Implementing HaloPSA – Roles and Service Desk

hi everyone Kristen here we're continuing with our halo PSA series um we're going to go through the Halo implementation from start to finish um and in this video today we're going to continue talking about permissions we're going to go into roles we're going to look at service desk and with me again today I have one of my favorite people at Halo I've got Morgan espinel who is is is Mr Halo he is is the um you know the Halo expert and and I'm really grateful to to Halo for allowing me to um to to use Morgan on these videos um so without much further Ado I'm going to pass over to you um Morgan so welcome back again and uh hopefully we can continue with the next the next bit in setting up halo yeah hey Chris welcome back and welcome back everyone um yeah we'll be carrying on with our implementation now um following on from where we left off from the previous video where we were just starting to to take a look at the permissions that uh agents in Halo PSA have so let me share my screen again hopefully I'll do it first time this time how about that perfect lovely stuff cool yeah um so I mean if you haven't seen the previous video I I'd certainly recommend sort of taking a look at that just so you can sort of get to the point where we'll be picking up from today um and that point was uh in configuration teams and agents agents we were just starting to take a look at the permissions tab against an agent record um so I started off by sort of or I wrapped up uh more accurately by by mentioning that um the first option in the permission set for an agent is whether or not they're an administrator so administrators have access to the configuration panel the full configuration panel they can change the settings in Halo and by proxy they can interact with with the whole platform um below that there's this option where you can specify whether or not this agent can edit their own preferences so throughout the system wherever you are you'll always have your agent account in the top right if I click into that I have this my account option and so in here if an agent does have access to edit their preferences they will they'll have this preferences tab available to them and this is if this is even if they are not an administrator if they don't have access to the configuration panel but they can edit their edit their preferences they'll still have access to to this tab here and that allows them to to change certain options like the appearance of Halo for themselves so you can change the application color and theme uh from agent to agent you can change options such as the way that tickets are viewed we can change our views and filter profiles something we'll be talking about in today's session uh and it's really a means of customizing the the personal options for the agent in question oh thanks below that we have this feature access option so I'm not going to go for every single option in here and but I will cover the the more important sort of high level aspects here so the feature access establishes the level of access that this agent has to certain parts of the platform so do they have access to read and edit tickets they have access to read and edit assets and delete assets they have access to Etc um and these these options in here pretty much equate to the options that we have in our menu so for example we have our knowledge base access you see we have a knowledge base module here we have our um invoicing access down here we have our invoicing module so the the options in the feature access effectively equate to the options that we have in the the menu pane itself so if I can just say Morgan so for those again those coming in from from different PSA tools that are looking at at implementing um Halo and especially you know those coming in from from tools like all the tasks or what have you and all the tasks would call the security levels so this is where you know you you would Define exactly like that is you know what permissions or security levels does each person have you know do they have access to to see the finance the financial side do they have access to service desk and when they and even more granular in in some of these things and and I know Halo does this as well but like you can see there you know read and modify or from tickets can they can they delete tickets do they do they have the ability to only read them and modify them that kind of thing so so if you are coming in from a different PSA tool um just remember security levels um is is kind of what uh you know what Halo is referring to as permissions at this point cool yeah um and yeah you're absolutely correct there in that for each of these uh features we do have different levels of access anything from no access to full read and modify access so you can get quite granular in here between whether or not uh agents have any access to the module or uh specific permission sets now uh below below that we have our more granular ticket permissions so you mentioned there about sort of the um the security levels in Auto task uh establishing whether or not agents can delete tickets um we we have those types of options from our ticket permissions area of the permission set so that's anything from um can they edit close tickets can they change the tickets type can they reassign tickets can they edit Advanced ticket details which are stuff like options like changing the workflow on a ticket changing the SLA Etc can they delete tickets um and so on now below that we have our asset type and ticket type restrictions so you can specify the agents only have access to assets of a certain type or tickets of a certain type perhaps you have a management ticket type that you you don't want agents to to be able to interact with so you can come in here and say actually uh Table conference is sort of dynamically appears but we can come in here and we can add this table and we can say that for this ticket type for our um quick quote ticket type this agent doesn't have any access to them so do something like that and for the purposes of the of of the video um Morgan I see a lot of those things say inherited from um uh you know from the administration role so by changing these I'm assuming for this user then they they obviously then don't have that inherited permission so whatever you change it to here that then becomes their permission even though they have the role of of administration I actually think that um if something is inherited from a role can change a tickets type uh the the role will um will override it be the master yeah so it's a good spot there about all of these options um yeah as I've mentioned there's there's quite a few options in here already um and you don't want to have to to come in and set the permissions for every single agent when um when they come into Halo and so what you can do is you can actually set all of these permissions at roll level and then the role or roles to the agent in question so let's take a look at how we do that so we'll take a step back to configuration teams and agents and instead we'll now go into the roles area so let's take a look at the first line support role for example now we see a couple of similar tabs here to what we see at agent level namely we have our departments and teams Tab and we have our permissions tab so what you can do here is you can actually set the uh the department and team membership at role level and again when you allocate that role to the agent it will automatically assign them to the teams and departments in here um and then we have our permissions tab as well and this has all of the options that we just saw a moment ago uh in the the idea is to come in set your roles up with the the respective permissions that you want per role and then apply those roles to the respective agents um and the last point there about sort of assigning a role to an agent you do that via configuration teams and agents agents you go to the agents you edit them and you add into the roles section here the roles that this agent has so um agents can have multiple roles the permission set is the highest permission set across those roles for example if I'm an administrator and first line support I still have access to everything um and the Departments and teams that an agent has is all of the Departments and teams across the roles that you allocate the agent okay so again that's that's something that's quite a lot different to especially especially all the tasks and I know you know a lot of people are coming in from from all the tasks where they call roles actually you're you know the the rate that you you charge your hourly rate out there that's what a you know um a role is in all the time so it's really our hour hourly billing rate but you can say senior engineers get billed out at this rate and you know standard engineers get billed out at this rate which all the task calls roles so it's very very different here in terms of what roles are um from from a Halo perspective yes yeah absolutely um yeah roll rolls in Halo you can uh I like at least to to think to permission sets security levels like like you said um with the the added bonus of the department and team membership as well yeah okay cool um so I mentioned previously that uh an agent if they can edit their preferences has access to the preferences Tab and they're in here um there's a tickets area where they can change the way that they give you their tickets so I just want to go into a bit more detail about what these options are uh so if we go back to the home page um and we we now go to the first module the service desk module just gonna click in here um and I just I want to break this screen down a little bit um yeah to sort of compartmentalize what we have so you can really initially you can really break the screen down into two sections and on the left hand side you have your viewing Pane and on the right hand side the sort of main portion of the screen you actually have the ticket list so this viewing pane we have here uh the the trial configuration is set to view tickets by team um where we see the the number of tickets within the team and then a collapsible list where we have the agents that are members of those teams and hence the tickets that are signed to those teams so you can expand or collapse at any point um this isn't the the only way that we can view uh our tickets and we can actually change the view by clicking up here our tickets by team now if I click that then I see I have this option presented to me um where I can instead view my tickets by their current type it's all the the ticket types in here we have seven incidents nothing no tickets of any time I might want to view current status um or or instead I might want to actually create my own bespoke lists in Halo where I can set my own specific criteria and I can do that by clicking into my lists where we have a few predefined lists already baked into the trial config um and if I wanted to create a new list in here I could just click the create a list option where we have two tabs to input some information so first and foremost we have our list name um Let's do let's do my tickets let's just do that we already have one in there but for the demonstration we'll just do it again all right my tickets again we see that sequence in lists allowing us to establish where in the list of lists this list appears that's a bit of a mouthful um we we have this show counts in preview option which is basically going to allow us to show the number of tickets that are meeting the criteria that we're setting up here so I probably recommend enabling that it's an easy way to actually see how many tickets are in that list at a glance and then we have our filters tab where we're at we're actually sort of uh putting that filtering criteria in so this is uh my tickets and let's actually let's make it my Open tickets so if I go to the filters tab um I have two options here I can first apply a filter profile we'll we'll see how where those are configured in a moment and but as I'm concerned with my Open tickets I will set my filter profile to be open tickets and then we have our additional criteria here where we can actually set our bespoke criteria um now when I hit this drop down we see quite a few fields in here so and there's a very broad scope as to what filtering criteria you actually want to apply we're actually going to see this list pop up quite a few times over the next few sessions um and so it is Handy to know that there's a broad spectrum of different filters that you can apply to tickets and we'll see that we can put these into our columns create ticket rules based on these options Etc and I'm concerned with my Open tickets my being the agent who's logged in so if I search for agent find that and then I can do I can apply my filter type where I'm basically saying the the agent um is going to be the agent who's logged in save that save that and now we have this new list at the top based on my sequence with two tickets in here that's what this is indicating and we can see when I click into the list those tickets have been presented to me yeah so I always do that I I always think it's it's useful in the ticket list to to turn on the tick account because I think it just looks so much easier in there too to see how many tickets are in that list for sure and and these again you know people coming in from from other PSA tools specifically all the tasks this is very similar to to what you would set up when you were setting up a widget on the dashboard right so I want to see my Open tickets um instead of it showing you as a list that that Halo does in this point you know you'd see a graph or a pie charts or bar chart whatever it is but it's it's the same Concepts and that list is actually probably going to be quite familiar to a lot of people that are um that are coming in especially from order tasks because it's very similar things that you can do to to filter the list down to show you know only only open tickets for me or Open tickets for the whole team or whatever the case might be cool cool um yeah and and I mentioned there when I was creating my list that I could apply a filter profile so another place that you'll see the the ability to apply a filter profile is when you're viewing your tickets not by my list because of course my lists already use the filter profile so we don't need it there um but if you're using one of the other views I'll use tickets by team we have this option presented up here um but it's worth noting that you can actually change your filter profile in here so I might actually want to look at all of the closed tickets in the system so it's quite flexible with in terms of um sort of presenting exactly the tickets that you you want to have presented so you know I I'd probably say um that people should be working from the Open tickets list because the Open tickets list is going to be everything this with you guys to action right um everything where the SLA timer is ticking down uh but if you did want to have a look at those tickets that were also uh on hold then we could change our filter profile in here and let's see if we've got anything we don't have anything but um let me very quickly change the status to with user and we'll see now in my Open tickets list this trackpad is not present and because this is the the list of tickets that need to be worked on but if I change that filter profile to include SLA hold then now we can see that presented in here highlighted in blue denoting that it is on SLA hold so um it sort of begs the question where do you set these up how do we know the criteria that is being used indeed and we can do that by going into configuration of teams and immigration tickets and then we have this fuse option at the top here so this this is effectively the the master list for for all of your your different ticket views so for example I could go into all of the lists that I have configured in the system across the service desk projects potentially CRM as well and below that I have this filter profiles option so if I click configure filter profiles we see closed tickets Open tickets and open including SLA hold so these are the options that we just saw in that drop down and if I actually click into one of these we're going to see that criteria table pop up again same options as what we saw when we were configuring our list so um for example the Open tickets including SLA hold are all of the tickets where the status is not closed or uh pending closure slash resolved yeah so so I guess for this it's it you know it goes without saying that obviously you can um you know as as an end user you or um you know somebody using the system you can you can change these views in any way that you like you can change the default views that come out of the box or you know as Morgan showed you can you can create your own views and and make it pretty much whatever you want so um I I always recommend to to leave the default views in place that come from a PSA tool and rather make your own based on that rather than just coming in here and starting to fiddle around with the stuff because if you break it it's it's gone I guess at that point um so it's better I think to to look at these views see how they set up and then if you wanted to base it on that you know something from the Open tickets including SLA hold to to look at what that's configured then set up a view the same and add your other criteria to it that you want and then you can go back and delete these later on if you wanted to or what have you yeah I think that's that's a really good idea um yeah keep the Baseline if for nothing else as a reference of how it is configured um and then expand on that for sure and over time uh once things are deprecated if you uh in terms of like once you create a new view if you don't use one of the stock views then uh you can remove it if if needs be but yeah definitely build on what's already here as opposed to ripping it apart let's say absolutely cool cool um so going back to the Views uh we can see below the filter profiles we have this column profiles option so column profiles in Halo are The Columns of information that we see uh in our list of things so and what we're looking at here is a specific column profile and I can edit that from the configuration module or instead I can actually edit that directly from my ticket area by clicking the three dots in the top right and then going to edit columns now we can see um based on the the highlighted service desk view this is the column profile we're currently using um and if I go into this if I edit this we'll see a list of options equating to the columns that we see in our column profile the ticket ID the customer site user the current status of the ticket the SLA time left um Etc and here we see the ticket ID customer site user status essay time left so on and of course those are you know when you click on the three dots um you know you you have the ability at that point only edit columns to to move those columns around right so yeah back to the edit edit screen so you might want to show that so you can just drag if you want agent right at the very top under ID yeah simply just drag it to wherever you want it to be um and and then go in and add other columns as as and when you need them so um you know so when you're looking at that that view it's not that's not the order they have to be in you can you can choose that but actually one question and I guess this is to I think I'm just about to answer my own question for the purposes of the video um this is this if you change that so now that you've moved agent that's going to do it for for all agents right because it says list visibility for all agents Global um yeah but but I suppose if you wanted to do this just for yourself where you say Okay I want this view but Morgan wants a slightly different view now maybe maybe you want agent down the bottom and ID right at the top you you can customize this for you specifically for yourself yeah yeah absolutely so at the bottom um I mean if you have the the permissions to to edit these uh column profiles globally you'll have the save option if not you'll have the save as new or just use without saving um so you can then we see that from that drag and drop I put agent to the top and now that's on the far left um and if we go and edit our columns again we can see that we've got a second service desk view because I saved that as a new view and yeah at that point you can restrict the list visibility so um you know everyone will be logging into the same instance of Halo but it can have a very different look and feel based on the people that are logging in um as I mentioned different application color theme the different way the the list of tickets is presented different columns Etc so yeah yeah and I think that that's the same across you know pretty much any of the the major PSA tools out there is is customizing it at a goal level but also um you know customizing it at a um yeah you know add a user by user uh level or an agent in this case agent by agent level yeah cool I've been kicked out that's did I set a password um cool right well I guess this is this is a good opportunity to to just wrap things up before the video gets too long um Let me let me go and log back in and we'll we'll pick up where we left off excellent as always thank you very much um and you know if anyone who's following this um we are going to be putting up a a few videos um you know we're going to try and get these up um you know at least at least one a week um potentially a couple a week um so you know stick with us um there's gonna probably be about 10 to 15 videos in the series um of the implementation and then um and if you want to see anything specific for for you know Halo um PSA users that are are using the system um you know already and you want to see specific stuff let us know in the comments below because what we can then do is is you know Morgan and myself can put some of those kind of videos together and make sure we get them up onto the channels so thank you very much Morgan um thanks for watching and we'll see you guys all on the next video thanks a lot Chris thanks bye