The Field Rules app is a much more flexible and powerful app that the Change Manager app and it is recommended that it be used in preference to build out your change management flows as shown in videos in this 'how-to' article.
It is not recommended that both of these apps be used in parallel. In fact, when it comes to conditionally showing and hiding ticket fields, you should try and have these set in only one place to avoid confusion if ever anything goes wrong and you need to debug something.
What is the Change Manager app?
The Change Manager app automatically installs a series of ticket fields associated with changes and prescribes conditionality on those fields. It also gives you one extra 'Ticket Type' field for specifying 'Change' tickets which is mapped to the native 'Type' field. .
What is the Field Rules app?
The Field Rules app allows you to conditionally show and hide any ticket fields based on who is looking at the ticket and the selection of other ticket fields. Additionally it allows you to set fields to be either read-only and/or mandatory using the same functionality. It also allows you to create rules to map selections from a custom 'Ticket type' field to the native 'Type' field, this allows you to have an unlimited set of types instead of being limited to only the native 4 types (Question, Incident, Problem, Task).
Why is the Field Rules app better to use than Change Manager?
1. Flexibility: The Field Rules app is much more flexible than the Change Manager app, allowing you to conditionally show and hide any ticket fields based on various conditions.
2. Power: The Field Rules app provides a more powerful set of features, enabling you to set fields as read-only and/or mandatory based on different conditions.
3. Compatibility: The Field Rules app is compatible with a wider range of use cases and is not limited to just Change. It can also be used to configure a variety of different ticket types and priorities.
4. Avoidance of confusion: Given that the Change Manager app only has a limited amount of conditional functionality, by nature it means that if you need anything further, you would need to use either another app and/or Zendesk's native field conditionality. This makes it difficult to nail down problems if there is an issue with conditionality.
Why might you still want to use the Change Manager app?
The Change Manager app is a great short cut for creating a series of change fields. This is because when you install it, you can click a button and have the following fields created:
Configuration Item, Impact, Risk, Identified Risks, Outage Required, Reason for Change, Resources Required, Implementation Plan, Backout Plan, Required Outcome, Root Cause, and Workaround.
The Field Rules app has no such shortcut. As such, you might install the Change Manager app to create the fields and then uninstall the app and use the Field Rules app to perform all of the other functions.
Alternatively, if you only need a solution for change tickets and don't need to setup any other field conditionality, then you might also find that the Change Manager app is enough to meet your needs.
What if I'm already using the Change Manager app and now want to switch to the Field Rules app?
If you disable the Change Manager app, then the rules it uses to show/hide fields would also be disabled and agents would see a series of fields when they shouldn't. You would then need to head into the Field Rules app and set those fields to be hidden, and put in the exceptions as to when those fields should be shown. For example, Ticket Type = Change, show the Change Type ticket field.
One strategy to move would be to set all of your change fields as hidden in the Field Rules app before disabling the Change Manager app.
Nonetheless the best time to switch would be during a time of no or low agent activity to enable you to make sure your conditionality is functioning as expected before agents need to use it.
Recreating all of the rules in the Field Rules app will likely take around half an hour, but this does greatly depend on the number of rules you're needing to create.
But I want to setup Change Management on my Zendesk; how can I do that if I don't have the Change Manager app?
We have a knowledge base article and videos here that details how to setup your change management flows. As you will see, this is setup using a combination of SweetHawk apps (including Field Rules) to allow you to select the specific functionality you want based on your use case.