The following topics discuss some of the important aspects of Personal Helpdesk system, and how these aid you in performing your tasks productively and efficiently to support ever-growing issues/queries from end-users:

Helpdesk solution right in your Outlook Log in cases from varied sources Automatic emails to support cases Support Request form in Outlook Conversation Threading - Get the Complete Picture Find information at your finger tips Integrate a HTTP gateway or Skype for SMS Make calls via Skype or phone Send automatic notifications Knowledge base Customer Web Service Asset tracking & management Statistics - Reporting, Charting, and Data Analysis Outlook views Export cases to a database of your choice

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Personal Helpdesk extends your Outlook as an ideal platform to collect, track and resolve trouble tickets, all with ease. It brings all of help desk functionalities and automation and tightly integrates with the easy workflow of Outlook, thereby allowing users to work in the same way they do with emails. What you would get as an IT manager, is high rate of user acceptance, yet low cost of operation, training and maintenance.

Moreover, Personal Helpdesk leverages your existing Microsoft resources such as MS Exchange server, Internet Information Server (IIS), MS SQL server, Active Directory etc, and hence, no specialized software are required.

Support cases generation can be automated by allowing Personal Helpdesk system to monitor any number of mail-enabled public folders or shared mailboxes. This is particular useful when you have a dedicated support mailbox account (for example support@yourcompany.com).

Additionally, caller information can be automatically scanned and saved to the caller list for CRM purpose.

Personal Helpdesk can be configured to intercept incoming emails from any number of shared mailboxes and mail-enabled public folders and automatically generate support cases out of the emails. Processed emails then can be moved to another folder or can be moved altogether to the Personal Helpdesk email history folder. Contact information is automatically populated and the summary and description fields are filled in.

There are various sections in the form such as time spent, email history, notes, assets, custom fields and related cases that you can easily navigate and work upon. Contact fields are accompanied by relevant buttons for making quick correspondence to the contact such as email, phone calls or simply sending SMS. Fields such as problem category, type, status and department are available in drop down format (configurable) so as to limit the choice you can select for such fields.

From directly in the case form, a technician can quickly browse, preview and select a knowledge base article or predefined reply and insert a relevant solution directly to the case problem description or make a quick reply to the caller. When logging in a new phone case, an existing caller, either from the caller list or from global address list (GAL) can be selected and it will automatically populate all other available caller fields such as address, phone number, company etc.

With the conversation threading feature, Personal Helpdesk captures the complete course of the conversation chronologically, from all email communications received or sent (including those automated notifications sent to caller in due course). The end result is a consolidated view where all the responses to a support request are collated together. Redundant and repeated conversations are filtered out to present only the relevant communications.
 

This eases the task of the helpdesk and minimizes repeating what has already been done, while keeping you to stay on the track. Another advantage is it allows you to quickly glimpse through the thread and get a complete overview on the responses in chronological order and resolution applied to the particular support request, something which is hard to extract from viewing multiple email responses.

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Search the support cases in the ongoing and resolved folders for cases that meet a user specified criteria or keywords. Any occurrence of these keywords are searched in all fields, including the description field and any the resulting cases that meet the searched keywords are then displayed in that same Outlook folder view. Yes, no dialog or redirection to any folder! Personal Helpdesk makes use of the flexibility of the built-in Outlook filter and hence, the view itself is modified to only display those wanted cases.
 

That is not over yet. Make advanced search based on cases based on intrinsic help desk fields such as created date, due on, technician, problems, caller, author, assets, status or departments. For non-date fields, the possible value lists are loaded in relevant drop down controls allowing technicians to quickly select a value and commence the search.

For date fields, search criteria can be for a particular date (e.g. cases that are due on 11/25/2008), or can be between a date range (e.g. cases created between 11/25/2008 and 11/30/2008).

Hence, due to the various advantages, it is no wonder that Personal Helpdesk supports SMS messaging just as it supports emails! SMS alerts can be automatically dispatched to callers or technicians based on certain help desk events such as when case is resolved or when a case is assigned to a technician.

There are two ways in Personal Helpdesk to support SMS messaging

1) Using a SMS HTTP gateway provider -  Many SMS providers offer simple HTTP SMS posting, allowing one to send SMS text messages directly through their gateways. Sending SMS via internet frees the support team from having a cellular carrier and individual mobile phones. Configuring support for a HTTP gateway in Personal Helpdesk is very easy. Just select a provider (from a list) and input the connection URL and user credentials and you are ready!

2) Using Skype (version 2.5 and above) - If technicians have Skype installed and has credit, Personal Helpdesk can set to send SMS directly through Skype. This functionality is done programmatically, which means, Skype is seamlessly integrated with Personal Helpdesk. The technicians won't even notice the Skype is being used during the whole process of SMS messaging.

Personal Helpdesk system enables technicians to start making calls to callers, technicians and Outlook contacts on a click of a button, all inside Outlook. This can be achieved in either one of the two ways:

1) Using modem based phone - A phone is connected to the technician's system via one of the communication port. This setting is done per system by the technician. These come under the Personal Settings portion. Calls can be made from the case form by directly clicking at the buttons with the phone or mobile icons.

2) Using Skype - Skype allows you to make calls to any local and international phone numbers via the internet. What all you need is to have some Skype credit. Personal Helpdesk can be configured to use Skype directly for calling callers or technicians.

Automatic emails and SMS alerts are send out directly when a relevant event occurs and the whole exercise is transparent to the technicians. Technicians are not even required to be working on the Cases folder. In fact, as long as Microsoft Outlook is running, Personal Helpdesk system is active i.e., it is processing requests and automating various helpdesk tasks such as sending out notification emails and SMS alerts.

Personal Helpdesk system includes an inbuilt Knowledge Base folder that allows your helpdesk team to document best practices and solutions to common problems. Any support case is eligible to become flagged as an KB item and thus, a technician recognizing a repetitive support issue can easily flag a resolved case as a knowledge article.

It is very easy to use the knowledge base in Outlook. A Question and Answer format is used to intuitively display KB items. Each item may have any number of file attachments associated, rich-text elements, and hyperlinks to other web pages. All items are tagged with a related problem category and problem type, so it is easy to find a particular resolution at time of needs.
 

Personal Helpdesk provides a means for the technician (in Outlook and web) or the customer (via web form) to create a hard-link between a troubled asset and a case.

The asset management module within the Personal Helpdesk system provides a centralized repository for all of your organization's hardware and software inventory. An asset may be cataloged and categorized by Asset Types. All the asset fields except for the asset name can re-titled to adapt and take any of your organization's intrinsic properties of inventories such as association with Make, I.P. Address or Model information; providing invaluable information directly from trouble case to the technicians resolving the support request.

Technicians can easily view every problem and incident ever reported on a specific asset. In Outlook, the support case form has a special tab for assets that not only shows the asset details, but also relevant cases that are associated with the same asset problem.

With summary reports, you can generate summarized reports on support cases based on different time interval - today, yesterday, this week, this month, last month, this year, last year or own date range. Summary reports provide an overview about when cases are logged, due, worked and closed over a period of time.

The inbuilt statistical tool in Personal Helpdesk system allows displaying support cases data from your exchange folders to multidimensional data structures in grids, charts and graphs and support most common operations such as pivoting, drill down/slice and dice, filtering etc. This gives managers a unique opportunity to analyze their helpdesk data - slice and dice performance data to seek opportunity, drill down into trouble spots  to reinforce and strengthen policies.

It also provides various inbuilt reports specific to Personal Helpdesk cases. Helpdesk managers can also easily create and save their user-defined reports for future references. Any report, chart, grid or graph can be saved to PDF, images, web pages or printed.  

Therefore, in addition to providing a mechanism to resolve customer issues, Personal Helpdesk gives senior IT managers with statistical information and understanding that aid in the decision-making process concerning the whole of help desk, and the organization as a whole. With such arrays of information, the organization can reengineer their help desk processes, reinforce resources and forecast problem areas and exploit all these factors for competitive advantage.

Based on different needs and scopes, technicians can switch to any pre-defined cases view. For example when, the problem category-problem type view is very useful when we want group cases on line of problems in hierarchical tree, so that it is easy to have a summarized information as which problem type has the maximum and minimum cases. Similarly, a manager can have a generalized information on the case life span (e.g, the day it was created to the day it was resolved) in a timeline view by choosing one of the calendar view. By default, Personal Helpdesk provides more than 30 views, catering to all help desk requirement scenarios and scopes.

Support cases grouped by problem category and further sub-grouped by problem type

Support cases grouped by technicians

The Personal Helpdesk views can be modified to suit the team's taste and fields requirements. If you are an Outlook expert, you can even create new views and publish them for all your team in the folder. All Personal Helpdesk views are organized in a way that they bring out some sense out of the cases - patterns, associations, occurrences or dependencies. But sometime, a technician would want to refine the view by means of keyword search on any fields. With the simple and advanced search options available with Personal Helpdesk right in Outlook, you are never handicap from the finding the right information in right time.