Copyright © 2004-2006 – ESUP-Portail ESUP-Portail Helpdesk: user support at establishment-level...
-
date post
22-Dec-2015 -
Category
Documents
-
view
215 -
download
0
Transcript of Copyright © 2004-2006 – ESUP-Portail ESUP-Portail Helpdesk: user support at establishment-level...
Copyright © 2004-2006 – ESUP-Portail
ESUP-Portail Helpdesk:user support at establishment-level
Pascal AubryIFSIC / Université de Rennes 1
Alexandre BoisseauUniversité de Brest
http://esup-helpdesk.sourceforge.net
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
A survey
• French Working group
• Usage of helpdesks in our community
• December 2004, 120 responses
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Do you use a helpdesk?
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Are you satisfied by using a helpdesk?
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Would you recommend using a helpdesk?
• OTRS, Request Tracker, …
Absolutely - 80%
No - 0%Maybe - 20%
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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)
2
3
4
5
6 (the leastimportant)
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
1 (le plusimportant)
2
3
4
5 (le moinsimportant)
HUMANPROBLEMS
TECHNICALPROBLEMS
The main issues with helpdesks
Installation problems
User reticence
Support team reticence
Unadapted software
Heavy usage
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
The main issues with helpdesks
• Ouch! Problems are not only technical…
• Is Esup-helpdesk another helpdesk?– Yes, but not only
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Simplified example (University of Rennes 1)
MATH CHEM PHYS COMP
Central Support Team
PHILO
MEDICINE PHARMA ODONTO
ECONOMY
LAW
CommonSciences
department
CommonHealth
department
CommonLaw/Economy
department
HEALTH CAMPUS
OU
TS
IDE
US
ER
S
SCIENCES CAMPUS
LA
W/E
CO
NO
MY
CA
MP
US
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Simplified example (University of Rennes 1)
MATH PHYS COMP
Central Support Team
PHILO
MEDICINE PHARMA ODONTO
ECONOMY
LAW
CommonSciences
department
CommonHealth
department
CommonLaw/Economy
department
HEALTH CAMPUS
OU
TS
IDE
US
ER
S
SCIENCES CAMPUS
LA
W/E
CO
NO
MY
CA
MP
US
CHEMCHEMMATH PHYS PHILO
Sciences support team
MEDICINE PHARMA ODONTO
Health support team Law/economysupport
team
ECONOMY
LAW
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
The external view of the helpdesk
MATH CHEM PHYS COMP
Central Support Team
PHILO
MEDICINE PHARMA ODONTO
ECONOMY
LAW
CommonSciences
department
CommonHealth
department
CommonLaw/Economy
department
HEALTH CAMPUS
OU
TS
IDE
US
ER
S
SCIENCES CAMPUS
LA
W/E
CO
NO
MY
CA
MP
US
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
The internal view of the helpdesk
COMP
Central Support Team
CommonSciences
department
CommonHealth
department
CommonLaw/Economy
department
OU
TS
IDE
US
ER
S
SCIENCES CAMPUS
LA
W/E
CO
NO
MY
CA
MP
US
Sciences support team
Health support team Law/economysupport
team
HEALTH CAMPUS
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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, …
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Virtual categories
Department A
Department B
web
Unix workstations
Windows workstations
administrative problems
administrative problems
Self-service workstations
Specialized workstations
web
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Virtual categories
Department A
Department B
web
AdmissionsAdministration
and Bursar's Office
Unix workstations
Windows workstations
administrative problems
administrative problems
Self-service workstations
Specialized workstations
web
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Central support team
ema
ilVirtual categories
Department A
Department B
web
AdmissionsAdministration
and Bursar's Office
Unix workstations
Windows workstations
administrative problems
administrative problems
Self-service workstations
Specialized workstations
web
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Central support team
web
ema
ilVirtual categories
Department A
Department B
web
AdmissionsAdministration
and Bursar's Office
Unix workstations
Windows workstations
administrative problems
administrative problems
Self-service workstations
Specialized workstations
web
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Rules example <define-condition name="staff">
<or> <attribute-eq name="employeeType" value="teacher"/> <attribute-eq name="employeeType" value="admin"/> </or></define-condition>
<rule> <condition> <or> <named-condition name="staff"/> <fqdn-ends-with pattern=".presidence.univ.fr"/> </or> </condition> <actions> <add-by-filter filter="STAFF"/> <add-by-label label="CRI"/> <stop/> </actions></rule>
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Ok, but how long will it take?
• Quite a while, but not always where it was expected
t
Technical implementation
CommunicationAcceptation of the solution
ReflectionOrganization of the support
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Setting up a helpdesk is a real project
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Ticket monitoring for managers
• Often quickly filtered to /dev/null (SPAM)• Highly configurable, by the users themselves
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Ticket monitoring for users
• Users choose which tickets they automatically monitor
• Ticket can be monitored individually
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
A user interface for everyone
• A simple and intuitive interface– Used by both technical and non technical people– http://helpdesk-demo.esup-portail.org
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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)
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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)
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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?
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Integration into the IS
• Single Sign-On– CAS (Central Authentication Service)
• uPortal by JASIG– Use of uPortal groups
• LDAP– search interface– Attributes retrieval
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
esup-helpdesk
• One component of the ESUP-Portail software
• Open source (LGPL)
• UML, 100% Java
• Collaborative development
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
History of the project
esu
p-h
elp
des
kif
sic-
hel
pd
esk
2001
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
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
Presentation at EUNIS’2006
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Architecture
• Complex…
JVM
Tomcat
uPortalesup-helpdesk
web browser
databaseJREJRE JRE
servlet
HTTP
XMLHibernate/JDBC
HTML
HTML
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
The quick start package
• Fully operationnal environment• Stand-alone application
JVM
esup-helpdesk-quick-start
web browser
databaseJRE
HTTP
Hibernate/JDBC
HTML
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Déployment (May 2006)
In use Implementation planned Testing
In use Implementation planned Testing
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Perspectives
• New features– FAQs– Statistiques
– JSR168 (portlet)• Spring/JSF
• Internationalization
2004
2005
2006
2007
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
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
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…
Copyright © 2005-2006 – ESUP-Portail
Try it!
• http://esup-helpdesk.sourceforge.net