Hello, my name is Jillian Salamon, and I am an SE for Quest Software, specifically for the UEM business unit. Today, we're here to talk about the KACE Service Desk. And more importantly, I will be highlighting some of the very exciting UI changes that will be made in the newest release, 14.0.
For those of you that may not be familiar with our service desk, I'm going to start with some of the key features our service desk offers, as well as some differentiators or what sets us apart from the competition. I will then follow up with a product demonstration so that you can see it in action.
For our service desk offering, most of these will come as no surprise, but I would feel remiss if I didn't mention them. So how can tickets be submitted? Well, we can have a technician manually create a ticket on behalf of the end user. We have an end-user portal. Tickets can be submitted via our mobile app. And finally, we do support email-to-ticket functionality.
Most ticketing solutions support some type of asset integration. But there are a few features where I feel we are superior, and I will make sure I point those out during the demonstration. We have a workflow engine that allows you to build onboarding or offboarding jobs, approval jobs, just to name a few. We support ticket rules so that tickets can be automatically routed or updated based on conditions that you define. We can merge tickets. We can schedule tickets to get automatically created based on maintenance work.
When an end user submits a ticket, as they are typing out their issue, it will do a keyword search against any Knowledge Base articles and recommend those articles to the end user. And finally, we do support single sign-on for the end-user portal if you are using Active Directory integration.
Unlike most ticketing solutions out there, we allow for unlimited technicians and unlimited end users. We also support unlimited queues. So a queue can be used for incident and problem management and a different queue for change management. Or maybe the IT department decides to use a ticketing system, but down the road HR would like to use it as well. In that example, you're not going to incur any additional costs in order to do so. This will allow you to continue to build off of your initial investment.
Another differentiator of ours, we don't force you to use an ITIL approach to managing your tickets. We can make it as simple or as complex as you need, and we can grow with you as your ITIL service desk maturity grows. Another differentiator, if you purchase a KACE SMA, the service desk is automatically included.
Should you not need a solution for patch management or software deployment, you can also purchase our standalone service desk appliance. And I know just about every product attempts to convey how easy they are to use or how easy it is to customize, but I truly believe we have one of the best when it comes to ease of use or ease of customization. And you'll get to witness that directly once we jump into demonstration. And with that, let's do this.
The KACE Service Desk is a web-based application. And what you're viewing right now is the technician view. This is the end user view. We will start with the technician side just so you can see how we can customize the queue and the service desk overall. So as you can see, we have a dashboard. And this dashboard can be customized by each technician.
I have the ability of adding widgets or removing widgets as needed. I can also drill directly into the tickets from here. For instance, if I want to see what ticket was opened today, I can click on the 1. I can view that ticket. I can see who submitted the ticket, and I can see their ticket history.
The status is New, but I can move it into an Open status if I want to take ownership of it and assign it to myself. In the Comment section, this is what you're going to use to communicate back and forth with the end user. I can have predefined responses that I utilize. I could insert Knowledge Base articles if I need to. Or I can simply just type it out. For instance, I can say--
As soon as I hit Submit Comment, the end user would get an email immediately with that comment. And if the end user replies to that email, we will directly append that reply directly to the ticket.
I'm going to go into the configuration just so you can see how we can create additional queues. So under the Queue section, you'll notice I have two different queues. I have an IT Help Desk queue, and I have a Change Request queue. Let's start with the configuration of the IT Help Desk queue. As you can see, I can customize queue fields. This is where I can create categories and categories underneath categories.
Tickets are either opened, stalled, or closed. Those are hard-coded, but you can build as many statuses as you want off of each state. For instance, maybe I'm waiting on the end user to get back to me and I want to put that in a stalled state. You can see we can provide additional values here.
Priorities are tied directly to your SLAs. I have high, medium, low, but if I wanted to create one called critical, I can definitely do that. You can also color code so that you can easily identify a high-priority ticket versus a low-priority ticket. Impact values. Default fields, so what fields do we want to utilize on the form itself!
There is a satisfaction survey. For instance, let's say you do not want to use the survey right away. We do have the ability of hiding it temporarily. And then down the road, if you decide you want to utilize it, you can then enable that feature.
For instance, maybe you do not want to use the field called Impact. I have the ability of hiding that field as well. Or if there's a field that you need that we don't have, you can create custom fields. And you can create as many custom fields as you need. And those custom fields can be user-based; they can be text; it can be a single select dropdown; it could be a multiple select dropdown; it could be a notes field; it could even be a simple checkbox if you needed to.
Next, we have the ability of creating different ticket templates. And what that means is maybe you need different forms for different types of requests that come in. For instance, if someone submits a request for a new laptop, there may be certain information you need on that form that you wouldn't need on a different form. So we can name the template, choose what type of layout we want to utilize. We can enable it. We can make it the default. We can show it in the user portal. We could also limit it to specific people if we wanted to.
But this is the layout. And you'll notice that these are all the fields that we include, including any custom fields you've created. And if you want to utilize that field on the form, you just drag it over to that section. You could also resize it if you need to.
We also have the ability of creating different process templates. So within the process templates themselves, instead of a ticket template, which is just a single ticket, a process template might be multiple steps involved or multiple tickets. For instance, onboarding and offboarding.
I have the ability of then creating a parent-child relationship, where I say, as soon as a new hire gets submitted, these are multiple things that need to be done. And I can have different people associated or assigned to each item if I wanted to. And most ticketing solutions, what they'll do is they'll have child tickets, and all of those child tickets will get created at the same time, which is fine if all of those things can happen at the same time. But for instance, maybe in order for me to do my job, somebody else has to do their job first. That's where that stage will come into play.
So in this example here, only the stage 1 would get created. When that's been closed out, stage 2 would get created. When that's been closed out, stage 3 would get created, so on and so forth.
Another example would be any type of request that comes in that requires approval, for instance a purchase request. In this system, I have the ability of creating a workflow that says when a new purchase request is submitted, I want the persons or the submitter's manager to get an email letting them know that I need their approval. And that submitter's manager can be manually associated with the user, or we can also pull that information directly from Active Directory.
We can also take it a step further. For instance, let's say if it's under $1,000, the submitter's manager can approve it. But if it's over $1,000, maybe the manager has to approve it first and then the VP of finance would have to approve it second.
Another example is that you can have multiple approvers. So for instance, if it's a change request and it's an emergency change request and I have three members of my cab, who are Dave, James, and Kyle, when an emergency change request gets submitted, I want all three of these people to approve it before that change can be submitted.
And then the very last example of a workflow template is any type of maintenance that needs to happen. In my example, I want someone to review the Knowledge Base articles, retire any articles that are no longer applicable, and then maybe add any articles that are now relevant.
And you'll see that I have a recurring ticket schedule. So in my example, this is a custom schedule. It's happening once a quarter. But for instance, you can have it where it's happening every 24 hours, every Friday at 5:00 PM, the last day of the month, the first Tuesday of every month. So it's very flexible as far as how often those tickets are automatically created.
So let's view a ticket. Again, I can see who submitted the ticket. The ticket is opened. I'm assigned to it. And I can see any screenshots related to this particular ticket. If we do convert an email into a ticket, essentially we just parse that email. So the title of the ticket becomes the subject line of the email. The summary is the body of the email. And then, of course, any screenshots or attachments to that email will get pulled as part of the ticket.
You'll notice they have a device attached to it. So in the i in the circle, this gives me information. And as I mentioned, this is where I think we're superior as it relates to asset management. If you're using our case agent on that endpoint, we're getting up-to-date information. This is actually automatically extracted by the agent itself. I can see what model the device is, the chassis type, the IP address, total RAM processor information, OS information, how long it's been since that system was last rebooted, who was the last user that was logged into it.
So this is great summary information, but you'll see also have the ability of selecting View Full Details. And then this takes me to the Inventory section where I can get more granular data. I can see what software is installed on this device. I can expand that. I can also track changes, which can be very helpful from a troubleshooting perspective since it's very helpful to know what changes have been made on that device. So we're seeing if something was newly installed or something was uninstalled.
I also have the ability of taking actions against the device from here. For instance, if I want to try to ping it or if I want to launch RDP-- really, we provide some of these as default values to you, but of course, you can build your own custom as well.
Now, let's take a look from the end user perspective. So when the end user goes to the portal, the very first thing they're asked or they're presented with is searching the Knowledge Base. So I can type in VPN, do a search. It will show me any Knowledge Base articles that actually have that keyword. I can view the article. I can also rate it, let you know if it helped me solve my problem or not.
I can see tickets that I've submitted. I can see the status of those tickets. I can see any tickets that are awaiting my approval. I can view that ticket. I can approve it from here. I can either approve it, reject it, or tell you I need additional information and put some information into that box.
On the right side of the screen, any critical announcements would have the purple background. Any general announcements would be listed underneath. On the left side of the page, any helpful links that you want to include-- now, I only have two, but you can create as many as you need. For instance, if I want to submit a standard change request, if I click on that form-- or that hyperlink, it takes me directly to that form. And then I can submit it.
Need help? If I click here, this will actually take me to a view of what queues I have visibility to. And when you create the queue, you can decide who has access to that and who doesn't. But this person has access to the Change Request queue as well as the IT Help Desk queue. So if I submit a new request, again, from this perspective, I can type in the word "VPN," and it's going to show me-- it's going to do a keyword search against it. And I can click on it from there. And again, it can take me right to that article.
I've only made title required, so they are forced to put in a title. Additional summary information. They can make an attachment. They can also paste a screenshot, which we'll give them instructions on how to paste that screenshot.
Also, they can update a ticket as well. So maybe I submitted this ticket, and I want to provide you additional information. Maybe I want to tell you I resolved it on my own. Please close this out. Again, as soon as I hit Submit Comment, if there was a technician assigned to this ticket, he would get a notification immediately, letting him know that the comment was added.