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Application Template: Help Desk

Description of Template

The Help Desk application template for Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 helps teams manage the process of service requests from inception through to resolution. The template tracks much of the process, with task oriented pages to display relevant information for each service request and an integrated knowledge base system. Dashboards help management track customer satisfaction with metrics such as issues resolution time, survey results, customer specific dashboards and customer service representative performance.

End users self-initiate a request by visiting the Help Desk site and completing a Service Request. They can periodically check back to see the status of any outstanding service requests and can also choose to escalate their service request to a higher priority, if required.

Sample Activities Performed in this Application Template

The following examples show the various ways Microsoft anticipates this template will be utilized in a typical organization. If you wish to add additional features, please ask your IT provider to research Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Jeff Low is a Customer Service Representative in Lucerne Publishing’s IT department. He starts each day logging in to the company’s Help Desk site where he can view a list of open issues entered by end users at his company. Today, he notices that there is an open request to help a user set up the company’s remote access software in preparation for next week’s business trip. Jeff takes ownership of the request and searches through the Knowledge Base to find the article his colleague wrote last year on how to use remote access. He sends the article to the user and changes the status of the open issue to ‘resolved’.

Meanwhile, Jim Daly, Jeff’s manager, has been receiving feedback that his department is slow to resolve outstanding service requests. He wonders if this is true and knows that his Help Desk site tracks metrics on the performance of his team. Jim logs onto the Help Desk site and reviews the overall service request status page. He notes the average resolution time and that 30% of the department’s service requests are still in the Initiated status. The end users might have a point on the delayed response time and Jim now has something to discuss with his team.

About Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is technology in Windows Server® that offers an integrated portfolio of collaboration and communication services designed to connect people, information, processes and systems both within and beyond the organizational firewall. Now available at no additional charge, the technology provides a platform for developing Web-based business applications. Application Templates provide out-of-the-box scenarios to address the needs of specific business processes.

More Information

For more information on the technologies described in this article, please visit:

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0:

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services:

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepointapps

The example companies, organizations, products, domain names, e-mail addresses, logos, people, places, and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, email address, logo, person, places, or events is intended or should be inferred.

This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.