Push Notifications from BMC Footprints 11.x using Slack
As a BMC Footprints administrator, I would occasionally hear our staff asking for push notifications to their smartphones. With a dozen desktop technicians out in the field, it’s common for one to help a customer and go back to their office, only to find their neighbor was having problems as well. BMC/Numara don’t supply a true mobile app (just a mobile friendly add-on), so how could we let technicians know of open tickets without writing a full app? Enter Slack!
An example of Slack Notifications from Footprints
If you’ve never used Slack before, I recommend watching the great video from Sandwich on YouTube. Slack provides a chat platform with amazing integrations from a wide range of systems. To quickly get messages out via push to a wide range of devices, I used the Slack system and applications to do my “heavy lifting” getting Footprints notifications out.
I programmed a cron job to run every two minutes, looking at the Footprints ticket and history tables for any new changes. Then I’d parse these out and notify for a range of things:
- New ticket created (to #feed room)
- Ticket status change (direct message to assignees)
- Assignee added (direct message to assignee added)
- Assignee removed (direct message to assignee removed)
The code is quite small and can be run on any server with PHP 5 with SOAP, as long as you’ve enabled the Footprints web API.  I wrote this for 11.x, and while it should work for older versions (the API was still the same) I don’t know if all the tables are in place for older versions.  It won’t work for 12.x yet.
This is not a full featured product and will take some comfort with PHP and Footprints to get it running. Â Find the code and how to set it up on GitHub.