As long as the Start and End Date fields in your parent ticket are custom fields that are the actual type of “Date”, then you can use those fields to trigger rules based on the “On A Schedule” section in your ticketing rules. You can use a a few different date range options to have it remind you, I think for your specific purposes the “next week” range would be best so that you know ahead of time. You will also need to create the actual schedule in the rule, you can have it check every day, or once a week, I haven’t personally made any that check for a weekly range, mine are all set to “Today”, so my schedules run every day. I’m not sure if you have the schedule run every day, that it will perform whatever action you set up each day up until the next week changes.

Here is an example of my rule set up:

You can have the rule send an email to the Building Tech or even create a new ticket based on a template to return the devices, or both. Feel free to ask me questions if you have any.

I like this idea @TAnders 

@mcarrigan Here is an idea to upvote that is similar to your request! 

Thanks @TAnders for the suggestion of how to solve this!  The end date is indeed a custom field so I was hoping I could use it somehow notify the tech that devices need to be collected. I haven’t used any “on a schedule” rules so when I attempt this, I’ll ask followups and report back.  Hoping to get to this next week.

@TAnders Followup question:  I set this On a Schedule rule to look for the ticket category/type that contains my end date custom field I want to check.  I set the schedule filter to look daily at 9:00am.  The actions performed when true are to set the status to “in progress” and send an email alert to the agent.  When I enable to rule and save it, it says it will affect an estimated 121 tickets (because there are 121 tickets with that issue category and issue type). 

I created 5 test tickets - 4 of them meet the end date=next week criteria and so notifications should be sent to the agent at the scheduled date/time. I verified these 4 tickets will match this rule in the rules simulator.  I made a custom view of the criteria I am looking for (issue category/issue type/end date = next week) so I can isolate the four tickets that meet the criteria. 

And when I tested this at 9:00am, nothing happened.  I’m now playing around with the rule and advancing the schedule every half hour to see if it will trigger the notifications.  What am I missing?

As long as the “Custom Fields - Date” field is of type “Date” and not a text field, everything looks like it should work from what I know. Mine do not include any ticket categories or types, just the field itself, so unless that is causing it to hiccup, I’m out of ideas.

@TAnders - End Date is of type date.  Thanks for taking a look at this and confirming it looks like it should work.  I put in a ticket with IIQ since it hasn’t run since I enabled it.

This collaboration between y’all has been awesome! Way to go, team!! 

@TAnders @mcarrigan