Practical Zendesk Administration, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Initial Setup

Every Zendesk instance has a set of features that you’ll need to configure once, and a set of features that you’ll configure on an ongoing basis. This chapter deals primarily with the former, and covers most of the options that you’ll choose during the very early phases of your implementation, and generally will not need to change afterward.

Some of the topics in this chapter—especially the email and domain name setup—may require assistance from teams other than your own, so it’s best to get in early and configure these features now, even if you haven’t fully defined your business process.

Creating a Sandbox

Before you start the configuration of any Zendesk environment, it’s important to understand that for every Zendesk instance on the Plus or Enterprise plans, there is another instance known as a sandbox. In a nutshell, the sandbox is an environment for testing, learning, and making mistakes. We mention the sandbox at this point in the book because it’s something that you’ll probably want to use as you follow along with the topics in the book and start to configure your own environment. It’s not possible to transfer the settings from your sandbox environment directly to your production environment, but after learning how to use each of the features covered in this book, you should find it fairly simple to repeat the configuration. I also find that it’s best to complete your configuration in the sandbox environment and confirm that all features are working ...