Developing TargetProcess v.3.0: New Help Desk Portal

Help Desk Portal is quite important application. It allows our customers to interact with us. Also it allows customers of our customers to interact with our customers (weird assertion, but it’s true :). We’ve collected quite many requests for Help Desk Portal improvements and finally decided to push it forward.

Here is the first mockup of the home page. It is still a work in progress, so comments/changes/advices are welcome.

Ideas, Issues, Questions, Mockup

There are some ideas behind the Help Desk Portal re-design:

When someone has a problem, he should be able to find existing solution easily (if any). If there is no solution, it should be straightforward how to post a request
Ideas and Issues should be separated. They have quite different flows and expectation. If someone post an issue it should be resolved quickly. Idea can live in the backlog for years.
People may use search or tags to find relevant ideas and requests.

The next step may be to add more social networking into Help Desk Portal (self-service is a great thing if you can encourage other customers to provide solutions and answer the questions). However this is just an idea so far.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 and is filed under UI, design, developing, help desk, usability, v.3.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Petr Toman

Hello, I would like to see some way to localize HelpDesk (config.file, db, resources - anything). I already submitted a request (#12534) and it seems it's not possible without touching HelpDesk sources.

Michael Dubakov

@Rick
There is Global and Company mode in Help Desk. If you enable Global mode, then all products are visible to all users.

If you enable Company mode, then you may bind Product/Project to Company as well as bind HD Portal user to Company. In this case HD Portal user will see only related Projects and will not see other projects.

As I remember request is private by default, unless you uncheck the Private checkbox.

Rick Cogley

OK. Can we set the default request type to private?

Also, is there complete isolation in it. If for example there is a list of all project names, some clients would see this as a violation of their security. You'd need to be able to specify in the system that when clients visit / log in, they can see only their designated projects.

Or, is it more open than that... ?

Michael Dubakov

@Graeme Nice point, so far you may just change title in HD portal and that is it. I think we will provide more customization options.

@knst Good addition. List of requests in progress and completed requests will be considered. Other things are there already.

@Rick Private requests already there. You may mark request as private and nobody will see it.

Rick Cogley

I agree there is also a usage scenario where the clients want their requests to be separate / private. Suggestions should be able to be made generic, because they might indeed apply to many customers, but, they should also be able to be made private to a particular product / company.

Regards,

Rick Cogley

Anonymous

I agree with GraemeF, ability to brand it is very important.

knst

It looks like HelpDesk portal is pointed for public products with plenty of users.

What about single customer products (e.g. outsourced enterprise application). In this case request in helpdesk portal is quite convenient entity to base workflow on.

Customer posts a request (most likely via email integration as customers is a lazy kind of human beings :) ) it is discussed , then discussion is concluded as story(stories) and implemented. Reporting is based on requests aswell.

Having such approach it is very important to be able at least to filter out completed requests or (that is much better) have a page where customer can see active requests and progress for each of them .

GraemeF

It should be easy to "brand" the help desk for a particular product/company. The current one is very hard to update if you have customised it.

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