What’s New in PHD 5.0 |
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What’s New in PHD 5.0 |
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What’s New in Polar Help Desk 5.0We have built Polar Help Desk 5 with focus on beautiful RESTful design, integration with email accounts and other systems, and customization of everything we found customizable including roles and permissions, notifications, languages and reports. |
Emails are automatically downloaded to the help desk and replies are sent when an incident is saved. You can set different email accounts for different teams. Each account can have its own settings and email automation mode.
Choose between different modes of email automation for each email account: you can leave emails in the email list or convert them automatically to incidents; additionally, you can choose to automatically create a contact if the email address is not in the help desk database.
Choose different notification rules for different teams, send emails automatically to multiple email addresses, choose who gets notified on each status change, priority change, conversation change and newly opened incidents.
Email templates can be customized using simple scripting language. You can fine-tune email templates for different teams and different events.
Each incident contains complete conversation between the contact who reported it and the assigned user. Incident status changes from waiting to new as soon as the contact replies. Incidents can be sorted and filtered by status, priority, a contact who reported an incident, a user assigned to an incident, a team and an account — any data an incident contains. You can use advanced filters and save your own filters.
API enables you to integrate any application with the help desk, including web applications. It allows you to connect to the help desk using HTTP protocols and perform any task you could perform via user interface.
Four HTTP Methods (POST, GET, PUT and DELETE) provide simplicity of use and design, and abundance is provided with different URI resources. Resource Oriented Architecture provides statelessness, cacheability, uniform interface between client and server and layered systems.
URIs are of two types: a group URI (eg. /incidents is a list of all incidents) and an individual URI (eg. /incident/3 is one individual incident). Each method carries a specific action: POST creates a new resource, GET gets a resource for viewing, PUT modifies a resource and DELETE deletes it. It is all you need to interact with the help desk via user interface or via some other system you have.
Programmable web is user friendly as well as machine friendly. Help desk users can jump to different pages just by intuitively changing URI, bookmark a page to get the same resource every time the open it, modify query parameters — URIs have a simple syntax on their own.
URI Resources and HTTP Methods are used in roles customization: you can give permissions to all members of a particular team or account to create, view, save and delete resources. For example, you can give members of the junior support team permission to GET /incident/{ID} but not to PUT /incident/{ID} — they will be able to see each incident but not to edit it and save it.
Each role can be completely customized — for each method and each resource permissions can be changed. You can create your custom roles and build any user, contact, team and account type in that way.
Permissions are granted to users and contacts by a membership in a particular team or account according to the role that team or account is in. Each user can be in multiple teams and each contact in multiple accounts. For example, user can be a member of a particular support team to view and solve incidents assigned to that team, and later, when he gets promoted to a manager, you just add him to the managers team to grant him additional permissions.
Manage your support service by monitoring and analyzing support processes. Different types of reports are included: contacts by registered incidents, registered incidents over time, user activity, incidents by status, completed incidents over time, etc. You can edit any of these reports if needed easily.
You can easily build new reports using client and server side JavaScript. It can be done directly through help desk user interface. In that way, you can fine-tune and adapt help desk reporting to your exact needs and respond fast to change.
There are no browser requirements — the help desk is supported by all of the latest popular web browser. Users and contacts can use any web browser they like.
Every label visible in user interface can be edited easily. You just go to Administration > Languages, click on a particular language, edit that label and click Save. In that way, you can fine-tune the language you use simply via help desk user interface.
You can easily build any language you need by editing the labels via user interface. For example, give a permission to person who translates English to Spanish to view and edit URI /language/Spanish. This person will not be able to see incidents or other data, he/she will just translate every label and click save. You can also import and export languages in different file types.
Global default language is set in the help desk settings. Each team and account can choose other language for their members if needed, and additionally, each person can choose preferred language. If preferred language is not set, language of the team or account applies, if that is not set either, the default language applies.
