Working with Help Desk Tickets
Mouse Tracks main feature is a comprehensive Help Desk system. This allows you to assign tasks and help desk 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 help desk is integrated with Mouse Tracks, you will be familiar with the user and equipment before approaching the problem. You can also track help desk tickets issues to computers, peripherals and software products. This will allow you to maintain a problem history for your inventory.
To Access the Help Desk Feature within Mouse Tracks technicians must be given Help Desk Permissions.
Defining Ticket Types
From the Data Menu, choose Miscellaneous Tables -- Ticket Types. When defining Ticket Types, you can define email addresses for the Ticket Type. These email addresses are used by the IIS Help Desk Interface Add-On. If adding more than one email address to Ticket Type, be sure to separate the addresses with semicolons. With Mouse Tracks 2003, you can also assign a default technician for a specific Ticket Type. Therefore, software problems could be assigned to technician 1 while hardware problems are defaulted to technician 2.
Defining Ticket Statuses
From the Data Menu, choose Miscellaneous Tables -- Ticket Statuses. Ticket Statuses in Mouse Tracks can be of type 'Open', 'Closed', or 'Pending'. You can create different statuses and then assign them on of these values. For example you could have a Waiting and Frozen status that would be assigned the value of 'Pending'. You could also have a Canceled and Denied status that would have the value of 'Closed'.
There are three built-in Statuses named Open, Closed and Pending that correspond to the Open, Closed and Pending Value. These may not be deleted, however they may be renamed.
Defining Ticket Priorities
From the Data Menu, choose Miscellaneous Tables -- Event Priorities
An ticket priority has an associated rank which determines the order of priority. Mouse Tracks only uses the priority rank to sort the text value of the priority.
Adding Tickets
To add a Help Desk Ticket in Mouse Tracks, click the Add command from the Help Desk list. Tickets can also be created directly by your end-users or technicians from the IIS Help Desk Interface Add-on.
The Ticket Number is automatically generated by Mouse 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 Help Desk 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 an Inventory Item
Associating tickets with inventory items is Mouse Tracks way of tracking help desk requests to computer, peripherals and/or software products. In the user information tab, click the option for computers, peripherals, or software. Highlight an item in the list and click the 'Link Ticket to Selected Item' command. You can link a ticket to the user's computer, peripherals and/or a software product. By default the records for computers and peripherals are filtered based on the requester of the ticket. If you need to link the help desk ticket to a computer or peripheral that is not assigned to the ticket requester click the 'Showing Records for Ticket Requester' toggle command to see all available choices. A subsequent click on this command will filter the list back to the requesters equipment.
Creating a Knowledge Base Article from a Help Desk Ticket
Mouse Tracks allows you to turn your help desk tickets into knowledge base articles. This allows you to quickly create 'How to' articles or publish solutions to common issues. To create a knowledge base article based on a help desk ticket, edit the ticket and then click the '+' knowledge base icon. The knowledge base title will default to the first 255 characters of the ticket's description. The description and resolutions will both default to the current tickets description and resolution. You may modify any of these values before saving the record to the knowledge base. Mouse 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
If you have a MAPI compatible email client on your computer you will be able to send ticket updates by way of Email. To Email the ticket details to the requester, click on the email icon. To customize this feature, see Configure Email Settings.
Automated emails may also be triggered when a tickets is created or updated. See Configure Email Settings for more information.
Previewing/Printing Tickets
To print a ticket, click on the preview command from the Help Desk List or from the Help Desk Ticket detail form.
Attaching Files to Computers Records
Mouse Tracks Introduces the powerful ability of file attachments. The following steps will teach you how to attach screenshots, or any other files associated with a help desk ticket.
The file is now stored in the database with the associated with the Help Desk ticket.
For more information on Attachments see Working with File Attachments.
Record History
Mouse Tracks records any changes made to a help desk ticket in the ticket's history tab.
See Also