Setting up a Help Desk on your Intranet is likely to be one of your easiest Intranet jobs. Because you probably already have most of the pieces of an Intranet Help Desk already in place, all you have to do is creatively apply the information you have learned so far in this book. This chapter helps you see how easily this can be accomplished.
These objectives, as you can see, are the practical application of the information and tools found in the rest of this book. Your steps in putting your Intranet Help Desk together involve the following: analyzing and converting available data (Chapters 2 and 3); selecting appropriate network services and tools to implement your goals (Chapters 7-9); setting up MIME and helper applications (Chapters 12-15); and applying indexing and database tools (Chapters 16 and 21). You find this same general process of integration applied in this and many of the chapters in this part of the book.
Looking at this modified list, it might occur to you that you can add one more item:
By comparing this new list with the preceding one (which represents traditional Help Desk procedures) you can see yet another example of how easy and compelling an Intranet can be. Which Help Desk would you rather use?
Help Desks are not limited to these narrow, though important, functions. Most large companies operate toll-free 800 numbers for customer support and questions about their products. You can call Proctor & Gamble, for example, with questions about toothpaste or other P&G products. Major furnace or air conditioner manufacturers refer you to dealers in your area for sales or service. Computer and computer software manufacturers also operate Help Desks for their customers. Of course, there are Help Desk databases of one kind or another underlying all of these operations. Though quite simple, one of the most widely accessed Help Desk functions on the Internet is the package delivery form on Federal Express's Web server. Here (http://www.fedex.com/) you can check the status of your delivery using a Web fill-in form and CGI-bin script back-end. Figure 23.1 shows the FedEx Tracking Form. Just type in your FedEx Airbill number, and the system shows you the path of your package step by step through the delivery system, from pickup to final delivery, with date and time stamps. All of FedEx's competitors have set up similar services on the Web.
Figure 23.1: Federal Express package tracking.
Some organizations set up what might be called Virtual Guy/Girl
Friday Web pages, with tips and information about doing odd jobs
around the company. Such operations can cover a wide range of
the kinds of miscellaneous questions that come up over and over
again, such as who to call to get a broken desk repaired, how
to ship an experimental widget, or how to get presentation booklets
printed overnight. Your Intranet's Help Desk can be just as expansive
or as limited as you want, with the information available subject
only to your own imagination.
| Note |
The Virtual Guy/Girl Friday function might well be implemented using USENET news or other means of communication and collaboration, such as Lotus Notes, Collabra, or other Intranet groupware. (See Chapter 27, "Collaboration on Your Intranet.") |
In large part, the ease with which users can access the accumulated wisdom and experience of your Help Desk dictates how effective your operation is. Whether your Help Desk uses indexed file cabinets, shelves of tabbed three-ring binders, a sophisticated database system, or a less formal method to store answers to previously asked questions, your first task is to get these answers online on your Intranet so they are easily accessible. The main principles for getting your legacy data online are those outlined in Chapter 3, "The Software Tools to Build a Web." In that chapter, you learned how to convert your legacy data into Intranet-usable information. If you have electronic copies of Help Desk documents available, you want to use what you learned in that chapter to move this data quickly onto your Intranet, making it accessible via your Web server and browsers. When you have legacy data that's not in plain text format, you might need to use the conversion tools you learned about earlier. This might include using your applications' Save As features to convert data into easily usable formats like plain text. In addition, you might eventually want to use Rich-Text format (RTF) as a go-between to convert legacy data into HTML documents for use on your Intranet. Now that vendors such as Microsoft and Novell have added direct HTML capabilities to their word processors, you can more easily save some legacy documents directly to HTML.
You can come back to your converted legacy documents once you have your Intranet Help Desk running. This enables you to refine them and add value by cutting in hyperlinked cross-references. This done, your Help Desk staff can use their Web browsers to jump from one document to another, looking for answers to customers' questions by following promising threads. The more cross-references you add, the more capabilities you give to your staff.
As you recall, enabling the use of your word processor and other office software packages as Web browser helper applications is a simple, two-step process:
You need to add one more step to this simple outline: the creation of an HTML structure to lead your customers to the right documents. This can be done quite easily (as explained in the Tips in the previous chapter) without extensive knowledge of HTML.
Once you have taken these steps, your Intranet's Help Desk staff can simply use their Web browsers to retrieve and view your documents, regardless of their format. As needed, helper applications will open to handle requested documents.
For example, clicking a hyperlink pointing to a WordPerfect file opens WordPerfect to display the files on-screen. Having located the necessary document with which to respond to the customer's question, your Help Desk staff member is ready to close out the trouble ticket. It's just a few additional steps to provide not only the answer, but also a copy of the document containing it, directly to the user via your Intranet.
If your Help Desk data is already bundled into a commercial database application, you need to look at the Web-related relational database tools described in Chapter 16, "Linking Databases to the Web." The ability to create Web fill-in forms that interface with database engines via CGI scripts (or other means) will enhance your Help Desk's capability to serve its customers. If you have built a custom text-based database application for your Help Desk, for which no tools are available, don't lose hope. You can probably dump the data out to plain text files, unless your database lacks support for standard export formats. As long as the data has an identifiable format, it can be run through WAIS, or some other indexing tool you find on the Internet, to make it accessible via Web browsers using fill-in forms. This enables you to continue to use the data you have accumulated in your application, at the same time freeing you of proprietary data formats. Further, with the outstanding capabilities of these search engines, you might find search-and-retrieval performance better than you had with your custom database-plus, your customers get a simple and familiar Web interface.
For example, was the answer provided on time, and with accuracy? Many Help Desks do this sort of tracking with paper forms, or with a computer program, which might or might not be integrated with the Help Desk substantive database itself.
It has probably occurred to you by now to wonder if you can put a Web interface on your Help Desk management and record-keeping itself. If you can provide your Help Desk staff (or everyone in your Intranet) the ability to search and retrieve documents and other data using their Web browsers, shouldn't it be possible to do your housekeeping (assigning and tracking questions or trouble reports, getting quality-control information, and the like) using similar methods? The answer is, of course, "Yes." If you have already written CGI scripts that interface with fill-in forms and the index of your substantive Help Desk data, the same techniques you have used to retrieve data can also be used to enter and track its progress and to assign trouble reports to individual technicians. This can be done in as simple or as sophisticated a manner as you and the Help Desk team deem necessary. You can do this either with an ISAPI or CGI database application or with simple, but limited, e-mail capability. ISAPI database applications can be purchased commercially (if you have the money), home-grown (if you have the time and skills), or custom-built using a hired-gun Web systems programmer (if you have the money, but not the time or the skills).
If you have the money, your choice to buy a commercial package or hire a custom programmer will depend on your specific needs and the level of functionality that you can find in a given off-the-shelf package. It is almost always cheaper to buy ready-made software than it is to build it yourself (or hire it to be built). The drawback is that ready-made software is usually less customizable than something you design yourself. A final point to consider; once you find a programmer with the right experience in Web technology and Windows NT, it will still take some time to design and finish the project. Suppose you want to try the quick and dirty way via e-mail. Once you create one HTML form that you tie to the Blat program (on the CD-ROM), it sets your mind overflowing with other possibilities. You could use Blat to e-mail form data from a Help Desk call to the right expert who handles questions of a particular nature. Besides using it to assign support calls, here are some other uses (some of which might require CGI scripts):
Unlike the situation with such phone systems, however, which can make a customer feel depersonalized, direct user interface to problem-tracking systems can give customers more control over their problem reporting, and a better overall feel for the process. It might be true, for example, that a fill-in form on the customer's computer screen is the same one a Help Desk call-taker would fill in when answering the customer's telephone call. Still, there's a definite feeling of finality about clicking that Submit button, especially if the system gives you a confirmation message with a problem-tracking number, either on-screen or in an e-mail message.
In this chapter, you have learned how the information and tools described in the rest of this book can be stitched together for purposes of your Intranet Help Desk. Specifically, you have accomplished the following:
In the next chapter, you use the same techniques used in this chapter to make ordering and inventory documents available on your Intranet.