To manage Ticket Departments, go to Tickets > Departments. At left, you’ll see the list of Departments currently in your helpdesk. The defaults for a new helpdesk are “Support” and “Sales”, but you are free to edit these.

You can change the order of Departments by dragging them with the handles at left. This changes the order in which they’re displayed to Users and Agents.

You can have an unlimited number of Departments. Most enterprises will have fewer than ten Departments, but you can structure your Departments as you feel suitable.

If your helpdesk is very small, you may decide that you do not need to use Departments. You need to keep one Department in your helpdesk, but if you only have a single Department, users are not shown the Department field on the Ticket submission forms.

Department Properties

To make a new Department, you need to enter information in the Properties tab.

Edit the Title field to change the Department’s name. You can select Show a different title to end-Users if you want to enter an alternative Department name to be displayed to Users.

You can set a Department Avatar - an icon for the Department that will be shown in various parts of the Agent Interface:

Select Enable Department Avatar, then click Pick Avatar to select an icon for the Department from a predefined set, or click Upload Avatar to upload your own.

Built-in Department Triggers

The New Ticket Trigger defines an automated action that runs when a Ticket in this Department is submitted through the Portal.

The Ticket Changed Trigger defines an automated action that runs when Ticket is moved into the Department.

Besides these simple, built-in Department Triggers, there are more built-in Triggers. You can also create your own Triggers, as well as other kinds of automation. See the section on Triggers for Automation and the chapter on Automating the Helpdesk for more details.

Sub-Departments

You can group similar Departments by making them Sub-Departments of a parent Department. This can help organize your Departments if you have a lot of them.

To create a Sub-Department, create a new Department and then select its Parent. For example, you could create a Consumer Sales Department, then make its parent Sales.

If you make a Department with existing Tickets into a parent, its Tickets are moved to the Sub-Department.

You can only have Sub-Departments one layer deep: for example, you can have Sales > Consumer Sales and Sales > Professional Sales Sub-Departments, but not Sales > Consumer Sales > Budget Range.