1. Quick Private note message posted text corrected
2. Better handling of URLs for selective managerial role permissions
3. Removed reset and cancel buttons in update custom fields section
4. More prominent "clear search" text on search action
5. Search on My Queue now loads search results under All filter
6. Due date display fix
7. Fixed issue where when there is no name for a contact, it's not possible to go to the contact detail page
8. Allow time spent to be editable by allowing negative value input
9. Security enhancements

Bug Fixes

1. IE fixes for embed code
2. Fixed bug where export of reports was not showing the correct ticket assigned value
3. Fixed bug where newly added staff was not being picked as a valid choice in the private note alert query set
4. Fixed bug where import contacts link was available to non admins in an instance

New Features

1. Forward ticket
2. HTML notifications
3. Rich text notification templates
4. Ability to restore default notification templates
5. Move ticket from ticket detail page
6. Migration support for Helpdesk Pilot 4.4.5 customers to move to Helpdesk Pilot 5
7. Related tickets now supports full ticket ID search with or without '#'

For any questions, contact sales@helpdeskpilot.com.

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It's that time of the year again, when we look at the calendar and count down the last few days of the year, eagerly looking forward to ushering in a new one. There's an enticing feeling that comes about, when you know a new year is upon you and that it's the right time to wipe the slate clean and start afresh.

2011 for us, was a big year.

We launched the fifth major release of Helpdesk Pilot this year, marking V5 as the most significant update to the product ever. It wasn't just an update, but a new avatar of our help desk management software, as we rebuilt the product on a new architecture with significant new features and capabilities over it.

We've been receiving great feedback from all our users and it's helped us in channeling our development roadmap for the next year. During 2011, we were able to consistently roll out new features and enhancements on a monthly basis, which has progressively improved the capabilities that Helpdesk Pilot has to offer.

Support teams can manage their performance goals as a part of their service offering, create and maintain work orders, cater to tickets efficiently whilst out on the field, and more.

Our Enterprise Edition has been a winner in numerous large scale help desk deployments across the USA & Europe, both for its feature packed status as well as its affordability. As more and more businesses look to trim costs but continue to maintain, and excel, in core areas such as support services, Helpdesk Pilot remains a powerful product to help them achieve that.

We can't wait to bring more powerful capabilities your way, to empower your support services even more. It's been a great year so far and we're sure 2012's going to be even better.

Thanks for supporting us and being a part of this growth. From all of us at Tenmiles, here's wishing you a Merry Christmas and a rocking new year!

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Till now, 2 way email integration has allowed for staff responses to be added on a ticket, by merely replying to the notifications that staff members receive via email. This is beneficial for staff members or help desk agents in the field, when it may be difficult for them to actually make use of the web interface, to stay updated of new tickets and respond where needed.

With email being directed to their mobile devices, staff responses via email ensure that:

- the ticket within Helpdesk Pilot is appended with the update

and

- the response is sent to the end user, as an email

Helpdesk Pilot is now even more mobile-device friendly, as staff can now perform ticket level actions when replying to end users, via email. These actions include changing a ticket's status, priority or the assignee (staff member to whom the ticket is assigned).

Be it via a Blackberry, iPhone, Android or any other mobile device capable of receiving and sending emails, staff members need to make use of a simple set of tags to perform these actions:

@@set [action]@@

where [action] could consist of a combination of status, priority or assignee changes.

Let's have a look at how a ticket's status can be changed, through this example.

John Doe sends in a request and Pulkit Sankhla (from the Helpdesk Pilot Team) is notified of this ticket via his iPhone, since he's currently on the move.

If Pulkit had accessed this ticket via his staff interface, this is how the ticket would have been displayed, in it's current NEW status:

Now, Pulkit's keen on responding to John as early as possible, so he taps Reply on his iPhone and begins the response with the action tag:

The tag has to be inserted in the first line of the response, following which the rest of the message can be typed out. Pulkit then sends the response, which gets routed through Helpdesk Pilot and then onto the customer. Helpdesk Pilot will strip the first line of the response, thereby removing the action tag and ensuring that the customer receives only the actual message.

If we now look at the ticket display, within the staff interface, we can see that the reply has been appended (after removing the action tag from the message body) and the status changed to OPEN.

In such a way, the tag used can be extended to include status, priority and assignee, as required. For more details on how these tags can be used, please visit the Notifications page within your admin's Manage section, or simply get in touch with us.

The ability to perform ticket level actions via email offers more capabilities to field agents and makes for more efficient ticket management, when on the move. Leave a comment and let us know what you think of it!

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Our latest feature addition is SLA Management*, available exclusively on the Enterprise Edition.

Individual SLAs, each with its own specific set of conditions and objectives can be created and linked to individual work schedules, ensuring that your SLA timelines are calculated over relevant working hours.

Single or multiple work schedules can be defined to cover the working hours of your help desk as well as a relevant timezone. This is extremely useful if you provide support across international regions (and, therefore, timezones).

1. an objective

2. a set of conditions that determine on which tickets, end users, etc, the SLA is applicable on

3. a goal percentage

4. a relevant work schedule

For a broader perspective, an SLA Performance Report is now available along with each report that you create. SLA metrics and stats on goal objectives will be clearly indicated and in the event that a breach has occured, the relevant tickets that caused the breach will be displayed.

With this feature, Helpdesk Pilot now allows you to cater to in-house and end-user specific SLAs as part of your support services.

SLA Management is available for evaluation on our free, full featured trial. Sign up now! 

(*SLA Management is a feature provided exclusively on the Enterprise Edition of Helpdesk Pilot)

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As part of your support offering to customers, it may be necessary for your techs to personally visit the customer's premises, look into the request and resolve it. In such cases, your techs need to have prior information on the customer and the ticket he/she raised.

Within Helpdesk Pilot, the ticket is displayed with relevant customer and ticket specific information as well as the communication exchanged between the customer and your support staff, in a conversational view.

This format looks great when viewed on your support staff's 17" LCD screen, but techs in the field need a simple template to work with.

Helpdesk Pilot has a print-friendly ticket view that extracts all the details on a ticket and displays it in the following tabular format, well spaced for easy viewing:

Each ticket can then be printed in A4 format and handed over to your techs in the field, for use during their daily support calls.

Going one step further, the print view can be exported in a PDF format and used as a more concise, digital version of the original ticket. Many organizations now outfit their techs with tablets (such as the iPad) in a move to be more environmentally friendly.

Therefore, techs can easily download their assigned set of service requests and refer to them whilst in the field, doing away with the need for actual paper based printouts.

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On the lookout for a help desk management software and pressed for time?

We've put together a short presentation that highlights the key features that Helpdesk Pilot provides, along with an indication on how they could potentially fit in line with your workflows.

A minute or two is all you need to browse through this overview, for a detailed insight on Helpdesk Pilot.

Helpdesk_Pilot.pdf Download this file

If you have any specific queries with regards to requirements that you'd like to implement, feel free to get in touch with us. We'd love to chat and learn more of your needs.

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Helpdesk Pilot is offered as a deployable software, that you can install and manage on your server. This is the favoured route for many businesses that prefer to have their applications managed in-house rather than have it hosted by the service provider.

If, however, you prefer a hosted help desk solution, then we invite you to consider HappyFox. 

HappyFox is essentially Helpdesk Pilot on the cloud and offers the same level of functionalities, in a hosted format. Both these products share a common development roadmap, with similar feature sets that are rolled out on a regular basis. 

Our objective is to offer two delivery channels for our help desk management software, to cater to the individual needs of your business. Whether it's Helpdesk Pilot or HappyFox, you're assured of a trusted and feature rich application managing your help desk operations.

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A while back, we highlighted how your help desk can be branded with your corporate logo and name. This gives your end users a familiar feeling when they visit the help desk for their support needs, but we thought that it may be worthwhile to go a step further.

You can now include customized content on the welcome page, to convey any additional information to your end users.  

The highlighted area of the screenshot below indicates the content section that can be customized:

To add your customized content, navigate to the General Settings page (within the Manage tab of your Admin interface). In addition to normal text, the HTML enabled editor allows you to make use of HTML tags to build your desired content.

Perhaps an indication of your help desk's operating hours and timelines for support responses? With a link to contact a Customer Support Manager for any critical issues?

Or maybe a more personalized guideline on how they can use the help desk to submit their requests and/or browse the Knowledge Base?

So go ahead and speak out through your help desk. Yet another step in ensuring that your help desk reflects your corporate image as much as possible.

We have a few customers who've put some creative thought in the messages they wish to convey and we'll be covering some of them on the blog, shortly.

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"Knowledge Base : A special kind of database for knowledge management, providing the means for the computerized collection, organization, and retrieval of knowledge" - Wikipedia

The latest feature addition to Helpdesk Pilot allows you to achieve this, by creating and managing an online repository of information that your end users can access. 

The Knowledge Base is a standard feature across all editions of Helpdesk Pilot and integrates seamlessly to provide your end users with a self-service help desk. 

Once end users visit your help desk, they can choose to :

1. Create a new ticket
2. Log in to their account to view past tickets and responses
3. Access most viewed articles
4. Search & browse the Knowledge Base for relevant technical assistance

Let's delve a bit deeper into that last point.

Search & Browse the Knowledge Base

The basic crux of any support request is the need for some form of assistance, which is typically sought once a support request is submitted. However, the presence of a Knowledge Base serves as a powerful online reference medium for your end users to consult. By categorizing various aspects of your support services into identifiable sections on the Knowledge Base, your end users can intuitively locate articles that are relevant to the type of issue they're facing.

Resourceful Articles

Effective technical documentation and support oriented articles can be built using a rich text editor, that allows you to make use of multiple media sources.

Insert images and video to create step by step troubleshooting guides. If you're well versed in HTML, make use of the HTML editor to build a more customized article pulling in references from other web sources.

The Knowledge Base is available on our full featured trial, which you can sign up for here. (If you already have an active trial, log into your admin interface and click on the Knowledge Base tab to get started)

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Rapid turnaround time is one of the key ingredients to providing exceptional support to your contacts.

The ability to achieve this rests on a number of factors, one of them being the ability to gauge a contact's past ticket history and profile, prior to resolving a reported issue.

With this in mind, we've linked the Contact entry on each ticket box with the Contacts Manager. This now allows you to view important contact related information, right on the ticket.

To access this summary view, (both in the Ticket View & Ticket Detail pages) simply click on the contact name that's displayed on the ticket box:

You'll notice that there are two individual ticket counts in the summary view:

- total number of tickets that the contact has submitted till date, using the displayed email ID

- number of tickets that are in a pending (open) state

Having this information may be sufficient enough for help desk staff to begin resolving the reported issue. For example, a contact may have indicated that he/she has sent in multiple requests that are yet to be resolved. A brief look at the number of open tickets for that contact serves as a handy check.

In the event that a more detailed view of a contact's profile is necessary, click on the email ID to navigate to the profile within the Contact's Manager. 

We'd love to know how the summary view assists your help desk operations. Leave us a comment!

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A recent feature addition now provides you with the ability to view all help desk contacts and manage their individual profiles.

Any client, customer, end user or ticket requestor is essentially a contact and each contact is identified on the help desk by their unique email ID. To access the Contacts Manager within Helpdesk Pilot, log in to your admin/staff interface and click on the "Contacts" tab.

- all tickets that a contact has submitted till date

- additional information linked to a contact via any client custom fields that you've set up. This could include details such as the contact's Company Name, Phone Number, etc. 

- the most recent tickets that have been submitted, along with a snapshot of important ticket details such as Assignee, Priority & the presence (or absence) of The Red Dot.

In the event a contact's details need to be updated, merely click on the "Edit" link along side the Basic & Additional Information sections.

The Contacts Manager, therefore, serves as a simple means to both maintain contact profiles and easily filter through to tickets submitted by a specific content. 

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Using custom statuses, you can replicate your business processes as closely as possible and more efficiently identify tickets in your help desk. Being able to visually identify a ticket's status through a brief glance is aided with the custom colour options for each status that you create.

The add/edit status form allows you to define a preferred color for the status, aside from other status related settings. Till recently, the hexadecimal HTML color code had to be entered to have the relevant color assigned to that status.

We've now made it even easier to select a color for any custom status that you create. Simply enter the name of the color you wish to use for the status and you'll see it appear right alongside the color field. (If you still prefer to use HTML codes, you can!)

In this example, the "Open" status has been set to be displayed in "Blue". Any tickets in the queue that are placed in the "Open" status can then be visually identified, by merely looking at the status color.

Are you using custom statuses? Let us know. 

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Following up to the flexible My Queue feature that we covered last week, we've got another handy tip related to customizing each help desk staff member's user interface.

Preferences typically vary from one support staff to another, in the manner in which they would like information to be displayed to them.

One of your staff members may wish to have as low as 5 tickets displayed in a single page view; another may prefer to have 20 in a single page, to make it easier to navigate through their support activities.

Helpdesk Pilot understands this need and allows each of your staff members to define the preferred number of tickets per page view. Albeit a simple one, this custom setting contributes significantly in offering help desk staff members with an ambient user interface. 

The "My Settings" page within each staff panel offers a setting to define the number of tickets per page.

Once set, the tickets view page will display all tickets in the help desk according to the number of tickets per page breakup, for that specific staff member. Remember, each of your staff members can have their own preferred view! (This page view would extend across all the status filters as well)

Did you find this useful? Leave a comment and let us know!

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As a part of the what's new series, we look at the My Queue feature which provides all your help desk staff with a view to attend to the most important tickets, as determined by them. 

The My Queue is a customized view of the Tickets view page, where the order of tickets can be determined by the staff according to their role in your organization and the categories that they have access to. 

To begin, the My Queue should be set on the Staff profile page. Log in, as you normally would, and click on My Settings. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the '+' icon in the My Queue section. You will see three drop downs, like this. 

You can choose the category from which you'd like to see tickets first, using the first drop down. Choose the status of the ticket, from the second drop down and the current assignment status of the ticket from the third.

A bit more on the status of the ticket - each status in Helpdesk Pilot is either a 'pending' state or a 'completed' state. Among the default statuses, Solved and Closed are completed statuses. The other default statuses shipped are pending states. You can choose a state of tickets in the second drop down, which would include all tickets that fall in that state.

The second drop down also has a value called 'unresponded', which allows you to choose tickets which have not yet been responded to by your help desk staff.

You can choose the tickets assigned to you first if you'd like to see them at the top of your list. Help desk staff who only assign tickets to other staff in various categories, can set up the queue to view unassigned tickets first, for example. 

You can set up as many rows as you want and the tickets corresponding to each filter will appear one below the other on the Tickets view page. 

Think this is useful? Leave us a comment.

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Did you know that Helpdesk Pilot is made up of two separate web interfaces?

1. The Staff interface, which your help desk staff would use to view and respond to tickets

2. The End User interface, which your end users/customers would use to submit new tickets and view responses to tickets they've raised in the past

Given the ability to customize the request submission forms for each of your categories, the end user interface serves as a comprehensive ticket management portal and represents your help desk's online image.

With that in mind, we're sure you'd want your end users to have the comfort of knowing that they're on familiar ground when they access your help desk. A standard feature on Helpdesk Pilot allows you to upload your corporate logo and brand the help desk in your name.

If you're currently evaluating Helpdesk Pilot by way of our free trial, you can brand the staff & end user interfaces right away! Navigate to the General Settings page (within the Manage tab) to get started!

Yet another step in ensuring your help desk reflects your corporate image!

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Now, your end users, clients, customers (as the case may be) can have their own login to the end user panel in Helpdesk Pilot. 

This panel is accessible on your trial at http://[your trial account name].helpdeskpilot.net, while the staff panel can be accessed at http://[your trial account name].helpdeskpilot.net/staff.

What you should know about the End User Panel:

* When an end user creates a ticket via any of the following modes:

 

-email
-end user panel submit new ticket form
-embeddable web form

or when a ticket is created on behalf of your end user, from the new ticket page on the staff panel, the end user will receive a notification (Contact Account invite). The end user merely needs to click on the activation link in this notification to activate their account and set the password. 

 

* End users may begin the whole process by also registering themselves first

* First time users to your helpdesk can go ahead and create a ticket first, in turn registering themselves

* The contents of this email and when this should be sent can be controlled under the Manage >> Notifications section on the admin panel.

* Once the activation is done, your end users can login to the end user panel and view the tickets that have been raised by them in the past.

* End users can see all their tickets in their current status, in the same conversation view as in the staff panel

* Status filters are available for customers too

* They can reply to the ticket from the Ticket detail page

* New tickets can be created from the New ticket form, by clicking on the New ticket tab

* All ticket specific custom fields (that were filled by them, while raising a ticket via any of the forms) will be visible on the Ticket detail page

* All contact specific custom fields, can be viewed and edited on their individual My Settings page

* End user panel supports LDAP mode login too! Helpdesk Pilot currently supports Active directory and Open LDAP

* End users can change their email ID, password, localization settings (timezone) in the My Settings page

What's coming:

• More controls and features on the customer panel
• Admin section to manage all end users
• A fully functional Knowledge Base module, which works closely with the end user panel, and more!

Looking forward? Absolutely. We are too.

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In addition to all the product information that's available on our website, the full-featured trial that we offer is aimed at offering prospective customer's a hands on feel of Helpdesk Pilot.

Typically, a successful evaluation by a trial user is followed by an internal presentation within their company, where senior management are introduced to the product and its capabilities. In most cases, the management team are faced with time constraints and would ideally prefer to have the key points made aware to them, rather than a complete product review. 

We've recently noticed that our stop motion video has done extremely well as the opening video in client presentations. A number of trial users have successfully used the video to introduce Helpdesk Pilot to their management team and cover the key functionalities. In less than 3 minutes, the entire Helpdesk Pilot experience can be conveyed in a simple yet creative manner.

So if you have an upcoming Helpdesk Pilot presentation planned, do consider using the video as an aid. 

If you need any other collateral (such as brochures, case studies or technical information) that you feel would strengthen your presentation, please let us know. We'd be glad to assist in any way that we can.

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Our latest release of Helpdesk Pilot, Version 5.0 is a thoroughly revamped upgrade of the outgoing 4.4.5 release but will retain a number of core features that have existed in previous releases.

These core features are currently being updated and enhanced to offer more benefits to Helpdesk Pilot users, and will be integrated as standard features. Here's a brief on the features that will be coming soon to Helpdesk Pilot V5:

1. Self-service End User Panel with built-in Knowledge Base

Currently, an embeddable request submission form is provided with V5, allowing you to embed a form on your website so that end users may submit web based requests. 

The self-service end user panel will go a few steps further in offering your end users their own ticket management interface. Through this web based interface, end users can:

• log in to their individual end user accounts
• submit new requests to the help desk
• view requests that they have submitted in the past
• view responses from your help desk staff

With the integration of a Knowledge Base, you can create articles and categorize them into specific online reference areas, that are accessible via the end user panel. End users can then look through your Knowledge Base articles and find answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), doing away with the need to raise a request on the help desk. 

2. Advanced search options

The built in search engine will be significantly enhanced and allow you to quickly find the information you're looking for, by offering advanced options to search by, inclluding:

• Ticket ID
• End User or Customer
• Contact Information
• Ticket subject
• Ticket content
• Tickets assigned to a specific staff member
• Tag
• Custom Field content

3. SLA Management

Meeting SLA targets is a key requirement for most businesses nowadays, and with this updated feature, you will be able to define individual SLA targets (for each of your categories or for an end user group). With escalation notifications that can be automated (using the already available smart rules feature), you can then ensure that your help desk staff is actively informed when a ticket threatens to breach an SLA target. Reporting on SLA targets will also be integrated with the reporting module, allowing you to measure SLA metrics across the help desk over desired date ranges.

4. Multi-lingual user interface

The outgoing release (V4.4.5) supported 15 international languages, allowing help desk staff and end users to select their preferred language within their staff and end user interfaces, respectively.

Language packs are currently being developed to offer the same level of language support on V5. Therefore, Helpdesk Pilot will continue to remain a help desk product that can be deployed for international use, with language specific user interfaces. 

Many of our current Helpdesk Pilot users are assisting us with the language translation packs and we welcome support from other users, to add more international language support. All these languages will be available for selection in Helpdesk Pilot, so the more languages we integrate, the more flexibility we can provide to you and your end users. If you would like to contribute to providing a language translation, please let us know.

These enhancements are being integrated into Helpdesk Pilot as standard feature offerings and will be offered as free updates to existing V5 users, by the end of April. 

We'll keep you updated via the blog, as these enhancements take shape.

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