Hi,

It is a normal assyst behaviour for the fields within the Item form to take the values from the Contact User specified. However, I believe this is a setting that can be toggled; unfortunately, I can’t remember of the setting name/location at the moment.

I can definitely see how the fields not updating to reflect the user’s fields can be problematic. We have observed the same thing at my organization. However, depending on the nature of the Item, it makes sense that those fields are not updated automatically. For example, if the Item represents a software, then that software does not necessarily follow a user’s changes. To resolve this at my organisation, we simply add a step in our process when we are updating a user’s profile: we check their assigned Items and update them accordingly if applicable.

Hope this helps :)

Hi Aaron, 

Just to confirm, as Jean-David has pointed out above, the Section and Department fields visible on the Item form are not related to the Item User’s Section and Department. Instead they are the Section and Department values for the Item that is being viewed. 

These fields do not automatically update when the Item’s user has their Section and Department edited as there’s no guarantee the Item has also moved Section/Department with the user. 

I’m not sure about the design of your reports but from the above it may be better to report on the Item.User.Section rather than the Item.Section.

Cheers,
Robert

Hi both,

Very much appreciate your responses. To paint a better picture I’d like to provide a made up scenario of how this might affect us.

In 2023, Our department ‘Social Services’ is split into multiple departments. For example, ‘Adult Social Services’, ‘Children’s Social Services’ and ‘Social Services’ remains creating 3 departments instead of one.

Now, when we do an item search by the item monitor functionality with the department of ‘Social Services’ every item that was assigned prior to the change will show in the monitor. Where actually, only a third of those items are now Social Services and the others are Adults & Childrens.

Hope that paints a better picture and although, we can report differently using PowerBI like you’ve suggested, at a very quick glance or when data dumping, the information doesn’t seem credible.

This is a BIG problem for the product and continually brings negativity around the quality of the product when discussing Assets, which I’m sure we would all like to avoid.  I’m hoping @Robert Wood this is something that can seriously be looked into as it’s causing us a massive headache and I’m sure we are not alone as @jdavidyoung07 highlights.

To add to this, maybe even a simple system parameter to allow us to choose how we want to structure our Item data could help a lot; that way, both options are available, and it would come down to the user. In fact, before investigating into this, I assumed there was a system parameter to toggle this, but there is none.

Absolutely the more options available the better.  To resolve this right now we are going to have to make a pretty risky script to address over 40,000 items!