Home > Service Desk > Working with Service Desk Tickets

Working with Service Desk Tickets

A core feature of Web Tracks is a comprehensive Service Desk system.  This allows you to assign tasks and tickets to your technicians.  Many different reports can be generated from this information including how many hours you are working for different departments, what types of problems you spend most of your time solving, weekly work reports, etc.  You can set different priority levels for the tickets and assign them to the appropriate technician.   Since the service desk is integrated with other Web Tracks modules, you will be familiar with the user and equipment before approaching the problem.  You can also track service desk tickets issues to computers, peripherals and software assets.  This will allow you to maintain a problem history for your inventory.

All user accounts which are setup will have basic privileges in which they can manage their personal ticket requests.  To access Service Desk Features with 'Technician' privileges a user account must be given Help Desk Permissions.

Defining Ticket Types
From the Admin Menu, choose Lookup Tables -- Ticket Types.  When defining Ticket Types, you can define email addresses for the Ticket Type.  If adding more than one email address to Ticket Type, be sure to separate the addresses with semicolons.  You may also assign a default technician for a specific Ticket Type.  Therefore, software problems could be assigned to 'Bob' while hardware problems are assigned to technician 'Mary'. 

Defining Ticket Priorities
From the Admin Menu, choose Lookup Tables -- Ticket Priorities

An ticket priority has an associated 'Priority Order' which determines the sort order of priorities.  Web Tracks only uses the priority rank to sort the text value of priority drop down list.

There is also a 'End-user may Select' flag.  If checked all users within Web Tracks may select this priority when creating a ticket.  If it is not checked then only technicians may choose this priority.

One priority type may be set to 'default'.  The default priority is simply the suggested priority when a new ticket is created.  Users may still select different a different priority.

Adding Tickets
To add a Service Desk Ticket in Web Tracks, click the 'Add' command from the Help Desk list.  Hovering over the Service Desk Menu Item also has a quick link for adding a new ticket.

The Ticket Number is automatically generated by Web Tracks and cannot be changed.  Even if you create a new ticket and cancel the record, the ticket number will be incremented to ensure that a unique ticket number is used every time.   

Closing Tickets
When you are finished working on a ticket you can close the ticket by changing the Ticket Status to a value that is associated with 'Closed'.

Deleting Tickets
Select the ticket(s) from the Help Desk List and click the Delete Command.  Make sure you actually want to delete the ticket (see Closing Tickets above). 

Associating a Ticket with Inventory Items
Associating tickets with inventory items is Web Tracks way of tracking service desk requests to computers, peripherals and/or software products.  In the 'Related' tab, click the 'Add' button for computers, peripherals, or software.  Highlight one or more items in the list and click the 'Select' command.  Web Tracks version 9.0 and newer allow you to relate the ticket to more than one item of each type.

Creating a Knowledge Base Article from a Help Desk Ticket
Web Tracks allows you to create knowledge base articles from service desk tickets.  This allows you to quickly create 'How to' articles or publish solutions to common issues.  To create a knowledge base article based on a ticket, edit the ticket and then click the knowledge base button (next to the help command).  The knowledge base title will default to the first 255 characters of the ticket's description.  The description will both default to the current tickets description.  The resolution will default to the comments entered in the comments tab.  You may modify any of these values before saving the record to the knowledge base.  Web Tracks also keeps track of the tickets that have been turned into knowledge base articles.  You will receive an informational message if you try to create more than one knowledge base article for a given ticket.

For further information see Working with Knowledge Base Articles.

E-mailing Tickets
Automated emails may be triggered when a tickets is created or when a technician updates a ticket using the 'Save Notify & Close' command.  See Configure Email Settings for more information. 

Previewing/Printing Tickets
To print a ticket, click on the preview command from the Service Desk Ticket detail form.  You may customize this ticket view using the Web Tracks Report Designer.

Attaching Files to Computers Records

1. Switch to the Attachment tab in the Service Desk Detail form
2. Click the 'Add' Command
3. Browse to the file
4. Click the 'Upload' Command

The file is now stored in the database with the associated ticket.

For more information on Attachments see Working with File Attachments.

Record History
Web Tracks records any changes made to a service desk ticket in the ticket's history tab.