Thank you all so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to attend our webinar! We hope you found it informative. If your company is interested in gaining a deeper understanding of this topic, GWI Software does offer a training course on it. Contact a GWI Software Account Manager for more information or to schedule a course time. (Sales@gwi.com)
Here are the combined Q&A sessions from the two webinars. Many great questions were submitted on both days so we figured everyone would benefit from seeing all of them.
Q. How will existing tech groups transfer from an older version of cSupport to version 7?
A. Existing Support Groups will not be affected by the upgrade. Everything will be the same on the groups that were defined prior to the upgrade and any new permissions or category-based group access setting that are needed will need to be applied by a c.Support Administrator post upgrade.
Q. Does GWI have any SQL training for the custom report function?
A. We are going to be announcing some new training course offerings very soon and one of the new courses will cover SQL Reporting.
Q. Will there be any webinars to discuss problem or change incident management?
A. There will most likely be webinars to overview Problem and Change Management, but none are scheduled at this time. A training course that provides detailed information regarding these features will also be available very soon.
Q. Can the templates be categorized to make it easy for the end user to find?
A. End User Desktop Sections and Sub-Menu Links can be used to organize templates that are available to end users. Sections and sub-menus links are defined within the end user desktop configuration pages.
Q. Do customers have access to reports?
A. Customer do not have access to reports. It would be possible to give a customer access to reporting, but the permissions to do so would be defined via Microsoft SQL Reporting Services rather than in c.Support. This is not a documented feature of c.Support so the links to the reports would need to be defined as custom URLs from your end user desktop.
Q. How do you manage incident templates created on the EUD desktop?
A. Tickets created from templates via your end user desktop would be managed like all other tickets. The tickets created are just like the tickets your staff create, but they would be categorized, prioritized, and routed based on the settings that are defined within the template.
Q. Is it possible to have a customer in more than one customer group?
A. Customers can be in one or many groups. They will see the categories, knowledge base entries, templates, etc. associated with all of their groups.
Q. Hi What is the max number or categories in v7.0?
A. You can have a maximum of five category levels within a category branch and there is no limit other than any applicable SQL limitations in regard to how many category selections you have at each level.
Q. Is there documentation in the pdf files within the software regarding this particular webinar that we just went through today can you show me your configuration page one more time. it seems as if you have more links within your configuration page.
A. Although there isn't a PDF that covers this specific topic as we've covered it in the webinar, the standard c.Support Administrator's Guide provides information about all of the features we discussed. A training course covering this topic is also available. Contact your Account Manager or Sales@gwi.com for more information or to schedule the course.
Q. What about restricting access to records that are in the archive database?
A. The permission that controls access to the archive views is currently an all or nothing. The groups and/or techs that have the archive viewers permission will be able to see all of the records in the archive database.
Q. Is there any plans for support of peer-to-peer replication of database?
A. This is something we've discussed as a possible future enhancement, but there is no active development of this feature at this time.
Q. How does this affect Views people will see. Using the All Incident views is nice, but on the version I am still running, when you change the permissions the All Incident views go away.
A. Permissions affect views the same way that they did in earlier versions so if you do limit a group of support reps to seeing only their own groups incidents they will not be able to use the all incident ticket views.
Q. Can you specify custom fields that are submitted in a ticket to only be viewed by certain group.
A. Custom fields would be available to all support reps that have read access to the incident ticket. We will be submitting a feature request to our development team for adding a group access option to the custom field definition based on this question as I'm sure other customers would like to see this enhancement as well.
Q. Speaking of reporting, will I be able to view reports of tickets that have been worked on by specific help desk users in the new version?
A. Reports are available that will allow tickets to be viewed by the support reps that worked on them. If you are wanting to filter a report so it only included support reps that are in your group or that you select prior to the report running you'd need to be on version 6 or higher so you could use the ad hoc report option to define a custom report.
Q. Can c.Support use exsisting active directory groups to define what group they belong to in c.Support.
A. c.Support does not currently sync active directory user groups and membership information, but this is something our development team is currently considering as an future enhancement.
Q. If you have a default support rep assigned for a template and if the member is out and set to not available can it go to another rep like their 1st notify rep?
A. If a template has a default support rep the tickets created using the template will be assigned to that rep even if they are marked out. In version 7 you could use a load balanced routing method like skills-based load-balanced routing to accomplish what it sounds like you are trying to accomplish.
Q. Does the Dashboard data change based on Support Rep position/permissions, or does cover all incidents?
A. The options that can be included on the home tab of the support rep desktop change based on permissions, but if a support has the reporting permission they will be able to see all records through reporting.
Q. Can the permissions be done at the customer level? I.E. a customer at busines A opening a ticket via EUD only sees their businesses categories Would this user membership work if you don't require EUD login authentication?
A. It would be possible to create the filtering by customer that you've described, but the end user would need to authenticate before they'd see the categories and all other categorized records.
Q. has licensing changed at all? can licenses be restricted to a group, ie, 5 licenses for group A, 5 for group B
A. Licensing has not changed so the available support rep licenses are allocated from a single pool on a first come first serve basis.
Q. For work templates, are there any plans for custom field information to be passed to the other related tickets. Currently, when a work template is created that triggers other tickets, the custom field information does not pass forward.
A. The custom fields that are populated into the parent ticket of a new incident or change hierarchy will be displayed from child tickets as well in version 7, but only if the support rep creates the records. This feature will also apply to tickets created via your end user desktops in the next version.
Q. adding groups to categories allows just that group or restricts that group thank you
A. The groups that are allowed to use the category are added to the group access tab on the category entry. Groups not listed will be restricted from seeing the category and all related documents. Categories that don't have any groups within their group access tab will be available to all users.
Q. Are SLAs still based on Groups/Categories? If so, then are they affected based on permission levels? So a certain group couldn't make an Emergency Ticket versus a High priority, or Low Priority?
A. SLAs for different groups can be defined, but they would actually be associated with the categories. The ability to set and change priorities is a separate permission and is all or nothing, so if a technician has the permission to edit priorities they can choose any priority for their tickets.
Q. Are there plans for any "basics" webinars?
A. I don't believe so as the webinars are intended to provide high level overviews of specific topics/features. We happily offer one-on-one demonstrations for more complete overviews of the entire solution and training courses that would deliver more exhaustive instruction on basic features are also available.
Q. We have 2 instances right now, Customer Service and IT Helpdesk. Is there an easy way to import and combine the 2 instances?
A. Custom SQL scripts would need to be written to combine two instances of c.Support.
Q. Is there a way to allow people from one group (A) to assign tickets to another group (B)without giving people in Group A access to everything in Group B?
A. There are two routing permissions available. One routing permission restricts the support rep to routing only within their own group and the other routing permissions allows a support rep to route to any available support rep regardless of their group membership. A rep who has the permission to route to any other support rep will still be limited to based on their other read permissions.
Q. Is it possible for a manager to set the Home tab for groups and not allow them to modify the settings/panes? Right now in c.Support, if a customer responds to a closed ticket it just adds that email to the closed ticket. Are their any plans in the future to re-open a closed ticket, and possibly change the status, and send an alert to the assignee?
A. Defining default home tab options for a group of users and limited access to the home tab configuration are not currently available features. This has been submitted as a feature request.
Q. Allowing Reps to post headlines - currently only admin's have the ability
A. This has been submitted as an enhancement request.
Thanks again to everyone that attended the webinar.
Eric & Darren