuitive buttons enable precise control over your interactions with our community. Whether you’re requesting information, providing updates, or adding internal notes, each action is designed to match your intent, reduce unnecessary email notifications, and ensure ticket statuses and SLA metrics are accurately maintained.

Some service requests evolve into complex or undefined tasks that resemble projects more than service requests. These tickets don’t align with our SLAs and can distort performance reporting. Using Backlog tickets, we can separate these requests from regular service work and preserve SLA accuracy.

• Backlog tickets can hold tasks and support multi-agent collaboration.
• Tickets may sit in backlog for future review, be actively worked on, or added to a Notice of Intent (NOI) as part of IPPM project planning.

When to use Backlog?

Convert SRs to Backlog tickets when:

• An SR grows beyond a repeatable, known effort.
• The request requires effort well beyond its SLA, business-owner consultation, or significant resource planning.
• The ticket will become part of a larger project.

Training & Resources

Convert, don’t create. Never create a backlog ticket directly. Instead, convert existing Service Requests to Backlog tickets.

Check out the video below, where we provide a quick overview of what this looks like for end users, and go over some agent-side tips and tricks, including:

• Concealing & revealing private notes
• Sending updates with and without emails

Many factors contribute to ticket submission times, and our test was far from comprehensive, but it still gives a great indication of what we can expect when Halo goes live on March 8. Check out the video below to watch the test and see the results.

Halo allows for customizable dashboard graphics that visualize essential data, as well as an activity feed that, with a bevy of filter options, allows for an at-a-glance understanding of what your team is working on.

See all of this in action in our video below:

With only a few clicks, you can access your reporting library and run or modify pre-built reports that are customized for your team.

That means that you and your team will get instant reports to check on the tickets that are assigned to your group. Let's take a closer look at what a Halo report provides.

The first thing you’ll notice is how many filters you can use to modify your report. Dynamically combining these filters ensures your report displays exactly what you need.

You can select date ranges and ticket number ranges. You can see what teams have tickets assigned to them and get a detailed overview of what those tickets are.

Halo reports are a great way to see exactly what’s going on in your area—applying meaningful filtering to already powerful pre-built reports means easy access to all our data. It means we can be more informed and deliberate and have more productive conversations about our work.

We took a design thinking approach that prioritizes our users' needs. Our Operation Excellence team worked in conjunction with end-users, service owners and agents to develop a system that is fully designed for the people who use it—people like you!

After following this design thinking approach, our Halo classification tree has fewer, more meaningful categories labelled with terms that make sense to the users. What's even more impressive is that our service request labels now fully align with our service catalogue, providing us with some long-desired consistency.

Last week we told you that Halo was coming and shared some look and feel improvements over our current Cherwell solution. Today, we are showing off one of Halo’s most exciting upgrades—one we think will make you all very happy: improved ticket searching. 

Gone are the days of needing a hundred Cherwell queries to find a single ticket. Halo takes a modern and intuitive approach to searching, making it easier, faster, and more accurate. 

Optimize your search by narrowing your search by objects—we chose Tickets in the example below—and adding filters and sort options. You get instant and accurate results that make finding tickets more straightforward than ever. 

With Halo’s robust search options, you can even search for tickets assigned to a specific individual or entire team, which means having to remember incident numbers is a thing of the past. You can even set filters toÌýsearch for closed tickets with only two clicks!Ìý

Easily searching for closed tickets has been on our Cherwell wish list for years, and with Halo, that wish has finally come true. 

But why even search for a ticket when you don’t have to? To help reduce searching, Halo has also added a follow option. You can follow an incident and receive notifications about it while retaining read access. This is especially helpful when you need to reassign a VIP ticket to another agent but have a commitment to the client to keep them updated. Following tickets means we can keep up without getting bogged down and is just one of the many features included with the Halo ticketing solution that makes our workday easier.  

Halo is a significant upgrade to Cherwell and makes ticketing easier, faster and all-around better. But don't just take our word for it; check out our before and after photos:

Halo's modern user-centred design means it's more intuitive to use and takes fewer clicks to accomplish your goals. It's also more responsive, which means your days of watching Cherwell's gears spin are over! Look how easy it is to submit a ticket:

But it's not only about beauty; Halo also has brains. Alongside the back-end upgrade, we've simplified how we classify and organize tickets. That means logging tickets is easier on the front end, but more importantly, performing valuable data analytics is now possible.

With quality metrics, we can pinpoint our community's pain points and address core problems systematically rather than ad hoc.

91ÑÇÉ« has never faced such a period of massive change, especially from a digital transformation perspective. We must rise to this challenge to ensure service stability and quality. Change management has never been more critical to our success. Halo comes with a fully integrated change management module to facilitate our process as it evolves to be even more efficient and effective.

We are always working towards automation. We want to reduce the time we spend on non-value-add activities and focus on building for the future. Our Operation Excellence team has been working hard to revolutionize our processes and compile them into a service catalogue. The Halo platform will host the front end of our service catalogue.

Halo isn't just a Cherwell upgrade; it's a core part of our 91ÑÇÉ« IT. Something that will help us grow and evolve. It's a new foundation on which so much of our hard work will stand.