Set up a Helpdesk

Install and configure a simple Web-based helpdesk-management system on Windows

Thursday, January 02, 2003

In today’s trying times, it’s not only important for business establishments to acquire new clients, but also retain existing ones.

This is possible only by providing customers good after sales support and prompt service using a good helpdesk-management system. There’s a range of helpdesk management software, both commercial and free. In this article, we’ll look at a free solution called Liberum Helpdesk, which is also on this month’s CD.

Liberum Helpdesk can do basic helpdesk management for any organization’s internal as well as external customers. It’s totally web based, very easy to set up, and uses either SQL Server or Access databases on the backend. The system is also capable of generating various types of reports such as pending client queries, etc.

To install it, you need Win NT 4/2000 Server with Internet Information Server, and a mail server. Copy the file liberum-hd-0.97.3.zip from the CD to the server you want to install it on. On extracting this zip file, you will get two folders www and DB. Open the folder c:\Inetpub\wwwroot and create a folder “helpdesk”, and copy all files and folders from www folder that you had extracted from zip file. Next, you need to create another folder “database” in location c:\Inetpub and copy the files from “DB” folder, which was extracted above. With this,the installation part is over. Now you have to configure the helpdesk management system.

Open your Web browser and type the URL http://webserver/helpdesk/ setup.asp, where ‘webserver’ is the domain name or IP address of your Web server. This will ask you to select the language, which will be incorporated in to the helpdesk-management system. Next, you have to configure the helpdesk according to your organization need. For that, open the URL http://webserver/ help desk/admin. This will ask you the password. Fill the password “admin”, after which a ‘configure’ Web page will appear. Here you can add users, create and manage categories (query category), configure site, create and manage departments, etc.

After this, you need to configure the mail server component on your Web server, so that clients can post their problems in the form of mail as well. In addition, the helpdesk staff can answer those mail. For this you can use any mail server such as ASPmail, ASPemail, Jmail, or even Microsoft Exchange Server. We used ASPmail, which was downloaded from www.serverobjects.com/products.htm#aspmail. After downloading it, unzip aspmail4.zip and extract the files in any folder, then move the following files, smtpsvg.dll and regsrv32.exe to c:\winnt\system32. Now open a command console and issue this command.

Regsrv32.exe smtpsvg.dll
This will register the mail component to Windows registry. After this, open the Web browser, and type http://webserver/helpdesk/ admin. Select “configure site” from the Web page. Here, another Web page will come up, where you have to fill all your organization details and helpdesk parameters like Web server detail, priority level, etc.
Note: Change the “E-mail Type” with ASPMail and give the hostname of your server in “SMTP Server” text box. You can even test your configuration, by selecting “Test configuration”, from administration Web page. With this, your helpdesk management is ready to use. The clients can access it by keying in the URL http://webserver_ name /helpdesk.

Using Liberum
To use this helpdesk system, you have to first configure the software according to your requirements. For that, open the Web browser and type in URL http://webserver_name/ helpdesk/admin. From here, you can configure and administer the entire helpdesk. To get started, you need to configure various elements starting from giving your website a name, defining users and departments who would be using this system. You need to break-up the helpdesk into various classes depending upon the kind of support you’ll be providing, and assigning each to a helpdesk expert (for example, a networking to networking expert, hardware to hardware expert, etc). There’s also a “Manage Priority” tab for setting user-priority levels. Finally, you can even define the status levels for each query, such as case open, pending, in process and case closed. This gives an idea of the status of each query. You can also generate reports based on the departments, categories and replies.

Once the helpdesk has been configured, users can access it from the URL http://webserver _name/ helpdesk. Each user can either be assigned a login name and password or register directly on this website. After logging in, users can submit their problems by filling in an online form. When helpdesk experts log in, they can view the problems assigned to them and give their solutions. The entire discussion is threaded to make it easy to track the case. Once the problem has been resolved, the helpdesk expert can close the case and submit it to the knowledge base. Users facing a similar problem can search through this knowledge base from their login. If an expert hasn’t been able to resolve the problem, then he/she can also assign it to another expert. If due to some reason a helpdesk expert hasn’t logged into the system, the helpdesk management system sends him an e-mail for every query that comes in. This way, a helpdesk expert can answer queries even when on the move.

Sanjay Majumder

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