A service target is configured with a milestone action to send out an email to members of the Assigned Group on the incident form but the emails are being sent to members of a different support group.

1. Create multiple companies with the same Group Name i.e., Service Desk
2. Now create a simple custom SLM Target Notification for Incident using 'Owner Group' as the notifier
3. Now create a Incident forcing the target rule above.

While expanding the notification group on SLM:RuleActionNotifier it is fetching the 1st matching request from Group form. In other words when fetching the Group ID from Group form (%->SERVICE DESK) different group ID is getting fetched because there are more similar support group name for another company (SERVICE DESK).

Legacy ID:KA380533

A group notification of an SLM service target milestone action can be sent to the wrong support group when the name of the support group is not unique.  A group name is not unique when two different companies or two different organizations within the same company have a support group with the name of 'Backoffice Support'.  In other words, when the same group name is used by different companies or different organizations within the same company, an ambiguity in group name exists which can result in the incorrect group being identified by SLM workflow for group notification.  Following is additional detail on why this ambiguity exists and the approach implemented to eliminate the problems it can cause with SLM group notification milestone actions.

When a CTM group is created, the unique value in the CTM:Support Group form is the Support Group ID field.  When the CTM group is correctly created, a corresponding entry is created in the AR Server Group form.  The unique value of the Support Group ID field of the CTM:Support Group record is not carried into its corresponding Group form record.  Instead, the Long Group Name field on the Group form is populated with the fully qualified name of the CTM:Support Group record.  A fully qualified name of the support group is a concatenation of the Company, the Support Organization and the Support Group Name fields.  The unique value of a Group form record is the Group ID field and group records created from CTM:Support Group entries will have this Group ID field also populated as value of the Group Name field.

Examples:

The SLM workflow that processes group notifications is independent of the ITSM Notification Engine workflow and identifying the correct members of the correct group is different in each case.  The SLM workflow uses the Group form data and not the CTM:Support Group data to identify members of a group.  When the To* field for the SLM milestone notification action is populated with a group name field on the application or data source form (i.e., the Assigned Group field on the Incident form), the SLM workflow will search the Long Group Name field in the AR Server Group form for a match to the group name populated to that field at runtime.  As long as the name of the Support Group Name is unique, the correct group record will always be found and notifications are sent to the members of the correct group. 

When the Support Group Name is not unique, the SLM workflow will use the first sequentially created Group form record to identify the members of a group.  This is also not a problem until the correct group is not the first sequentially created Group form record.  When this condition is encountered, the email notifications will be sent to members of the wrong group.

Following is a sequence which illustrates the problem

-configure three separate CTM:SupportGroup entries with different company and organization but same support group name

- configure at least one unique user for be a member of each of these support groups

- configure a service target with a milestone which has three milestone group notification actions, each of which is to be sent to a different support group

    notification to assigned group field
    notification to vendor group field
    notification to owner group field

- submit an incident, selecting one of the three groups each for Assigned Group, Vendor Group and Owner Group fields

  Assigned Group:  Calbro Services => IT Support => Backoffice Support
  Vendor Group:    Invention, Inc.       => Sppt Org    => Backoffice Support
  Owner Group:     My Company        => Support      => Backoffice Support

- monitor execution of the milestone action and verify which users received which email notifications

In this sequence, notifications designated to be sent to the assigned group, the vendor group and the owner group will all be sent to testuser01, testuser02, testuser03.  The expectation is that notifications will be sent as follows:

  notification to assigned group field sent to testuser01, testuser02, testuser03
  notification to vendor group field sent to testuser04, testuser05, testuser06
  notification to owner group field sent to testuser07, testuser08, testuser09

The ambiguity in same group name for three different companies will result in all emails will being sent to the members of the ARServer Group record which was created first.  In this example, because the Backoffice Support group for Calbro Services was created first, all email notifications for the Assigned Group, Vendor Group and Owner Group will be sent to members of the Assigned Group

This has been reported as defect SW00442238 for which a hotfix is available.  Because the problem does not occur when the To* field for the SLM milestone notification action is populated with a group ID field rather than group name field (i.e., the Assigned Group ID field rather than the Assigned Group field), the hotfix converts group name fields to group id fields in the SLM metadata that defines the notification milestone action.

The fix is restricted in scope to these fields on these forms:

For any other fields on these forms or any custom data source forms which may contain the name of a CTM:Support Group, the recommendation is to use the corresponding group Id field for those fields.  This includes:

    1) any custom fields which might be used for an SLM group notification milestone action;
    2) any out-of-box fields for defined out-of-box SLM data sources
    3) any group fields on custom data sources

Following is a matrix reference of the group name fields to the group ID fields on each application or data source field which will be included in the conversion provided in the hotfix:

1. BMC Service Level Management