After installing PerlDesk you need to follow a few steps to get your help desk up and running and ready to handle customer inquiries. This post will guide you through the steps required to get PerlDesk ready to run.

This post is intended as a quick start guide and does not cover the extensive features related to the below steps.

Step 1 - Create Departments
You must create departments in PerlDesk, a department could be ‘Support’, or ‘Billing’ and represents where your tickets will be assigned and the options your end-users have to categorize their submissions.

Create department(s) by logging into your Administration and going to:

Settings > Departments.

Step 2 - Create a Staff Login
It is staff users who respond to and manage incoming tickets, please create a staff account in the Administration by going to:

Staff > Add Staff

After creating a staff user, they can login to the http://<yoururl>/staff.cgi file. Staff users must login to this unique access point. Your staff users can have access to particular departments (created in Step 1) or given global access, meaning that login account will have access to all tickets in the system.

Step 3 - Setup Incoming Email
If you would like your hosted PerlDesk installation to handle incoming email you can do this by allowing it to access a POP3 account, similar to a normal desktop mail client. Simply follow these steps:

In the Administration go to:

Settings > Incoming Email > Email Piping

Enter the email address you would like PerlDesk to manage and map that email address to a department, meaning any emails received will be routed initially to the department you specify. This allows you to setup several email addresses such as support@domain and billing@domain and map them to relevant departments.

Now you must configure your POP3 account details by going to:

Admin > Incoming Email > POP Retrieval

Simply create a new POP server by entering the required credentials. That’s it! PerlDesk will now check your POP account(s) every 10 minutes to retrieve emails.

Step 4 - Set your Logo

PerlDesk can be easily customized to carry your branding on the PerlDesk front-end. To set the logo you simply need to specify the Logo URL in the Admin> Settings section. Specifying this will immediately update the logo displayed on pdesk.cgi for your users.

You can further customize the PerlDesk front-end by editing the  templates in the /include/tpl/v4 folder. Please see the related blog post ‘Customizing the PerlDesk design’ for more information.

If you have any questions please contact us for assistance.

One of the greatest benefits a company will experience after deploying PerlDesk is in regards to email handling. Email handling in PerlDesk is sophisticated, yet easy to use because the workflow is logical. Each incoming email is picked up by PerlDesk, logged as a ticket and confirmation can be sent to the customer with a tracking number. Your customers have the convenience of using a normal email client to contact your staff, and your staff can take advantage of using a fully featured help desk system.

PerlDesk Email Handling Features Improve Efficiency

One of the indisputable advantages of PerlDesk is that its email handling features improve the efficiency of your team. Some of the features that will have a most notable influence on the speed and quality your Customer Service team will provide are the following:

• Multiple email accounts and addresses. With PerlDesk you can have as many addresses and accounts you need. You can have support@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com, billing@yourdomain.com. No more need to have only one address that captures all your emails.
• Mapping of emails to specific departments. In addition to having many email addresses, you can set precise rules for email piping – i.e. which email address goes to which department. This way emails are sorted to the appropriate department right away.
• Recognize high priority emails. PerlDesk can recognize and appropriately mark emails received as high priority.
• Tracking Numbers. Each incoming email is assigned a tracking number which can be given to the customer via an auto-reply on receipt of their issue (optional).  The customer can then use this when contacting your team in future to query their issue, allowing staff to quickly access and view the complete communication history.
• Threaded discussion. No matter how many emails a customer or end-user has sent, if they are about the same issue they will be all gathered in one PerlDesk ticket on one page, so you will know right away what the history of an individual issue is.

PerlDesk Email Handling Features Give You More Control

PerlDesk is an application which gives you a lot of control over the support process. There are many aspects you can configure and these include the following:

• Attachments. You can specify if you allow customers to upload attachments and if yes, you can also specify their max size and the allowed file types, as seen from the screenshot below.

• Emails only from registered users. If your help desk is getting lots of emails from users who are not entitled to receive support, you can easily fix this by enabling only registered users to sent you emails. This will require end-users to create an account before submitting tickets (via the web of email)
• Blocked addresses. You can block incoming emails from specific addresses of domains.
• POP3 retrieval. PerlDesk can connect to a common POP account and retrieve emails as your normal client would. This is easy to setup and allows PerlDesk to integrate with the most common of company mail systems including Exchange and Linux based mail servers.
• Incoming email rules. One of the most powerful email features of PerlDesk are the incoming email rules, which allows to create rules how specific emails are treated, you could filter emails with specific words, automatically assign them to specific people or departments.
• SLA rules. SLA rules give even more control because they all allow to set additional rules regarding what to do with emails, which have not been resolved in a specified period of time or are due soon. These options apply to all tickets and provide you with the control and knowledge that issues are resolved in a timely fashion.

PerlDesk Email Handling Features Will Make Your Customers Happy

Although the primary beneficiary of the PerlDesk email handling features is your support staff, your customers will also benefit because they are getting better service without the need for them to install or inconvenience them. If you choose to use the customer support portal front-end, your customers also have a way to track and manage their issues via your internet or intranet installation.

PerlDesk is an intuitive and easy to use Web application. At the same time it is a very powerful help desk solution allowing you to have full control over your customer service process. PerlDesk has 3 interfaces – a customer interface, staff interface and an administration area. Here will will give a brief overview of the new Version 4 designs, along with screenshots of each of these sections.

The Customer Area of PerlDesk

The customer interface, or the support portal area of Perl Desk is what your customers see when they access PerlDesk. The next screenshot will give you an idea of the look and feel of the customer area (click on the screenshot to enlarge it).

The customer interface allows users to register with PerlDesk, submit tickets and track their status, download useful resources, browse the knowledge base and chat with your customer service operators (in the Enterprise release). The customer interface is simple but it has all the features your users need to quickly access self service support and if required, contact your staff.

The Staff Area of PerlDesk

The staff interface is where each of your customer service team will login to manage and respond to incoming help desk tickets or emails. Each member of your staff has an account and based on his or her credentials, he or she will have access to different features. A sample screenshot of the home page of the staff area is provided below.

As you see from the screenshot above, the staff area gives access to tickets, messages, tasks, reports, settings. What each of your staff members will see depends on how you configure your help desk, each staff user can be limited to specific departments or given global access. They can also re-assign incoming tickets to other staff members or departments. All the time PerlDesk keeps a history log that allows you to monitor and track the progression of an issue.

The Administration Area of PerlDesk

The administration area of PerlDesk is only used to setup and modify the PerlDesk installation, including the creation of staff users/departments and setting up incoming email. The administration area allows to configure application-wide options of PerlDesk. A screenshot of the home page of the administration area is shown below.

 Try the Demonstration of PerlDesk to see each of these sections.

Response templates play a big part in making your support or staff team more efficient and timely at handling customer communications. If you receive common questions or inquiries you can create a response template in PerlDesk to use when responding to future similar help desk tickets.

These templates can then be called instantly when responding to a customer help desk ticket. On selection the template will populate the response box with the response template text, which you can further customize with product details, order information or personalize before sending to the customer.

To create a response template, login to your PerlDesk installation as a staff user and go to ‘Your Settings’ by clicking the link at the top right of the staff area, you can then create and manage your response templates from this screen.

To use a response template, when using the quick response feature or advances response page simply select your desired response from the drop down menu.

PerlDesk runs on HTML templates, allowing you to easily modify and customize the front-end that your customers interact with. There are varying degrees of customization, I will start with the most simple options available.

Changing the Logo

To change the logo on your installation, you simply need to login to your Administration Area and go to Settings, there is an option on the main settings page to specify a logo url, you just need to enter the web address of your logo image file. PerlDesk will then display the logo on your customer portal.

Template Modifications

The templates for PerlDesk are stored in the directory below:

/include/tpl/

HTML and Interface templates are stored in the relevant theme folder, the most current and default at the time of this post is ‘v4′ and to modify the user front-end you would need to edit the files within this folder. There is no header or footer template to edit in order to customize the general look, there is just one main template file DEFAULT.TMPL, you can edit this to make changes throughout the frontend. If you are experienced in CSS, you can also modify the CSS file by modifying the relevant .css file in /images/v4/userend.css.

When editing templates, please be extra careful not to remove or damage any of the template tags which are crucial to the functionality of PerlDesk, these tags are usually in the form of <TMPL_VAR title> and should not be removed. If you are using a WYSIWYG editor such as Dreamweaver please ensure that your editor does not damage these tags.

Email Templates are stored in /include/tpl/email and you can completely customize the correspondence between PerlDesk and your customer.

Complete De-Branding

You are free to modify PerlDesk as you wish for your own licensed use, however, the ‘Powered by PerlDesk’ link must remain intact and visible. You can remove it by purchasing a de-branding license from our product order page at www.perldesk.com/order.html

If you require any further assistance please visit our own support portal installation at www.licensearea.com/desk.

Overview of Email Handling Features

One of the main benefits of PerlDesk is it’s ability to handle your companies email, incoming and outgoing. You can set PerlDesk up to handle an individual or multiple email accounts, for example support@perldesk.com and billing@perldesk.com could be piped into PerlDesk without interference with your companies individual and personal accounts.

Having your public email addresses handled by PerlDesk will allow your support/billing or relevant teams access to all the outstanding emails within their departments - meaning an email is no longer passed or forwarded from mail client to mail client or person to person, everything is centralized in PerlDesk and everyone (with sufficient access permissions) can view and manage those emails.

When an email is received, an ID is generated by PerlDesk for that email (now a ticket in PerlDesk), that ID number is sent to the customer for reference with a confirmation of receipt and an email can be sent to your staff with notification of a new release. You can alternatively switch off the auto-responders to clients so that it is a silent system on the front-end, your customers wouldn’t know you were using anything other than a usual mail client - causing no disruption or confusion to them.

Technical Aspects and Enabling Email Retrieval

There are two ways PerlDesk can connect to your mail server and retrieve email. The first, the POP3 Retrieval option is the most common method for fetching emails, and is used by normal email clients such as Outlook, Entourage and Thunderbird - so plugging PerlDesk in should be no different to configuring a mail client to fetch emails. The second option, is Email Piping, this is a system level option that instructs your MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) such as Sendmail or Exim on Linux to pipe an email to a specific file on the system rather than a users mail account

1. Setting up POP Retrieval

Please obtain the POP3 account settings from your administrator before continuing, you will need the POP hostname, port, username and password.

In the PerlDesk Administration go to:

Settings > Incoming Email > Email Piping

Enter the email address you would like PerlDesk to manage and map that email address to a department, meaning any emails received will be routed initially to the department you specify. This allows you to setup several email addresses such as support@domain and billing@domain and map them to relevant departments.

Now you must configure your POP3 account details by going to:

Admin > Incoming Email > POP Retrieval

Simply create a new POP server by entering the required credentials. If you are unsure about the PORT enter 110, this is the standard port used for POP3 connections.

You have now setup PerlDesk to connect to a POP server, you will obviously want this to run automatically every x minutes to ensure PerlDesk fetches emails, to do this on Windows create a scheduled task and execute the /include/pop-email.cgi file. at the desired interval - you will need to enter the Scheduled command like this:

C:\Perl\bin\wperl.exe "C:\wamp\Apache2\cgi-bin\include\pop-email.cgi"

On Linux, you can simply create a CRON entry to execute the file every x minutes:

crontab -e
*/5 * * * * /home/user/www/perldesk/include/pop-email.cgi

To use email PIPING you will need to modify the system level mail files for the domain in relation to your PerlDesk install, for example, perldesk.com on an EXIM mail server you would

pico /etc/valiases/perldesk.com
support@perldesk.com: |/home/user/www/perldesk/include/email.cgi

This does not require a cron entry or scheduled task as the mail server passes it to PerlDesk instantly on receipt of the email.

That’s it! You should be up and running, if you have any questions or problems please send us an email or visit our own PerlDesk Support Portal at www.licensearea.com/desk