Outlook Help Desk Customizations
Outlook Help Desk is designed to meet the needs of many companies "out of the box", but we also have worked with many of our customers to modify Outlook Help Desk to better fit their needs. These changes make the Help Desk system more attractive, useful and familiar to the users and staff.
Outlook Help Desk offers some built-in customization features. For other changes, we can work with your company to get them implemented.
Customizations available within the program
- Background Colors
Outlook Help Desk comes with a Ticket Colors utility that allows you to change the ticket colors on the fly. You can set different foreground and background colors and every ticket, both existing ones and new ones, will have the new color pattern.
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- Title Changes
The default title of the tickets is "Help Desk Ticket", but this can be changed with the Ticket Color utility included with the program.
- List Manager
Outlook Help Desk includes List Manager to give you control over the contents of all drop-down lists on the Help Desk tickets.
Customizations that can be added
Customization of Outlook Help Desk could be simply adding a logo, or it could be more extensive, such as adding, renaming or deleting fields and boxes. It could involve changes to the layout, such as simplifying or rearranging the forms or changing fonts. Other changes could be to the functionality of the program, such as connecting to a database, making fields required, setting notifications based on category or other criteria, sending auto responses and other similar features.
An additional customization is to translate the end user interface into another language. The program comes fully translated into English and German and we have translated the user interface into 8 other languages. We can translate this interface into more languages, if needed.
If you want customizations done to the program, please contact us and we can discuss what is involved. Minor changes, such as adding a logo or modifying one or two fields, are a flat fee of US $100. For more extensive changes, contact us for pricing. The turn around time for these changes is usually only one to two weeks.
- Changing Fields and Layout
We can change the titles and labels on the ticket forms and add or delete boxes, lists, etc. We can rearrange the layout of the fields on the ticket, or remove some boxes to simplify the form. Alternatively, we can add boxes to hold more user or contact information, as well as more data about the issue.
- Adding a Logo
We can add your logo to the ticket pages. The logo must be a gif, jpg, or bmp file, and it should be below 50 KB. We usually put it in the upper left corner, but it can go other places if desired.
- Translating user interface into another language
The end user interface -- the part the users see when filling out a new ticket -- can be translated into your language. We already have this in English and German as well as 8 other languages: Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Japanese, and Inuit.
- Functionality changes
As mentioned above, sometimes additional features will make the program more useful. This could include making fields required, setting notifications based on category, and sending auto responses. Many other options that take advantage of Exchange, Outlook and Office features are possible. Contact us with some proposed changes and we can offer our advice and experience as to what is and is not feasible and what the cost would be.
- Connection with a Contact database
In the Service Provider edition, Outlook Help Desk can be set to connect with an Exchange public contacts folder. However, in some cases, the customer data is in a separate database. We can connect with this database, as long as it is ODBC-compliant and we can access the tables and field names. We can pull in any information you want from the database into the ticket.
- Connection with an Asset tracking or audit database
Outlook Help Desk can integrate with any ODBC-compliant Asset tracking database or LAN audit software database. When you are working on a ticket, this will allow you to bring up information about the computer or asset involved. We can work with you to integrate Outlook Help Desk with the system you already use. Our tickets can connect with your audit database, providing information that is invaluable in solving problems quickly.
Contact us by email or phone about any of these changes and pricing.
