Creating/Managing Departments

Choose View/Manage Departments from the menu. All departments will be shown. You can create separate and any amount of departments (such as for billing, support, accounts, etc.) Users for each department will be displayed. The Global (All Departments) department is where global users can be assigned. A global user can view and work with tickets sent to any department. When assigning new users, you can also specify that they be an administrator. For the global department (global administrators), global administrators can create users, and have access to virtually all components of the help desk. Administrators in all other departments will be able to manage auto-replies for their department and various other department-related issues.

All departments (except for the global department), can be deleted by global administrators by clicking on the recycle icon next to the name of the department.

Creating Users

Choose View/Manage Users from the menu. You can create a new user by entering their name and email address in the top area. An email will be sent to him/her with the login information (and a randomly generated password). Existing users will be displayed below. Click on their names or the information ('i') icon on the left to view more information about the user. Global administrators will be able to keep an eye on other users by viewing tickets they have taken part in. Global administrators can also delete users by clicking on the recycle icon next to a user.

Your Profile & Preferences

Choose Edit Your Profile & Options from the menu. You will be able to change various options, including your signature, which is displayed the bottom of all posts made to tickets. Notifications allow users to receive email notifications when new tickets are created within their departments, and also when a customer replies to a ticket that the user is handling. The SMS email is available to users who have an email address for their cellphone (ie 5555553449@mobile.mycingular.com). All ticket notifications will be sent as well to the SMS email address if specified.

General Help Desk Settings (Global administrators only)

Choose General Help Desk Settings from the menu. You should configure a few of these options before using your help desk. Information on the web page will lead you through this process.

Department Auto-Replies

Auto-replies can be very useful for providing information to those who create tickets that you already have a possible solution for. When a user creates a ticket containing a specified phrase in the subject line, it will trigger an auto-reply that will contain information that will be sent along with the ticket notification email.

To do this, select Department Auto-Replies from the menu. Each department will be shown with its associated auto-replies. When creating a new auto-reply, you must select the department, the key phrase, and the message used in the auto-reply. If you select the global department, then your auto-reply will be triggered when a ticket is submitted to ANY department. Otherwise, it will only trigger for the department you specify.

Email Customizations

Global administrators can modify the important emails sent by the help desk. The header and footer will be prepended and appened to all emails, and each email itself for ticket creation, ticket notification, SMS emails, and ticket surveys can be completely customized.

Browsing Tickets

To browse tickets, choose Browse from the menu. By default, all tickets for departments in which you are assigned will be shown in order of latest activity. You can use the powerful search engine to search for specific tickets, only show tickets that have not been answered, etc. Tickets can be flagged. Flagging a ticket for a user or all users will make a flag icon appear next to the ticket. One of the uses of ticket flagging is to notify a user or all users that a specific ticket is of high importance.

Configuring The Ticket Form Template (Used for creating tickets)

Choose Edit Your Profile & Options from the menu. The ticket form template will be used on all the web pages that your clients will use to create tickets. Using the ticket form template options, you can customize your layout and settings to your needs.

The logo and title will change the logo used in the upper-left corner of the template and the title of the web pages if you choose not to use the header and footer.

To completely change the look of your ticket creation template, you can specify the header and footer HTML that will be used. Note that with using this method, you must specify the title of web pages and include the tags, etc.

The CSS styles allow you to customize the colors and fonts used for links and other text on the ticket web pages. You should specify these even when using your own header and footer HTML, because you will still want to customize the content to match your template.

Custom Input Fields

If you want to add more fields to the ticket creation form, you can specify them easily under Custom Input Fields. Simply specify the field name and check the Required? checkbox if you want the field to be required or not.

Message Tags

Message tags allow posts to contain HTML-similar tags to allow things like bolding of text, creating lists, inserting links, etc. These will cause no harm and can be quite useful. They can be enabled or disabled by checking the Enable Message Tags checkbox.

Predefined Replies

Predefined replies allow you to store commonly used replies for later usage when replying to tickets. When replying to a ticket, simply check the 'Save as a predefined reply named' box and type the name to give the reply. Later, you may select this predefined reply from the list, and the message area will be filled in automatically.

Knowledge Base

The knowledge base (or FAQ) allows global administrators to create a powerful, searchable knowledge base. Select 'Knowledge Base' from the menu. Categories can be created (as well as subcategories). Create knowledge base entries within categories. Users will then be able to search the knowledge base as well as browse categories.

Help Desk Backups

Select 'Help Desk Backup' from the menu. Using this feature, you are able to store a backup of the entire help desk-related tables onto your own computer. If you ever need to restore the help desk database (for instance, if your server crashes), you can do so simply. All backup data is appended to the database. This will make sure that any tickets, etc. created after a fresh install will not be removed.

Surveys

As of version 2.0, you can use the powerful surveys built-in to the help desk to get feedback from your customers. Global administrators can define a list of up to 10 questions that will be rated from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), as well as an extra box for comments. Other options on the survey page allow you to automatically send out surveys when tickets are closed, and to send surveys to users more than once if they create more than one ticket. Each question will show average ratings, how many customers chose each rating, as well as a list of the individual surveys.

Messaging

Staff can send messages to one another (to a single user, multiple users, and/or departments). You can compose and read messages thru the message center link that appears under the miscellaneous links.