ExDesk s Quick Start Account Configuration Guide 1. Some Quick Definitions 2. Account Creation 3. The Decisions 4. Customizing your ExDesk account 5. Creating Admins 6. Creating additional Clients 7. Sharing the service with Closed Users Groups 8. Sharing the service with Open User Groups 9. The Admins-only approach 10. Ticket types available to your Admins 11. Attaching files to a ticket 12. Ongoing modifications 1. Some Quick Definitions Super Admin The creator of the ExDesk account who has the highest permission level. An Admin who can also configure the ExDesk account. Admin A person who will be resolving problems that are logged in trouble tickets, they can open, view, edit, update, and close tickets. Also referred to as administrator User the person reporting a problem, they will open tickets or have them opened by admins on their behalf. These are the people with the problems that the admins assist. Client Account A complete ticket system within the ExDesk account, each account starts with a single default client account called internal. You can create as many as needed and assign admins to them, customize them, add users to them etc. 2. Account Creation Your ExDesk account is composed of sub-accounts called client accounts, the first of which is called the internal (default) client account. This account has a master record found on the main menu in the Master account menu. At this point you should go into the master account menu and select edit the account to ensure that all your information is correct. Its especially important that the email information for yourself (the Super Admin) is correct and that the Company information is correct. This Master account record serves as your User information and is unique because it s the only user information stored apart from the rest of the users and admins.
When a new ExDesk account is created it has a single client account for use by all your administrators and users. It can be completely customized to meet your support needs but two important decisions need to be made early on that will effect how you set up your system. REMEMBER: there is help information provided on every menu that is specific to what you are trying to do, just click on the button labeled Help in the lower left hand side of each page to get more information about a feature. 3. The Decisions Your ExDesk account can be set up with more than one client account. If you intend to use ExDesk for internal support only you may not need to set up additional client accounts. If you would like to present different trouble ticketing options to different departments or divisions internally you can either create a separate client account for each or support them by sharing the internal account with everyone. If you are using ExDesk to support external customers or businesses you probably should create a separate client account for each. Each client account can have their own trouble types, priority levels, custom fields, notification levels, reports, look and feel, etc. so if you need to present customized features to different groups (internally or externally) having multiple Client accounts is the approach to take. In either case all the trouble tickets that will be opened by users will flow back to the Admins (who are all located in the internal client account but assigned to work where needed) to be processed. 4. Customizing your ExDesk account From the main menu select Configure System. In the scroll box in the center of the screen highlight the internal (default) account and click Configure Client. The first settings you will want to address are trouble types, priorities, and notifications. Go to each of these menu selections and adjust the settings to suit the needs of your internal Client Account. The trouble types are the short problem categories that will appear in a drop down list when a user or admin creates a trouble ticket. They will choose from the available list you provide. To get you started we have included a number of default trouble types that would normally be used for IT support. Add any you might want the user to choose from in the future, an example would be if you used a Color printer in your office you might want to add Color Printer to the list. You can also remove any of the default entries you think your users would not need. There is no limit to the number you can create but understand that users are unlikely to scroll through hundreds of trouble types looking for the perfect fit. The only requirement from the ExDesk system is that you maintain at least one trouble type. The Priorities are selections that will also appear as color-coded check boxes on the user s trouble ticket creation screen. These are checked by the users to indicate how important or urgent they feel their issue is. There can be up to 7 separate levels but the default is 5. These levels can be renamed or deleted to give you the granularity you are looking for. The system will not allow for the deletion of all priority levels, you must maintain at least one level and if you have only one level it must be level #1.
The Custom Fields screen allows you to create an unlimited number of additional data fields that can be accessed by administrators, users or both when they create and view tickets. Simply enter the name of the field you would like to include in every one of your tickets (such as part #, Account number, or PC model ) and then check the active box, you can also check the user visible box if you would like your users to see these fields and be able to add text into them. These fields can be free text or made into drop down menus. You can check the drop down box and then click the Create Drop Down menu. Here you can add edit and delete drop down list entries. The list will appear empty at first with just an Add button, click this and add your first entry, add as many as you like. You can also select whether a custom field is mandatory or not. This is particularly important if you are using free text custom fields. These fields can be a mix of free text and drop down menus. When you are done click save changes The Notifications are organized into three groups, inbound, outbound, and internal. The internal page displays 7 different levels of notification you can choose from that will control how the Super Admin and Admins get notified of a new trouble ticket. They range from simple online display to online + email + Cell/SMS/pager email address for every new Trouble ticket. Different notification levels can be set for each Client account you create if you so choose. At any time these levels can be set higher or lower. You can also set how your users are notified when tickets are opened or changed on the outbound menu. Lastly, the internal menu determines how one administrator is notified when another administrator assigns them a ticket. The Administrators Menu selection on the Configure Client Menu will be discussed below and revisited after Administrators are first created. The remaining menu picks from the Configure Client Menu are not really mandatory places to visit during your initial configuration but you can alter their setting now if you like. The first one you may want to update is the Information page; this is where contact information for your client account is stored for your own records. The ExDesk system doesn t use this information itself but it provides a place for you to store contact information about your client account. This becomes more valuable when you have multiple external Client Accounts in use. The next is Site Design; from here you can alter the appearance and text of your internal account as well as the appearance of any additional client accounts. When you alter the appearance of the internal client you will see its effect after you save the changes and go to any other menu. When you alter the appearance of any other client account only the users of that account will see how it appears. You can preview the combination of logo, colors, and text for any client account that you by clicking the preview settings button at the bottom of the page. The Site Design menu allows you to upload a company logo by clicking the choose new logo button. When you have done that you can either upload your logo or choose from many different examples of stock art for your Client Account. The logo you upload is limited as follows: it must be a.jpg file, it can t be larger than 75k and should be within the size limit of 100h X 300w pixels. Once you have created a Custom look for your internal (default) Client Account its site design settings can be used as the defaults for all client accounts created in the future. Even though these can become the new defaults you can still alter any individual client account to appear any way you would like. One final note: the logo background color exists for use when the uploaded logo is either smaller than the minimum height or
width. A general rule of thumb to use when in doubt is to set it to the same color codes as the title text background color. The Ticket Types menu allows you to determine what style of ticketing your administrators will use if they are to open up tickets on behalf of users. Normally and by default they are able to choose from either a drop-down menu of closed users - people who already have a user profile created for them (this can be users or admins) or they can enter the email, first name, last name, and phone number of a user and take the open user group approach where you may not know the users in advance or don t want them to be able to log in and create their own tickets (they can still create tickets if you want but from an open user group submission page see the usage guide for details). The last option is call call tracker where admins can create open user group tickets that are generally opened, updated, and closed in a single action. This is a good choice if you provide rapid-fire phone support to remote users and seldom leave a ticket open after talking them through a fix on the phone. On this menu you can also toggle on and off the ability to allow yourself and your admins to re-open closed tickets as well as the ability to attach files to a ticket. The Auto Escalation menu selection allows you to set up automatic reminders via email and Cell/SMS/pager email address when a ticket has remained open past a certain amount of time. Up to three levels can be activated with different contacts at each level. You will generally first need to set up administrators and users before using this feature. Lastly there is the HTML Forms menu selection. On this page you can request that an html ticket submission form be generated and sent to you automatically via email. You can then take this form and embed it into your own website so that users can submit tickets and check ticket status directly from your own website. This form requires that you provide URL information to ExDesk as to where the user should be taken next to indicate that the ticket has been submitted successfully. The submission form will look just like a user level ticket submission form including whatever configured settings and custom fields you have added (except for site design settings). Its important therefore to first configure your client account before generating embeddable code. You can have a unique form for each client account if you like also but remember that any changes made to your account settings will require you to regenerate and replace older HTML code you might be using. 5. Creating Admins Administrators are the second highest level of user in your ExDesk system; they are below the Super Admin and above the regular user in terms of permissions. Admins are the people who will be working to resolve trouble tickets, all Admins must reside in the Internal (default) Client Account but they can be assigned to work in any Client Account. To Create a User or Admin go to the main menu and select User Accounts then select Add User if you have all the users contact information or Quick Add User if you just want to get a User ID created with the minimum of information. In either case provide the mandatory information and select Internal for the Client and select Admin for the User Type if it is to be an Admin, Do NOT check the critical user box. Check the email login info to user box and then click Add User. Repeat this process for each Admin you require.
All the Admins you create in the internal client account are assigned to work on Trouble tickets created by users or themselves in the internal client account. If you create additional client accounts you will need to individually assign each Admin to it by going to the Configure System menu, selecting a client, clicking configure Client and then clicking on the Administrators button and then assigning each one separately. 6. Creating Additional Clients If you have chosen to use more than one client account for internal use or for external customers you will now want to create additional client accounts. This is not mandatory and if you don t intend to create additional accounts please skip to the next section (Sharing the service with Closed User Groups). To create additional Client Accounts go to the Main Menu and select Configure System, then select Add Client and enter the name of one (or more) client accounts that you would like to add. Below the box used to enter client names there are two buttons, the first one, if selected, allows you to create the new client account with the same customized settings as your internal client account (or another account you may have already created). The second button allows you to create new client accounts using the default settings ExDesk provided for your original internal client account. When the client account is completed you will receive an email from ExDesk showing the URL Closed Users will need to access the account. When the Client Account is created you can go into the Configure System menu from the Main Menu and highlight your new Client Account and then click the Configure Client button to customize it further. To View all the URLs created along with your new client account go from the Main menu to the Master Account menu and select Client account information, this menu will show al the URLs for each client account. 7. Sharing the Service with Closed User Groups A closed User group is one where each user is given an ID and password to login with and open, update, and view tickets. Not everyone will want to implement their system as a closed user group system. Read below about open user groups and the Admin only approach to see what your implementation options are. To allow Closed Users to use the system you can either create each User Profile yourself or have the Users do it. For large User groups its best to have them do it themselves by sending them the sign-up link and ID/Password from the Client Account Info menu mentioned above and also sending them the normal login URL. Its important that you differentiate between the sign-up URL and the normal login URL because they will only use the sign-up URL once. They should also be instructed to bookmark the login URL and you may even want to attach a desktop icon to the login URL so they can have quick access to it. The best time to invite Users to join the service is after you have customized it to your liking and added the Administrators. If you have created Client Accounts, the Users you intend to have within those Client Accounts will have a different set of URLs and ID/Password combinations than those in the Internal Client Account. If you would like to change the ID and Password before mailing it to your Users do the following: go to the Main Menu and select Master Account then select Client Account info. In this menu you will see all the sign-up and login URL information and you will be able to change the IDs and Passwords.
If you intend to create each User Account yourself you can go from the Main Menu to User Accounts and either use Add User or Quick Add User and enter their information then check the email login info to User box. This will send the User their ID and Password (that you create) as well as their login URL. They will not need a sign-up URL as you have already signed them up. 8. Sharing the Service with Open User Groups An Open User Groups is one where the individual users are not given ID s and Passwords They are just asked to provide contact information when they submit a ticket. ExDesk provides a special URL that these kinds of users can use to open a ticket or view the status of an open ticket. This URL is called the hosted open user new ticket URL and can be found on the main menu/master account/client account information menu selection. If you are using (or plan to use) the embeddable html ticket submission form it is also designed as an open user submission form. You might choose to use open rather than closed user groups if you didn t want your users to have to remember an ID and password combination or if you wanted to create a hyperlink from a web page to the open user ticket submission form. The Hosted open user view ticket URL will allow a user to get status on a ticket. If a user wants the status of a ticket they will need the ticket number and the email address that they used in the contact information section when they created the ticket originally. ExDesk will then forward a status email to the user if the ticket number submitted matches the email address of the tickets creator. When an Open User creates a ticket their contact information and email address are used to create a closed user profile within the system that the administrators can then use if they would like to ever open a ticket on behalf of the user at a later time. The email address becomes the User ID.
9. The Admins-Only Approach Many companies choose to implement ExDesk in a way where only the Admins create tickets. This might be the right choice if your users are already calling a support phone line or you would rather not allow Users (open or closed) access to the system for whatever reason. Administrators have a unique ticket submission page that allows them to select closed users or previous open users from a drop down list or enter in the contact information for new open users. When an admin creates an open user ticket for someone, at a later date they can just ask the user for their email address and then select the user from the closed user drop down list when they need to create another ticket for this user. By combining open user group ticketing with the Admins-only approach you never have to create individual user profiles in bulk, or individually and the users don t enter the system until the first time they need a ticket opened. This approach makes for the most rapid deployment possible. This method also means that the Users never receive any login information to the system (closed or open user URLs), and as a result they only become aware there is a support system when they receive there first automated status email from ExDesk (this email has your companies return address on it, please read the Usage Guide to learn more about status emails that are sent to users). 10. Ticket types available to your admins While we have mentioned above that you can use open or closed user groups and your admins can select from either on the ticket creation screen you also have the ability to enforce a particular type of ticketing on the part of the admins. On the configure client menu the first selection is labeled ticket types, this menu allows you to select either closed-only, open-only, mixed (which is the default we have been referring to above), or call tracking. If you choose open-only or closed-only the alternate method of ticketing will be removed from the ticket creation screen. If you choose call logging you have the option of creating a call log ticket that can be submitted and closed in one operation or left open if needed. This option doesn t allow for assignment of admins at the time of creation, it automatically assigns the admin who creates the ticket as the admin.
11. Attaching files to a ticket For a small additional monthly fee (see http://www.exdesk.com/price.html) you can chose to add the ability to attach files to your tickets. You can activate this feature by going from the main menu to the master account menu and selecting File attachment permissions. On this menu you can turn the functionality on globally which means that every current and future client account you have will allow your users and admin to attach up to 5 files per ticket. These files can be attached at ticket creation or later as long as the ticket is still open. You can also turn the functionality on by selection Per Client account which activates the feature but allows you to choose which client accounts you want to offer file attachments to. If you choose per client account and you know which client accounts you want to enable then simply go from the main menu to the configure system menu and highlight a client account, click configure client then click ticket types and toggle on file attachments. 12. Ongoing Modifications Once your system is configured and running with users you can always add, remove, or change just about anything. If, over time, you need to change notification levels or priority levels or Admins you can. You can also delete Client Accounts and add new ones whenever you like. The system remains completely configurable during its usage. The only things that can t be changed from within the system are the Company and Client Names once they are created and the ID of the Super Admin. If you ever need to change who the Super Admin is we would need an email from the current Super Admin requesting the change. The email should be sent to support@exdesk.com. We will then call to confirm the change for security reasons. Some of the settings and Users that you may want to change during the course of usage will require you to first do other things. If for example you want to delete an Admin then you must first reassign the Admins open Trouble tickets to another Admin or close them. The same is true for Client Account deletion; The Client account must have its users removed and all of its Trouble tickets closed and its Admins unassigned (except for the Super Admin) before it can be deleted. Additional rules relating to system changes can be found in the Usage Guide. At this point you are ready to begin using your ExDesk System! If you have any questions email us at support@exdesk.com or feel free to call us at 203-795-5955. Thank you, The ExDesk Team