nService helps you provide services to your customers or your co-workers. It is really about two things: knowledge management and service request management. Knowledge management allows technicians to publish knowledge so that users can try to look for information themselves before submitting a service request. It also helps technicians to share knowledge with each other and better resolve service requests. Service request management keeps track of service requests, associates them with services, products, assets, users, priorities, statuses, etc., routes them to the right technicians and sends out notifications.
Services |
Services are the services you offer to other users. For
example, on a customer service website, you can offer Accounting Services to
answer billing questions, Technical Support Services to help users with their
technical questions. You can organize your service offerings in a multi-level
tree structure. For example, under the Technical Support Services, you can
offer Microsoft Office Support Service and Microsoft SQL Server Support
Service. |
Service Requests |
Service requests are requests for the services you
provide. A service request can be a billing question, a request for product
information or a request for technical support. A user submits a request for
service. A technician receives the request. She can reassign it, responds to
it or close it. The submitter can also submit more information. |
Service Request Routing and Notification Rules |
New service requests can be routed to the right technician
according the routing rules. You can define routing rules based on service type,
service zone, product and priority. For example, you can specify that all
billing questions go to the accountant group, all technical questions go to
the technical support staff. |
Tasks and Calendar |
You can create tasks for service requests. For example,
you can create a task to go to the user’s site to setup her computer at
3:00pm. It shows up in the calendar of your group. Supervisors can also use
the calendar to schedule group members for site visits. |
Products |
Products are the products your users use. Products are
organized in to the product tree. Products are linked to organizations.
Assets are associated with products. |
Knowledge Base |
Knowledge base is the place where you store all your
knowledge about your products and services. It also has a tree structure. The
security is also based on the User Group, Technician Group and Administrator
Group. You can designate certain area to be accessible by everyone. Most
questions and problems are repeated ones. Having a knowledge base with good
content will dramatically reduce the number of service requests you will
receive. |
Organizations, Sites and Organizational Units |
Organizations represent companies, non-profit
organizations, government agencies, etc. An organization may have multiple
sites. Sites are used to record the physical locations of users or assets.
Users and assets belong to different organizations. Organizational Units are
a way to organize users and assets. You can think of it as business units and
departments in a company. Users and assets belong to different organizational
units. The organizational unit tree is modeled after Active Directory. If you
use the LDAP/Active Directory integration feature of nService, the
organizational unit tree will be populated with the data from LDAP. |
Users and Technicians |
Users include the service staff, other employees in your organization and your customers. When a user is in a service technician group or a service administrator group, she is considered a technician. There are two pre-created users: ns3.anonymous and ns3.admin. ns3.admin is in the System Administrator group. Note that there may be who don’t belong to any organizational unit. In that case, use the All Users & Assets page to search for it. Users can be created from five places: the organizational
unit page, the organization detail page, the All Users & Assets page, the
Sign Up page and the Email Importer. Users created from an organizational
unit are assumed to be employees of the website owner. Users created from the
detail page of an organization are assumed to be the employees of that
organization. When a user is created from the All Users & Assets page or
the Sign Up page, if the organization name field is not blank, an
organization is created along with the user. The Email Imports creates an
account when it imports an email from an person unknown to nService. |
Groups |
Groups are groups of users. Users can have multiple group
memberships. Groups are used for authorization, i.e. who can do what.
Services, products, knowledge folders, organizational units all use groups
for access control. There are four pre-created groups: Everyone, Service
Technician, Service Administrator, System Administrator. The Everyone group
is the default group. Everyone who has been authenticated by the log on page
automatically has the membership of the default group. This default group
membership doesn’t show up on the user’s group membership list because it is
implied. |
Assets |
Assets are properties of your organizations or your customer’s.
They can be computers, printers, cars, houses, etc. Service requests can be
associated with assets. You can keep track of the history of service requests
on the assets. |
Email Integration |
You can set up nService to automatically send out notification email and import service requests submitted by email. Go to Admin, Email page to set it up. |
Active Directory and Windows Integration |
You can set up nService to authenticate users in three modes: nService, nService+LDAP/Active Directory and Windows integrated authentication. |
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