Copyright © 2004-2006 – ESUP-Portail ESUP-Portail Helpdesk: user support at establishment-level...

ESUP-Portail Helpdesk:user support at establishment-level

Pascal AubryIFSIC / Université de Rennes 1

Alexandre BoisseauUniversité de Brest

http://esup-helpdesk.sourceforge.net

A survey

• French Working group

• Usage of helpdesks in our community

• December 2004, 120 responses

Do you use a helpdesk?

Are you satisfied by using a helpdesk?

Would you recommend using a helpdesk?

• OTRS, Request Tracker, …

Absolutely - 80%

No - 0%Maybe - 20%

The main benefits of helpdesks

Organization of the support team

Quality of the support

Knowledge database

Making the work visible to the users

Making the work visible to the hierarchy

Making the work visible within the team

1 (the mostimportant)

6 (the leastimportant)

1 (le plusimportant)

5 (le moinsimportant)

HUMANPROBLEMS

TECHNICALPROBLEMS

The main issues with helpdesks

Installation problems

User reticence

Support team reticence

Unadapted software

Heavy usage

The main issues with helpdesks

• Ouch! Problems are not only technical…

• Is Esup-helpdesk another helpdesk?– Yes, but not only

Centralization and user-support

• Everywhere we share– Centralized applications– Shared equipments– Shared services

• Build the software round and close to the IS

• …except for user support– esup-helpdesk remedies this lack

Cutting the establishment into departments

• Discrete enough– to respect the natural independence of departments

• Communicative enough– to allow tickets to pass from one department to another one

• Flexible enough– to take into account any existing support structures

Mask the complexity from users

• Universities are complex structures

• This complexity must be masked to users

• Users are shown only the departments they have to see depending on their profile and their localization

Simplified example (University of Rennes 1)

MATH CHEM PHYS COMP

Central Support Team

MEDICINE PHARMA ODONTO

ECONOMY

CommonSciences

department

CommonHealth

department

CommonLaw/Economy

department

HEALTH CAMPUS

SCIENCES CAMPUS

Virtual departments

• Tickets can be automatically moved to another department

• Give the impression of support proximity

• Allow internal reorganizations without changing the external presentation of the helpdesk

Simplified example (University of Rennes 1)

MATH PHYS COMP

ECONOMY

CommonSciences

department

CommonHealth

department

CommonLaw/Economy

department

HEALTH CAMPUS

SCIENCES CAMPUS

CHEMCHEMMATH PHYS PHILO

Sciences support team

Health support team Law/economysupport

ECONOMY

The external view of the helpdesk

MATH CHEM PHYS COMP

ECONOMY

CommonSciences

department

CommonHealth

department

CommonLaw/Economy

department

HEALTH CAMPUS

SCIENCES CAMPUS

The internal view of the helpdesk

CommonSciences

department

CommonHealth

department

CommonLaw/Economy

department

SCIENCES CAMPUS

Sciences support team

Health support team Law/economysupport

HEALTH CAMPUS

Cutting departments into categories

• Large support structures (universities)– Thousands of users– Dozens of managers in departments– Thousands of tickets

• A flat structure is not sufficient

• Any sub-division is allowed– By thema (email, courses, development, …)– By building, by operating system, …

Virtual categories

Department A

Department B

Unix workstations

Windows workstations

administrative problems

Self-service workstations

Specialized workstations

Virtual categories

Department A

Department B

AdmissionsAdministration

and Bursar's Office

Unix workstations

Central support team

ilVirtual categories

Department A

Department B

and Bursar's Office

Unix workstations

Central support team

ilVirtual categories

Department A

Department B

and Bursar's Office

Unix workstations

Implementing such a customized vision

• Define departments and categories– Stored in the database– Managed with the web interface

• Visibility rules– Centralized in an XML configuration file

• Rules can be tested before use

Rules example <define-condition name="staff">

Ok, but how long will it take?

• Quite a while, but not always where it was expected

Technical implementation

CommunicationAcceptation of the solution

ReflectionOrganization of the support

Setting up a helpdesk is a real project

Formalizing the competences

• Map categories to competences• Define the members of the categories

– i.e. determine who will follow up on tickets corresponding to certain competences

• A real chance to detect weaknesses as well as redundancies in a support team

The main goal: user satisfaction

• Quick, low-problem ticket input– offer pre-completed tickets– automatically assign tickets to managers– install a high-quality knowledge database

• Good priority management• Real-time follow-up of tickets• Clear identification of a unique speaker for each ticket• A universal and ergonomic interface• The possibility of confidential exchanges

The input of tickets

• Goal: have all the elements needed to resolve problems as soon as tickets are created

• Steps:– Choose a department– Choose a category– Choose a pre-completed ticket

• Example : – Mathematics → Printing → no paper

The automatic assignment of tickets to managers

• Often the thing that takes the most time is deciding who takes charge of a new ticket– Assign the ticket at creation

• Predefined algorithms respond to the most common needs– assignment to the first available manager, cyclical

assignment, random assignment, …

• Custom classes can be added– (simple) Java development– E.g. link to an external calendar

Priority management

• Without a helpdesk, by email– Several strategies: FIFO, FILO, SISO, …SINO– Essentially depending on the manager’s mood

• The support service must be completely separated from the email inbox

Ticket monitoring for managers

• Often quickly filtered to /dev/null (SPAM)• Highly configurable, by the users themselves

Ticket monitoring for users

• Users choose which tickets they automatically monitor

• Ticket can be monitored individually

A unique and identified speaker

• No multiple and conflicting responses– Waste of time– Deplorable image of the support team

• Faceless but not anonymous– Every action is nominative and logged

A user interface for everyone

• A simple and intuitive interface– Used by both technical and non technical people– http://helpdesk-demo.esup-portail.org

Visibility / Confidentiality

• Interest of visibility– Share solutions (knowledge database)– Prevent from several tickets for a single poblem

• Drawbacks of visibility, need of confidentiality– Exchange sensible information– A good pretext not to use a helpdesk ;-)

• Visibility and confidentiality are reconciled– Several visibility levels– High granularity (service, ticket, action)

The knowledge database

• The essential contribution of the helpdesk– Users can find the solution of their problems without creating

a ticket

• FAQs can be added to tickets– More structured information

• Full-text Lucene indexation (both tickets and FAQs)

Making the work visible

• To users– Exposing the work is appreciated– generally results in an overall improvement of the

relationship between users and the support team

• Within support teams– Share competences– Improve communication

• To the hierarchy– Should I really explain?

Integration into the IS

• Single Sign-On– CAS (Central Authentication Service)

• uPortal by JASIG– Use of uPortal groups

• LDAP– search interface– Attributes retrieval

Supporting both local and outside users

• All the support in one tool

• Authenticate outside users with email/password– The password is sent on demand by email

• Note: some use the email authentication only

A tool to support users or to supervise managers?

• Statistics

• Often the main motivation• Often the main reject reason

• The risks are really minor compared to the benefits

esup-helpdesk

• One component of the ESUP-Portail software

• Open source (LGPL)

• UML, 100% Java

• Collaborative development

History of the project

Ifsic-helpdesk is running at IFSIC (University of Rennes 1)

The very first textual specifications of esup-helpdesk

esup-helpdesk is running at University of Rennes 1

UML specifications and coding

Presentation at JRES’2005

esup-helpdesk is distributed by consortium ESUP-Portail

Demonstration site is online

Consortium ESUP-Portail is formed

Presentation at EUNIS’2006

Open standards only

• XML rendering by Xalan/Xerces• Full-text indexation by Lucene• Web Services by Axis

• Data persistence by Hibernate– Runs on MySql, Postgres and Oracle– Optimization of database access

Architecture

• Complex…

Tomcat

uPortalesup-helpdesk

web browser

databaseJREJRE JRE

servlet

XMLHibernate/JDBC

The quick start package

• Fully operationnal environment• Stand-alone application

esup-helpdesk-quick-start

web browser

databaseJRE

Hibernate/JDBC

Déployment (May 2006)

In use Implementation planned Testing

Perspectives

• New features– FAQs– Statistiques

– JSR168 (portlet)• Spring/JSF

• Internationalization

1.4.0 – first release distributed

very first textual specifications

1.7.9 – ticket templates, LDAP search

1.4.4 – internationalization

UML specifications and coding

1.5.0 – confidentiality1.5.3 – esup-helpdesk-quick-start1.6.0 – virtual categories1.7.0 – Lucene indexation1.7.6 – email feeding1.7.7 – web services

1.8.0 – deep linking

1.9 – FAQs

1.10 – statistics

2.0 – Hibernate 3

3.0 – JSR168

You are here

Long is the road (to the helpdesk)

• Most reticences come from support teams– You can not on the one side denounce the burden of user

support and on the other refuse a helpdesk– This behaviour is however widespread

• introducing a helpdesk application becomes much easier when it is encouraged by institutional policy

• Helpdesks can no longer be ignored– Better choose it today…

Try it!

• http://esup-helpdesk.sourceforge.net

Copyright © 2004-2006 – ESUP-Portail ESUP-Portail Helpdesk: user support at establishment-level...

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