In this video, I'm going to show you how to create new accounts in Web Help Desk. Web Help Desk supports two types of users: techs and clients.
Clients are users who submit help desk tickets. Typically, a client can only submit and view their own tickets. If you provide a client with Client Admin permissions, they can view or edit other client's tickets in their location or department, create a ticket on behalf of another client, and create asset reservations for others.
Techs are the users who work and resolve
help desk tickets submitted into Web Help Desk. A tech can be configured with administrator privileges that allow them to manage all Web Help desk configuration settings. For example, the default Joe Admin account we are using right now is an administrator account. A tech can also be configured as a supervisor or group manager who manages other techs, but doesn't necessarily need to have full administrative privileges. Or the account can simply remain a tech account. This would be ideal for all your regular help desk technicians.
Let's begin by quickly demonstrating how to create a tech account. Only a
Web Help Desk administrator can create a tech account. SolarWinds recommends creating your supervisory techs before you create your non-supervisors. This process allows you to build configuration in layers, assigning supervisors to techs as you create the individual Tech accounts. At a minimum, you'll need to fill out all the mandatory fields in bold.
To begin, we'll click 'Setup' in the toolbar, click 'Techs' in the left menu, and then click 'Techs.' This displays a list of all your existing techs and tech groups.
To add a new tech, scroll down to the bottom and click 'New.' This opens the Account Info tab where you'll add information about your tech.
In the Identity section, click the 'Account Type' drop-down menu and select 'Tech.' This limits all your screen options so they only apply to techs.
Add the tech's user information, making sure you complete all the bold fields. If you're not sure what to add in the fields, click the tooltip in the field for more information.
If the tech has more than one email address, the address you enter in the E-mail field will be used for identification purposes only in cases where the tech add a note to a ticket from his second email address. For example, when the tech updates a ticket using the mobile app on his phone.
In this example, Web Help Desk will be able to associate the second email address to his account. Web Help Desk will always use the primary address when sending email to the tech.
Supervisor is another field that would be good to configure. The supervisor will typically get an email notification if a ticket is escalated to an assigned tech. This gives the tech's supervisor a heads up if the tech is not on shift, is sick, or on vacation. The tech will be able to see and change some of the options in their own account, including all fields in the Ticket Setup section, however, some options are not available for tech to edit like some under Email Setup section or they depend on tech permission settings.
One important option to configure for your tech is Business Zone. This tells the system how to format the dates and times based on what is configured in that business zone. This comes in handy, especially if you configured multiple business zones that may represent several time zones, business hours and or work days.
Once you define the business hours and work days in the Business Zone, you can select the 'Specify Work Schedule' check box to provide more flexibility in defining the tech's actual work week. This will come in handy when Web Help Desk is
auto assigning tickets.
If a ticket comes in when the tech is off-schedule, the tech will be considered an ineligible candidate for the ticket at that time. The On Vacation checkbox will do the same thing. It takes the tech off the list of eligible candidates.
Make sure 'Active Account' is checked too. Otherwise the tech will have an inactive account and won't be able to login to the system. Inactive techs don't take a seat and won't go against your license count. Wasn't that easy?
If you need more information about what an option does, click the tool tip for additional help.
If you want your clients to open a ticket by sending an email to a selected email address, you'll need to configure an incoming mail account.
If you want your clients to
open a ticket using only the Web UI, then an incoming mail account is not required. You may have skipped the incoming email setting during the getting started wizard. Don't worry. You can still set it up within the application outside the getting started wizard.
You'll need to be logged in as an administrator. Once you're logged in, click 'Setup' in the toolbar.
Click 'Email' in the left menu, and then click '
Incoming Mail Account'
In the Incoming Mail Accounts screen, click 'New.'
The first account you create is always the default account. If you have more than one account, you have the option to choose another account to be the default account.
Enabling email tickets tells the system to monitor the mailbox you entered in the E-Mail Address field and convert each incoming email into a ticket.
So, you'll want to check the contents of that mailbox and make sure you're comfortable having email processed and then deleted. Leave it unchecked for the time being if you need to move some email out of the mailbox. You can come back and enable it later if you like.
For our demonstration, we'll use the email address support@mycompany.com.
In the Account Type field, choose a protocol for accessing your incoming email account.
Check with your mail administrator about which protocol to use and the server name or IP address of the incoming mail server. Notice that the field requirements change based on the protocol you choose. The system will automatically populate the default port number for each protocol. If you receive a connection error after you configure and save this screen, you'll need to verify your mail server port number with your mail administrator. Let's use the Exchange protocol and mail.mycompany.com with the default port over SSL.
The Request Type drop-down menu lets you assign a request type for tickets received in this email account. This way, you can categorize incoming emails into different request types and tech groups if you need to. You can create as many incoming email accounts as you need to correspond with the different email addresses. For example, if you receive sensitive email that shouldn't be viewed by everyone on your help desk team, you can set up a mailbox like HRheldpesk@mycompany.com and assign it to an HR request type instead of the generic IThelpdesk@mycompany.com. This configuration limits which techs can view and read HR requests, regardless of how the request is submitted. Otherwise, you can have just one inbox and assign a generic request type to help you and your tech identify which tickets were created via email and re-assign the request type to the appropriate tech group.
Leave the Allow Auto-Submitted E-Mail check box unchecked so the application will automatically block any mail with an "Auto-Submitted" mail header and prevent an auto-reply looping between the remote system and Web Help Desk.
So now I'll click 'Save' to commit my changes.
You do have some control on which sender's emails can be created into tickets.
If you navigate to the Options sub-menu, you'll see the Create Accounts for Unrecognized Senders option. At some point, you'll receive email in your inbox directory that shouldn't be created into tickets, such as spam for example. By default, this option is set to no. This means that if the senders email doesn't match an existing client in Web Help Desk, the email will be rejected.
If set to yes, all email in your inbox will be created into tickets. A happy medium between the two would be to allow unrecognized senders with addresses from defined domains to create tickets. The "Only if e-mail matches an Accepted Domain" selection does this. You can then define the list of domains you find acceptable in your organization at Accepted Domains. For example, in my case, I'll add "mycompany.com" and click 'Save' to save my changes.
Outgoing Mail Accounts are used for sending emails from Web Help Desk to clients and techs with ticket updates, notifications, and so on. To create an outgoing mail account, click 'Outgoing Mail Account' and then click 'New' to begin.
Similar to incoming mail accounts, the first account you create will be the default. This means that if you have more than one outgoing account and none of the others are specified in a given location, company or request type, Web Help Desk will use the default account.
I'll use smtp.mycompany.com on the default port 25. Again, you'll want to check with your mail administrator for the SMTP server name and port number, as well as whether or not it listens on SSL.
For SMTP Authentication, you can choose 'Anonymous’ if your SMTP mail server allows it.
Otherwise, select 'Simple' if your mail server requires authentication to send email. When 'Simple' is selected, the system provides an additional field where you can enter a username and password for the account.
In the Friendly Name for Web Help Desk E-Mail Address field, enter a friendly name to use for the from address of all email sent by this SMTP server. I'll save the changes here.
A green dot indicates a connection exists to your SMTP server.
A red dot indicates a failure to connect to the SMTP server.
The error message at the top of the page indicates the nature of the failure.