Setup Incident Service Desk

The Incident service desk, based on ITIL guidelines, is a more advanced service desk. The Incident service desk demonstrates the benefits of automating the processing of support tickets by including sample stage entry procedures, escalation procedures, and goal procedures. This service desk integrates with pre-defined sample user roles, user pools, organization types, procedure variables, message templates, policies, coverage schedules, and holidays. Additional configuration is required to use this service desk.

Note: See Service Desk Priority Calculations for an explanation of how the Incident service desk sets priorities using a sub-procedure.

Prerequisites

You may or may not have the following data already defined in your VSA. If not, you'll have to create them.

• Create a Review Team - Identify, or if necessary create, a small group of users to act as your initial "review team" for the Incident sample service desk. You'll need to specify these names in certain steps below. After you complete the configuration, you can repeat the user-specific steps to add more users to your review team.
• Create Organizations - Identify, or if necessary create, a small set of organizations and agent machines within those organizations. You'll need at least 3 organizations, one for each of the 3 different organization types described below. This is necessary to demonstrate how to associate a ticket with an organization and organization type or with an agent machine. Organizations are maintained using System > Manage.
• Create Contacts - Identify, or if necessary create, at least one department within an organization and at least one staff member within that department. This is necessary to demonstrate how to associate a ticket with the staff member of an organization. Contacts are maintained using System > Manage.

Configuration

1. Create the Desk - Click the Install Desk button for the Incident Management Desk using Service Desk > Desk Templates.
2. Assign Users to User Roles - Assign users requiring access to the Service Desk module to user roles—such as SD User or SD Admin—that use the Service Desk Administrators or Service Desk Technicians role type.
3. Associate the Desk with User Roles - This service desk is automatically associated with the SD User role. If you assign users to a user role that uses the Service Desk Technicians role type, you must associate this desk with that user role using Role Preferences or the Desk Definition > Access > Roles tab.

   This step is not necessary for users assigned to user roles—such as SD Admin—that use the Service Desk Administrators role type.

4. Assign the Desk to Scopes - Assign this desk to the scopes of users who use roles—such as SD User—that use the Service Desk Technicians role type.

   This step is not necessary for users assigned to user roles—such as SD Admin—that use the Service Desk Administrators role type.

5. Assign Organization to Organization Types - Assign customer organizations to one of the following organization types using System > Orgs/Groups/Depts > Manage.
   • Gold_SLA
   • Silver_SLA
   • Bronze_SLA
6. Assign Users to Pools - Assign all review team members to each of the following user pools within the Incident desk. This allows your review team to see each step in the life cycle of a ticket. Once your review team is familiar with the entire life cycle, you can assign different users to different user pools. You assign users to user pools using Service Desk > Desk Definition > Access > Pools. Your review team members can expect to be continually notified by VSA inbox messages about the status of each incident as it progresses through its life cycle.
   • Tier1Support
   • Tier2Support
   • Tier3Support
   • SupportManagement
7. Configure Procedure Variables - Change the value of the Email_ReviewTeam procedure variable from its default generic value to a series of review team email addresses. Procedure variables are maintained using Service Desk > Procedure Variables.

   For example, you could change the value to jsmith@acme.com;fgorham@acme.com;twinters@consultants.com. This procedure variable is referenced by other procedure variables. It sets the To: address of all sendEmail() commands in all procedures run by the Incident sample service desk. Your review team members can expect to be continually notified by email about the status of each incident as it progresses through its life cycle.

   Once your review team is familiar with the entire life cycle of an incident, you can re-assign different values to the following procedure variables:

   • Email_Tier1Support - These email addresses correspond to the same users added to the Tier1Support pool.
   • Email_Tier2Support - These email addresses correspond to the same users added to the Tier2Support pool.
   • Email_Specialists - These email addresses correspond to the same users added to the Tier3Support pool.
   • Email_SupportManagement - These email addresses correspond to the same users added to the SupportManager pool.
   • Email_KaseyaServer - Enter a single "From" email address.
8. Verify Outbound Email is Enabled - Ensure that outbound emails are enabled using System > Outbound Email.
9. Create an Inbound Email Reader - Create an email reader using the Service Desk > Incoming Email and Alarm Settings > Readers tab. This enables tickets to be created when inbound emails are received. Ensure emails received by this reader are converted into tickets for this service desk by linking the email reader to the service desk using the Desk Definition > New or Edit > General > Standard Field Defaults > Email field. You can override this default association using a Ticket Request Mapping procedure.
10. Activate Service Desk - Alarm generated tickets can be configured to create tickets using this desk. Use Service Desk > Incoming Email and Alarm Settings > General tab to specify Incident as the desk to use when tickets are created from alarms. Then use Service Desk > Global Settings > to activate the Service Desk.
11. Modify Message Templates - You may wish to update the message templates used by the Incident using Service Desk > Message Templates. These message templates do not have a CS prefix.