Departments usually reflect different divisions of your enterprise with different requirements. Here are some common ways to use Departments:

• You want to have separate contact forms on your website for support requests and media requests, with different custom fields. You would create Support and Media Departments, create custom Ticket form layouts for each Department, then Embedding a ticket form.
• You want to configure your helpdesk so that your manufacturing staff only see manufacturing Tickets, and your retail staff only see retail Tickets, while your research staff can see everything. You would create Manufacturing, Retail and Research Departments, then control access with Agent Permissions.
• You want anyone to be able to contact your Sales Department, but for only your subscribers to be allowed to create Support Tickets. You would use the Usergroup permissions to remove access to the Support department from all users, then create a usergroup with full access to Support and make sure subscribers are added to it.
• You want to be able to analyse the difference in response time for Sales Tickets and Support Tickets. Using separate Sales and Report Departments makes it easy to analyse this with a custom report in the Reports interface.
• You run an IT Department and want to divide your helpdesk into Hardware and Software.