Crow Canyon Software is working on a brand-new version of our award-winning IT Help Desk system! We’re calling this new version our NITRO Help Desk, based on our in-house developed NITRO Studio tool set. It is due for release in April 2023.
This new Help Desk Software will be available in the Modern UI for SharePoint 2019, SharePoint SE, and Office 365, including in the GCC and the GCC High versions of Office 365.
Some of the new features include:
- An advanced SLA Policy feature
- A more robust Survey feature
- Ability to merge tickets
- Updated Employee Portal design
- Updated Workspace design
- Better Teams integration
- A mobile app for iOS and Android
I’ll discuss each of the above in more detail.
SLA Policies
Following industry standards, we have incorporated a robust Service Level Agreement policy framework to our new NITRO IT Help Desk system. Policies can be set based on any criteria you choose. Some examples include Category, Issue Type, Requester, Requester Location, and many combinations thereof. You can then further refine the policy based on the Priority of the ticket.
Typically, you’ll have one default policy that will apply to all tickets if no other policy matches. Then you can set up more specific policies based on any combination of the above criteria or any new criteria you choose. This allows you to set up multiple policies and apply them in order of priority to the ticket. In the case of one ticket meeting the conditions of multiple policies, the policy with the highest priority will be applied.
For example, let’s say you have a policy for setting the Due Date for all tickets with a Category of “Hardware Problem” to be 4 hours from when the ticket arrives. However, if a requester is from your Executive team, you’ll want to set the Due Date to 2 hours from when the ticket arrives, regardless of the Category. In this case, the policy for the Executive team will have a higher priority than the general policy for Hardware Problem tickets. So even if the ticket is created with the Hardware Problem category, the Executive team policy will be applied first and will set the Due Date to 2 hours from when the ticket arrives.
Surveys
First, I’ll address the elephant in the room. Yes, SharePoint has a native survey feature. But it is lacking in several respects. It does not work in the Modern UI, therefore it is not mobile responsive. In many cases, our customers want to link the survey responses back to a specific Ticket ID. This is not available in native SharePoint surveys out of the box.
With the new NITRO Ratings column you can make an end-user friendly survey right in NITRO Forms. Using lookups, you can tie the survey back to a specific ticket or requester.
In the simplest version, the NITRO IT Help Desk system sends out an email or a Teams message (or both!) to the Requester with one question: Was your issue resolved to your satisfaction? There are two options for the user, Satisfied or Unsatisfied. You can expand this with additional questions as needed.
For reporting, we have enhanced our Tiles and Dials web part to use calculations to display data, such as percentages of tickets with a Satisfied rating. Conversely, we can show a Tile with the percentage of Unsatisfied ratings. You can tie these metrics back to the Assigned Staff for the tickets to track and improve performance of your Help Desk technicians.
Merge Tickets
Previous versions of our IT Help Desk system have the Problems Module, which is a way to connect multiple tickets under one Problem ticket. Once the Problem ticket is resolved, the connected tickets are all resolved and the requesters are notified.
We’re enhancing this concept so that you can now merge multiple tickets together into one ticket without needing to navigate away from the core Tickets list to the Problems list.
This is especially useful if the same user submits multiple tickets for the same issue. You’ll be able to select the “parent” ticket, likely the one that came in first, and then merge the information from a “child” ticket into the “parent.” The IT Help Desk system will retain the Work Log information from the “child” ticket, so you don’t lose any data. If the requesters for the “parent” and the “child” tickets are two different people, the NITRO Help Desk will merge the requester of the “child” ticket into a “CC” field, so that the other requester will continue to receive notifications.
Don’t worry, though! The Problems module will still be there to address deeper and longer-term issues.
Employee Portal
We have made changes to our Employee Portal, incorporating some of the latest and greatest NITRO features. Rounded corners for tiles, a better color scheme, a new dashboard page; these are just a few of the new features in our out of the box Help Desk. We have streamlined NITRO Reports to look cleaner and sleeker on the page.
The core functionality will remain, where users can search the Knowledge Base, view the status of existing tickets, and search for their old tickets, as well as submit a new ticket. All that remains the same. But a more pleasing user interface will go a long way towards user adoption of the Help Desk.
Workspace Design
Along the same lines, we have incorporated many of the new UI options in our webparts into our out-of-the-box workspaces. We now have an option to remove report headers, which give the overall workspace a much lighter feel. Using some of the aforementioned options with tiles (e.g. rounded corners, circular tiles, etc), we gave the workspaces a much more modern feel.
Better Teams Integration
As workplaces continue to adapt to the new reality of a remote workforce, communication tools such as Teams have become the core tool for communication. We want to meet the workforce where they spend most of their time, which is in Teams. That’s why we have expanded on our NITRO Engage app concept to include new ways to stay in Teams and get important Help Desk work done. We will be doing this in a few ways:
- Creating a ticket from a conversation in Teams
- Starting a conversation from a Ticket in Teams
- Ticket workspace in Teams for technicians to update and resolve tickets
Creating a Ticket from a conversation in Teams
Oftentimes when a technician is chatting with an end user, they’ll want to escalate the conversation to a ticket for better tracking. Instead of manually creating the ticket and copying over the relevant information, the technician will now be able to click on a message in the conversation and directly create a ticket out of it. Teams will present the technician with a lightweight version of the Help Desk ticket to fill out additional information, after automatically copying the conversation message in to the Description field, before creating the ticket. As usual, the standard notifications will apply when the ticket is submitted.
Starting a conversation from a Ticket in Teams
Conversely, a little further down the road map will be the ability to start a conversation in Teams from within the ticket itself. This will be possible from either the ticket in SharePoint or the ticket in Teams. A link in the ticket will allow you to start a Teams conversation with the Requester to gather more information about the issue or problem they are experiencing. We’re targeting a late Q1/early Q2 2023 release date.
Ticket Workspace in Teams
Currently, IT Help Desk techs can call up their tickets in Teams via the NITRO Engage app. They can make edits to the Work Log, reassign the ticket, or close it out. We’re developing a new Teams app that will give the Technician more options for updating their ticket, such as the ability to start a conversation. They’ll be able to update multiple fields, not just Work Log and Assigned Staff. This is further down the development road map, so look for this Teams app feature in Q2 or Q3 2023.
Mobile App
Coming soon in early 2023 will be our specialized NITRO App for iOS and Android! You’ll have all the familiar features of the NITRO Help desk on your mobile device. View, assign, and update tickets via mobile. Allow employees to submit tickets and search Knowledge Base articles via mobile. Even approvals can be done from the convenience of the mobile app. All your Help Desk needs for users to create tickets and for technicians to respond to and update tickets will be handled in the app!
Conclusion
Our new NITRO Help Desk application will retain many of the features our customers have come to know and rely on for their day-to-day Help Desk operations. At the same time, we’re packing in a wealth of new features. Because our Help Desk is based on our innovative NITRO Studio platform, we will be continuously rolling out new features and will always be improving our Teams and Mobile options. Take advantage of one of the best Help Desks on the market by booking a demo with our sales team today!
#ITHelpDeskSystem
