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.

Tags: configuring perldesk, email piping, help desk guide, perldesk email handling, perldesk guide, quick start guide

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 7:06 am and is filed under Using PerlDesk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

You’ve installed PerlDesk and would like to start using it, but before you do - we recommend taking 5 to 10 minutes assessing the options and customization capabilities PerlDesk offers to ensure your installation is optimized for your use.

Stage 1. Create Your Departments

Departments in PerlDesk signify a traditional department within your organization, for example ‘Technical Support’ or ‘Billing’. Tickets can be assigned to these departments in future, and your staff members will be given access to specific departments (or global access).

To create Departments, login to your Administration (admin.cgi) and go to:

Settings> Departments
When creating a department you also have the option to specify the From Name and From Email address, these can be support@domain or billing@domain and customize the sender details for all replies and auto-replies.

If you are planning to use incoming email and would like to map support@domain to your support department please ensure you set the From email address correctly to the right department.

 Step 2. Create Staff Users

To respond to incoming emails and web submissions, you will need to create individual login accounts for your members of staff. This is a simple process and can be done from the Administration.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 1999 at 12:00 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.