Purpose of this add-on
Many organizations today are migrating their
customer support mechanism to SharePoint, due to it's
relatively ease of access, collaboration and
centralized storage and management features.
However, the inbuilt issue tracking list template in SharePoint is only good for basic tracking
requirement and lacks the automation and sophistication,
to function as an effective helpdesk system. There is
no direct and easy way to source the ticket
information, say from your emails in Outlook, except
to resort to copy-paste trick, which is time
consuming and laborious, and not to mention, the
precious human resources needed for data gathering.
Moreover, one of the
important goals for a helpdesk is staying on top on the growing amount of
support request emails from end-users. But without an
organized and structured link between Outlook and SharePoint, caller and problem information
from Outlook mails cannot be added or updated to SharePoint tickets in
a timely manner. This can lead to delay in response time and even support requests falling
through the crack. These limitations prevent many
helpdesk teams from implementing an
effective SharePoint based issue tracking system.
Issue Tracking System overcomes
this limitation by extending your Outlook as an
ideal platform to raise trouble tickets from emails
to one or more SharePoint lists. With a click of a
button in Outlook, it can analyze your emails and
collect ticket specific information such as contact
details and problem description.
Screenshot: To raise a trouble ticket in
SharePoint from an email, click a SharePoint list
from the 'Raise Ticket in' drop down list.
It also allows you to add
more information to the ticket, such as, the
technician that will be responsible for solving the
ticket, due date by which the issue should be
resolved, and problem category and any number of
custom metadata.
Screenshot:
You can add more information
on the problem, caller etc. to the generated ticket
Once a trouble ticket is generated
successfully in the chosen SharePoint list,
information regarding the ticket, such as the ticket
ID, data/time and the URL to the SharePoint ticket
are tagged and embedded into the email item in
Outlook. This not only provides an easy way to go to
the ticket directly, but also prevents other
technicians from generating a duplicate ticket.
Screenshot: After a ticket is created, the
mail item is tagged with information on the trouble
ticket such as Ticket ID and URL
In the SharePoint ticket item,
most of the fields
are populated with the metadata information
extracted from the Outlook mail item. For example,
the caller contacts detail, the problem description,
subject, attachments, formatting
and style, inline images and
links are retained in the ticket. Also notice that,
further information fed in the New Ticket form,
such as the responsible technician, due date,
problem category, type and status and other custom
fields data are also available in this ticket.
Screenshot: This is how the trouble ticket in
the SharePoint list looks like
|
