Chapter 4
Helpdesk Ticketing
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Allowing users to submit new problems issues or requests
- Enabling helpdesk employees and managers to respond to and resolve those problems
- Providing end users with a view into current problem status
- Providing metrics for analysis
- Helping to facilitate and grow institutional knowledge by creating a memory bank of solved problems, organized for easy categorization and retrieval
You don’t always need to dive deeply into SharePoint Designer to create a workflow solution. End users and helpdesk managers can manage a workflow process quite well with little more than the clever use of a status field on a key custom SharePoint list.
WHAT IS THE HELPDESK TICKETING PROCESS?
As anyone that works in the IT department of a company of any size knows, technology fails outright on occasion, or end users find creative ways to cause problems for themselves. It often falls to the IT department to unravel these problems and get end users back up on their feet, happy and productive. The goal of a helpdesk ticketing process is to help the IT department manage end user reported problems efficiently, with high quality and with high satisfaction. At the same time, a good solution helps end users figure out things on their own, and when they can’t, report the problem and receive updates as IT addresses it for them.
The helpdesk ticketing process loosely follows the pattern you see in crowded delicatessens. You pull a numbered ticket from the ticket ...
