Ace
Help Desk System
- Upgrading And Installing
- Creating/Managing Departments
- Creating Users
- Your Profile & Preferences
- General Help Desk Settings
- Department Auto-Replies
- Email Customizations
- Email Processing
- Browsing Tickets
- Configuring The Ticket Form Template
- Using Header/Footer HTML
- Custom Input Fields
- Message Tags
- Predefined Replies
- Knowledge Base
- Help Desk Backups
- File Attachments & Private Notes
- Surveys
- Miscellaneous
Upgrading And Installing
* Note - If you plan on allowing file attachments
to tickets, please read the File
Attachments section after following the installation
instructions below.
Upgrading from a previous version
To upgrade from a previous version, extract all of the
files from the latest ZIP file to the same location where
the old help desk is installed, overwriting any existing
files. Make sure that the new settings.php file uploaded
is changed to match your current database settings. Skip
the rest of the installation described below, and simply
access the upgrade.php file through your web browser.
This will make any needed changes.
First or fresh installs
Extracting Files
After you have downloaded the help desk (which comes as
a ZIP file), extract the zip file to a folder of your
choice on your server, or extract the zip file on your
own computer, and upload the files to your web server.
Configuring Files
The only file that you will need to manually is settings.php.
This file contains information needed to use a MySQL database
(username, password, database name, etc.) Open this file
in a text editor and make the necessary changes.
Setting Up (Creating a global administrator)
After you have made the necessary changes to settings.php,
go ahead and access the setup.php file in your browser
(http://www.yoursite.com/path_to_helpdesk/setup.php).
On this page, you will be able to create a master administrator
account. This account cannot be deleted by any other users,
and can create other administrator accounts and so forth.
Follow the directions on this page and you will then be
able to login.
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Creating/Managing Departments
Choose View/Manage Departments from the menu. All departments
will be shown. You can create separate and any amount
of departments (such as for billing, support, accounts,
etc.) Users for each department will be displayed. The
Global (All Departments) department is where global users
can be assigned. A global user can view and work with
tickets sent to any department. When assigning new users,
you can also specify that they be an administrator. For
the global department (global administrators), global
administrators can create users, and have access to virtually
all components of the help desk. Administrators in all
other departments will be able to manage auto-replies
for their department and various other department-related
issues.
All departments (except for the global department), can
be deleted by global administrators by clicking on the
recycle icon next to the name of the department.
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Creating Users
Choose View/Manage Users from the menu. You can create
a new user by entering their name and email address in
the top area. An email will be sent to him/her with the
login information (and a randomly generated password).
Existing users will be displayed below. Click on their
names or the information ('i') icon on the left to view
more information about the user. Global administrators
will be able to keep an eye on other users by viewing
tickets they have taken part in. Global administrators
can also delete users by clicking on the recycle icon
next to a user.
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Your Profile & Preferences
Choose Edit Your Profile & Options from the menu.
You will be able to change various options, including
your signature, which is displayed the bottom of all posts
made to tickets. Notifications allow users to receive
email notifications when new tickets are created within
their departments, and also when a customer replies to
a ticket that the user is handling.
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General Help Desk Settings
(Global administrators only)
Choose General Help Desk Settings from the menu. You should
configure a few of these options before using your help
desk. Information on the web page will lead you through
this process.
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Department Auto-Replies
Auto-replies can be very useful for providing information
to those who create tickets that you already have a possible
solution for. When a user creates a ticket containing
a specified phrase in the subject line, it will trigger
an auto-reply that will contain information that will
be sent along with the ticket notification email.
To do this, select Department Auto-Replies from the menu.
Each department will be shown with its associated auto-replies.
When creating a new auto-reply, you must select the department,
the key phrase, and the message used in the auto-reply.
If you select the global department, then your auto-reply
will be triggered when a ticket is submitted to ANY department.
Otherwise, it will only trigger for the department you
specify.
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Email Customizations
Global administrators can modify the important emails
sent by the help desk. The header and footer will be prepended
and appened to all emails, and each email itself for ticket
creation, ticket notification, and ticket surveys can
be completely customized.
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Email Processing
Email processing is a powerful feature of the help desk
that allows you to have tickets created when emails are
sent to specific email addresses. There are 2 unique ways
in which you can do this. In both methods, you must choose
'Email Processing' from the menu and specify an email
address (or addresses) that the help desk will be processing,
as well as which department tickets each address should
be routed to. Once you have done this, you can choose
to either have the help desk connect to your POP3 accounts,
or to install a .forward file. The POP3 method is much
easier and does not require any setup on the server.
POP3 Method
To use POP3, specify your POP3 email server, as well as
the username and password for each email account (you
can even specify a POP3 server that isn't local). The
default port for POP3 is 110. Once you have done this,
a link will appear at the top that allows you to 'Fetch
Emails and Create Tickets'. When this link is clicked,
the help desk will connect to all the POP3 email accounts
you specified, download the emails from your inbox and
create tickets. If you specified to do so, these emails
will be deleted after the tickets are created. You must
use the 'Fetch Emails and Create Tickets' link every time
you want to import new tickets. Alternatively, you can
automate this process by using a cron job. You must have
the PHP stand-alone binary installed (refer to php.net)
which allows PHP to be run from the command line. Here
is what you would execute:
/path/to/php/binary /path/to/helpdesk/email-pop.php
A good interval for this cron job to execute is every
few minutes or so.
Forwarding Method
Many MTA programs, such as sendmail and qmail, have the
ability to pipe incoming emails to other programs, rather
than to deliver them to a user's inbox. In most cases,
they make use of a .forward file to do so. We do not support
this option because of the vast differences between servers,
making it almost impossible to walk you through the setup.
However, if you do know how to create a .forward file
and pipe the output to another program, you have a line
similar to:
/usr/bin/php -q /path/to/helpdesk/email-parse.php
This method is nice in that it automatically creates tickets
when emails are sent, but usually require a sysadmin to
setup.
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Browsing Tickets
To browse tickets, choose Browse from the menu. By default,
all tickets for departments in which you are assigned
will be shown in order of latest activity. You can use
the powerful search engine to search for specific tickets,
only show tickets that have not been answered, etc.
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Configuring The Ticket
Form Template (Used for creating tickets)
Choose Edit Your Profile & Options from the menu.
The ticket form template will be used on all the web pages
that your clients will use to create tickets. Using the
ticket form template options, you can customize your layout
and settings to your needs.
The logo and title will change the logo used in the upper-left
corner of the template and the title of the web pages
if you choose not to use the header and footer.
To completely change the look of your ticket creation
template, you can specify the header and footer HTML that
will be used. Note that with using this method, you must
specify the title of web pages and include the tags, etc.
The CSS styles allow you to customize the colors and fonts
used for links and other text on the ticket web pages.
You should specify these even when using your own header
and footer HTML, because you will still want to customize
the content to match your template.
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Using Header And Footer HTML
Header and footer HTML allow you to completely customize
the look of the help desk pages that your clients will
interact with. You can also use PHP code in the header
and footer HTML (you must have working PHP knowledge).
When using the header and footer HTML, the links that
appear by default at the top of the ticket template will
no longer be there (i.e. 'Create Ticket', 'Staff Login',
etc.) You must specify these manually. The following are
the links that you can use in your header/footer HTML:
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index.php
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Used for creating new tickets
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ticketview.php
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Viewing tickets
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ticket.php?cmd=lost
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Looking up tickets
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login.php
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Staff login
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Custom Input Fields
If you want to add more fields to the ticket creation
form, you can specify them easily under Custom Input
Fields. Simply specify the field name and check the
Required? checkbox if you want the field to be required
or not.
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Message Tags
Message tags allow posts to contain HTML-similar tags
to allow things like bolding of text, creating lists,
inserting links, etc. These will cause no harm and can
be quite useful. They can be enabled or disabled by
checking the Enable Message Tags checkbox.
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Predefined Replies
Predefined replies allow you to store commonly used
replies for later usage when replying to tickets. When
replying to a ticket, simply check the 'Save as a predefined
reply named' box and type the name to give the reply.
Later, you may select this predefined reply from the
list, and the message area will be filled in automatically.
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Knowledge Base
The knowledge base (or FAQ) allows global administrators
to create a powerful, searchable knowledge base. Select
'Knowledge Base' from the menu. Categories can be created
(as well as subcategories). Create knowledge base entries
within categories. Users will then be able to search
the knowledge base as well as browse categories.
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Help Desk Backups
Select 'Help Desk Backup' from the menu. Using this
feature, you are able to store a backup of the entire
help desk-related tables onto your own computer. If
you ever need to restore the help desk database (for
instance, if your server crashes), you can do so simply.
All backup data is appended to the database. This will
make sure that any tickets, etc. created after a fresh
install will not be removed.
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File Attachments
To allow files to be attached to tickets, first create
a subdirectory in the help desk directory named 'files'.
You must also modify the privileges of this folder so
that the help desk may write files to it. You can do
this by CHMOD'ing the folder to 777.
Once you have done this, you must then enable the file
attachments through the help desk under the 'General
Help Desk Settings' section.
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Surveys
As of version 2.0, you can use the powerful surveys
built-in to the help desk to get feedback from your
customers. Global administrators can define a list of
up to 10 questions that will be rated from 1 (poor)
to 5 (excellent), as well as an extra box for comments.
Other options on the survey page allow you to automatically
send out surveys when tickets are closed, and to send
surveys to users more than once if they create more
than one ticket. Each question will show average ratings,
how many customers chose each rating, as well as a list
of the individual surveys.
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Miscellaneous
Our patent pending technology blocks spam by authenticating
senders at the source. There are no rules for spammers
to get around. We are different than any other anti-spam
technology because we do not have to guess if mail is
spam. You can safely download your mail knowing that
every email you get is an email you want! Find Out More
Linking To The Ticket Creation Form, Auto-setting
The Subject, Etc.
You can easily link to the ticket creation form by using
the URL http://www.yoursite.com/path_to_helpdesk/index.php.
You can also automatically have the subject text box
and department fields set by using the following link
format:
http://www.yoursite.com/path_to_helpdesk/index.php?subject=YOUR_SUBJECT&department=DEPARTMENT_NAME
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If you have any problems, please visit http://www.inverseflow.com
and create a support ticket through our help desk.
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