Help Desk Management

Continued from page: 1

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Some help desk solutions
Mojo help desk-This is a hosted help desk solution, which means you don't have to spend money on hardware and worry about installing and maintaining the help desk solution. However you need Internet connectivity at all times to access Mojo help desk. Mojo help desk is simple to use, it took us less than 5 min to create our own help desk using Mojo services. It allows users to fully customize their help desk including creating custom ticket fields. It provides centralized ticket tracking services; users can log their complaints through its Web interface as well as email and track their tickets online. It can notify admins through email as soon as a new ticket is created; similarly users are notified as soon their ticket is updated.

Mojo help desk has one unique feature called Mojo number which gives ratings to help desk team and overall help desk performance. Once a customer closes the request, Mojo help desk asks the user to rate the work done. A customer cannot close a ticket without rating the service. Based on these ratings and time spent on each ticket, Mojo calculates this number. As a result IT department gets instant customer feedback and is aware of help desk performance at all times and they can easily find out how to improve their customer services. Mojo help desk service is available in four models depending on the needs, its free version is also available while the Enterprise version costs USD99 per month. It can be found at http://www.mojohelpdesk.com.

Spiceworks-It is a free IT mgmt solution with easy to use and implement IT help desk. Other than IT help desk ticket mgmt, it also has additional features like Network Inventory, monitoring, reporting, etc. Spiceworks is simple to install and it has an intuitive easy to use Web interface, which can be accessed through any Web browser.

Its inventory feature can gather all hardware and software information from the network without any agents and automatically categorize them. It can also retrieve information about licenses present, services, and patches applied on each machine, etc. When logging a help desk ticket it can be attached to machine on network, to provide instant inventory information about that machine. It comes with 24 report templates which include reports on help desk tickets, hardware and software inventory. You can also create custom reports and save them as templates for future use. Spiceworks can also constantly monitor machines in your network and alert you about potential issues like low disk spaces, status of antivirus, critical service availability etc.

Installing Spiceworks is simple, it can work with Windows Vista, 2003 server, and Windows XP. It can be downloaded from www.spiceworks.com. Once installed to get started with asset management, click on Inventory tab on its main Web interface. Now click on Start Scan option and choose scan whole network option. It will start scanning your network for devices present which may take a while depending on the size of your network. Once the scan is finished it will automatically categorize the detected devices, ie, all servers detected will be put in Servers category while all switches, routers detected will be put in networking category. Now you can see overview of assets by going to overview option in Environment summary pane. Later on when a new asset is added to network, instead of doing the whole network scan again, you can manually add it. To create inventory reports, go to Reports option on main Web interface.

Emails which have been sent to help desk, get converted into a ticket, with details about who is the customer, what's the request, and when was it generated

Now to create a report of all software running on workstations on your network, select the template ' Applications by Computer' and click on the run button at the bottom of Window. Now spiceworks will create an application inventory report and display it. This report can also be imported to PDF, CSV, and Excel format. Similarly you can also create other specific hardware and software inventory reports.

HelpSpot-It is an Web-based help desk mgmt solution. It provides email integration, ie, all emails coming to help desk are automatically converted into help desk tickets. Users can also log tickets through its Web interface and also access knowledgebase for resolutions of their problems. It provides advanced reporting features, it comes with 15 report templates including overall help desk's performance analysis. HelpSpot also lets you create Automation rules for escalating requests, notify employees, send alerts etc. In other features it supports Mobile access, Time tracking, reporting tags etc. HelpSpot can be found at http://userscape.com and is priced at USD 179 for one license.

How to use HelpSpot
HelpSpot can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac and for database it requires SQL Server 2000/2005, PosgreSQL 8, and MySQL. Installing HelpSpot is simple. After installing it, to access its administration interface, open http://localhost/helpspot/admin.php and log in with username and password provided during installation. Now you will have HelpSpot's Workspace where your Inbox contains all tickets logged by the employee. To assign a ticket, click on Take it button. This opens the ticket, here you can see details of the problems submitted by the user. Now to assign this ticket, from the Request Details menu, choose category of request and then from Assigned To menu, select the name to whom you want to assign the ticket and click on update request. Now the ticket will appear in My Queue option of assigned user login. To create automation rules, click on the Admin button on the main interface, click on Admin>Tools>Automation Rules. This will open Add an Automation Rule window, here first provide the name for the rule. Next select a condition, let's say if you are creating a rule according to email address, here select Email, now select the condition two and provide the email address. Now you can test this condition by clicking on Test Conditions button. Next you need to define an action for this condition. For this from the Actions drop menu select the action and fill rest of the details, eg, if you select Send email notification to option, you will be asked to choose the member to whom email should be sent, subject as well as email contents. Lastly, click on Add Rule to create the rule.

To perform analysis on your help desk performance, click on Reports and go to analysis and click on Speed resolution by status type. This option calculates the average time taken to resolve tickets by their status type. On the new page select the time for which you want to create and click on Run Report button. Similarly you can do 80/20 Analysis, Speed to resolution by category/reporting tag, etc.

Saurangshu Kanunjna and Swapnil Arora

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