Halo Implementation – Ticket Types – Part 3

hi everyone and welcome to part three in the Halo implementation series with me today I have Mr Halo himself at Morgan aspinel um if if there's anyone who knows anything about Halo it's it's him and today we're going to talk all about a ticket type configurations we're going to talk about the ticket details screen and then we're going to go into a little bit of an introduction into actions so hey Morgan how you doing and thank you very much for joining me again hey Chris yeah yeah pleasure as always um you're too kind you really are thank you very much so yeah um if you if you can just share out your screen like we've we've done in the past and just kind of you know maybe talk us through um you know virtually what our ticket types obviously the configurations um and and then you know let's go through that uh in in detail yeah yeah absolutely um so I certainly recommend if you haven't seen part one and two yet uh to go back and sort of have a review of those uh towards the end of part two we were looking at the way that we can organize our service desk and um sort of sort and show certain ticket information um so a lot of what we were looking at in that previous session was concerned with ticket outputs right changing the columns to present certain pieces of information on the ticket sorting by that information Etc and today we're going to have a look at the input side how do we actually populate information on a ticket um so I like to sort of just follow the the Journey of a ticket from from it being raised all the way through to it being closed so we'll focus on the um the actual logging of the ticket and let you say have a look at some of our ticket type configure decoration so um again we would come into our trial configuration um as of sort of as of 2023 and you might find that your configuration looks slightly different based on the version that you're running um we are running version 2.108.4 and I got to that just by clicking the question mark in the top right and then going to show release details um so let's start off by actually logging a ticket so we'll go back home and then we'll go to service desk and again um I mentioned in the the previous session how a lot of the the screens that we see throughout Halo whether it's the ticket screen the asset screen the invoice screen um is templated in such a way that you'll likely find if you're creating a new entity of something you'll find a new button in the top right so we're in the service desk area and um we want to create a new ticket so let's go ahead and click new now um at this point just like with our ticket lists I'd like to sort of break this screen down into two main sections on the left hand side we have our end user details so in here I can search for a company and find all of the users within that company I could search for a site and find the users within that site or I could search for a particular user and allocate that user to the ticket we'll also see at this point we have the option to enter details manually so this is quite a handy way of sort of quickly adding new users into the system if someone calls up and they're not already a user in Halo you can find the company that they are a user against and instead of selecting an existing user we can actually input details manually in here so just a question around then and I think um it's I you know for the certainly for the purposes of of this training um so that is that is entering the new end user the new customer details whatever but what what happens if the customer themselves don't exist at this point we we can't go in there and just create the the actual company we have to correct companies yes yeah yeah if the actual sort of company slash client doesn't exist and then we would have to go into the customers area and click new in there we will see in um our CRM session that we can from an opportunity ticket uh create a customer directly from the opportunity but for our service tickets we're kind of assuming that you're providing service to an existing customer so if they're not an existing customer then um you'll want to go ahead and add them into Halo as one okay so what about and just following on from that so if uh you know if if an MSP has a you know home user customer that they're dealing with who isn't really a company so to speak right so so then the customer name the company name would then obviously have to be um you know Chris Timm or Morgan or whatever rather than the name of the company yeah yeah I I probably recommend um formatting it that way I mean I've seen situations in the past where um even a sort of an integrated accounts package has the accounts named as the name of the individual so uh follow a sort of similar procedure in in that respect if it's it's a a particular person who you're you're providing service for it and sending invoices to the chances are the name of that person is the name of the account at which point that would be the name of the client as well okay sounds good cool um and then sort of on the main bulk of the screen here we actually have the the ticket form itself so firstly at the top we can see our ticket type and it's interesting that it's automatically selected this as instant so I just want to take a step back and um demonstrate how we can change the default ticket in here and actually sort of more generally how we can default certain ticket configurations based on our ticket areas so sorry if I can just jump in here as well Morgan just for those people that um that that are confused about that as I was when I first started using Halo is that ticket type incident there is not necessarily the um the the idle um incident right that is that is just what you've called that ticket type so that could be password reset or it could be onboarding or it could be something like that um and then it will have an ITIL ticker type assigned to it as well that is absolutely correct yeah yeah um and we'll we'll see in a moment when we actually look at our ticket type configuration how we can allocate an ITIL ticket type to a particular ticket type and it might um it might be worth when we when we get to that point Chris just mentioning the sort of the language translation between autotask and Halo PSA as a good example there so we'll come on to that in just a moment before we do um yeah I just want to take a step back we'll go home and and we'll see the first two modules in here are service desk and projects um now these are referred to in Halo as ticket areas and we can actually configure our own ticket areas should we wish so to do that we would go into configuration and then into tickets and we see we have this areas option here now um if I were to sort of expand my my menu and disable this module we'll notice that our options slightly change we see that the service desk and projects areas have actually been merged into a general ticket area so again a handy point to note is you can enable or disable certain modules throughout the system and it won't remove the configurations for example I've disabled my areas module just by hovering over the module itself and clicking the cross and and that has removed the service desk and projects areas but as soon as I enable that area again I get that configuration back so you can you can toggle on or off certain options within the configuration it might actually make sense to turn a few options off initially to sort of reduce this list and then over time as you sort of find the need to bring new features in come into configuration and enable them as needed now if we click in to the the areas module itself we see two records in here we see the service desk and projects equating to the service desk and projects areas that we have um and let's just go into service desk now in here um we again we see that sequence so we can actually order the um the list of areas that we have presented to us and that'll be based on the sequence of the area in question um below that as well we have the option to sort of name our entities which just equates to the the sort of the the name of the area itself we see here instead of looking at tickets by team we're looking at projects by team so we can rename our entities per area go back in there um and Below sort of tying back to that point I mentioned about why when we're logging a new ticket from the service desk area are we automatically logging an incident that's based on this option we have down here our default ticket type and you'll actually see as well tying back to our previous session that you can set your default views default filter profiles default column profiles per area so I think this is quite handy um a good example of this is the sort of the distinction between the The Columns of information that you see in the service desk area The Columns information that you see in the projects area example is you know we we're not going to be tracking slas against projects so we have no need to see that in our column profile so we can actually configure column profiles per area equating to the most important information that we want to see for the tickets within that area so something just to just to note on there and it might be worth um kind of explaining this a little bit for the um purposes of people watching this is if we were to merge those two areas together and what what then happens as far as those um you know those columns and where you see you see it saying you know tickets buy so now it says tickets by team but I guess if we wanted to then look at projects by team um the you know because the areas are merged yeah we see them down as as kind of separate um uh I guess drop down lists or whatever you want to call those things down the side yes yeah exactly um so sort of by disabling our areas we're no longer looking at the um we're no longer looking at the default configuration for the area at which point we would revert to the default configuration within config tickets views so in here we have our default column profiles our default filter profiles and so on so disabling the areas module um will revert back to our Global defaults provided the agent hasn't set their own personal preferences um and of course it's really it's really a matter of personal preference I I like the areas um I think it's quite beneficial to to see the information that you need to see based on the types of tickets that you're working on however uh for someone sort of just and it's just just starting up um they might not be be using projects initially they might just be working on incidents and requests which point you might want to disable the areas module and make things a little bit more straightforward so it's it's really sort of it's up to you yeah I mean I'm with you on that I prefer the areas because it just um you know I like to I like to kind of almost keep my tickets and my project separate as well yeah so that I know what I know what it's a project I know what it's a ticket rather than kind of all being merged in together in in one in one view so to speak so absolutely yeah um yeah so I'm I'm with you on that but like you say I mean when I speak to people around um you know Consulting on this I kind of go into the same thing saying you know turn it off if you want to but it makes sense to leave it on um yeah especially when you start doing projects because then you're gonna have you're gonna kind of want to segregate the two um parts of the system that's that's exactly it um now a good point you mentioned there about segregating parts of the system well how do we actually do that how do we segregate how do we how do we show um or how more actually how do we not show projects in the service desk area and not show service tickets in the projects area and that is within the area itself we also have our filters tab up here now in a very similar fashion to our ticket lists um we can set filtering criteria within our area and only tickets and or teams or anything that meets the criteria in here will be returned in the respective area so for example we can see that in our filters for the service desk we're only showing tickets where the ITIL type includes incident problem service request and change request and the only teams that we want present in the service desk area a first line Second Line infrastructure third line and then if I were to go to the projects area again we have our filters tab but we have a very different set of criteria in here um hence allowing us to split out uh you know our segregate our tickets as you mentioned yeah yeah and that makes much more sense to me I think that's much more logical and much more structured and and the way that most other PSA tools work is we'll kind of have a you know a a specific section for service desk in a specific section for projects and um kind of keep everything segregated just so you you're not you know kind of mixing everything all into the same the same pot so to speak it's it's kind of all um you know separate and you're going to go to separate places so your project team can then you know if you have a dedicated project team they're only going to look at the um you know at projects and then your service desk team is only going to look at tickets yeah exactly and um it's kind of the philosophy of you should only really see what you need to be working on right and if everything is in the same area you've now got all your project tasks in there they might not have a start date for a couple of months and you don't necessarily want to show them in with your incidents and so yeah segregating that uh in my opinion allows you to sort of better organize your day and be more effective as an MSP yeah absolutely I agree cool um now if I click edit and at this point I can add to my my filters table and we actually see the same set of options as we saw in our lists the same set of options that we saw to be able to add to our column profiles and this is going back to that point that I mentioned uh where we're talking about ticket outputs right showing tickets that meet a certain criteria um and that this field list that we see throughout the platform namely in our areas in our lists and our column profiles in our filter profiles as well allows us to provide the output for the tickets so now we have an understanding of why um why the incident ticket type is that the ticket type is being used when logging a new ticket I just want to sort of break down the screen a little bit more and we'll start taking a look at our ticket type configuration itself so um this form that we're looking at here this is where we establish the input of of our ticket information so um a good example I suppose would be we might want to create a dedicated list in our service desk view to show P1 tickets um now that list isn't going to be very useful unless we have the option to set the priority of our ticket as P1 so it's the the form that we see here composed of the field lists for our ticket types that allow us to specify the input which is then used for the output in in our lists and views so um let's let's go and have a look at how we sort of amend the the form that we're looking at here so to do that I'm going to go back to my configuration module and I'm going to go into tickets and now we're going to go into ticket types and we see a list of all of the available ticket types sort of predefined from The Trial configuration in here and let's go and take a look at our instant ticket type and this is probably a good a good opportunity for me to kind of start talking about um you know especially those users that are coming over from from order tasks in you know what all the tasks would call a ticket type so in in order task um it's it's actually called a ticket category so it's where you categorize the ticket it's how you customize the look and feel of the form you know what Fields you have on the form whether they're um uh you know shown as as compulsory or um you know whether you even show them whatever whatever you like so those uh in in order to ask that is called a category and then the ticket type is basically the incident type so whether sorry the isil type so whether it's an incident or a problem or a change request or something like that that is your your time so you would you would have a a category in Auto task that would be called a password reset where you'd customize your form to show only the stuff you need for a password reset and you might then do that as a as an idle incident type or something to that effect cool cool yeah um yeah I I remember sort of initially discussing this with you and sort of realizing that there is uh there are parallels there um but yeah ticket types in Halo the direct translation is ticket types are a lot more powerful than ticket types in Auto task um but but like you say it's a ticket category in Auto task that sort of drives the form and the behavior of the ticket uh yeah they're off um yeah so we see a hell of a lot of options in here um and and it grows by the week I mean there's there's probably stuff in here that I've never seen and I'm not going to go through every single option but we'll cover some of the some of the more important configuration options so um I mean again just highlighting that we've got our sequence in list allowing us to to order the list of ticket types when we're selecting our ticket type we've also got the name um and here we have the ITIL ticket type which is what you're referring to earlier and if I click edit in the top left we have a drop down here and we have our core ITIL types that we can select from um below that we have our use so we saw when we were configuring our organization that a team had those free checkboxes used for tickets used for projects and used for CRM now that ties back to the use that we have here for our ticket type so um of course we have our sort of our instant type well that's certainly not going to be of use CRM but if we were and we will do in a later session to head to config sales opportunity types we'll see the opportunity types in there all have a use of CRM so we can specify the types of tickets that certain teams are allowed to have assigned to them and that's based on the check boxes we saw in in the first session tying back to the use against the ticket type in here below that we have some visibility and logging options so uh sort of combination of these options effectively allows you to Mark a ticket type as being inactive um so again I wouldn't recommend going into configuration and deleting ticket types if you want to hide them from the list then you can simply Mark the the ticket type as not being visible in lists and then not allowing anyone to log a ticket of that type effectively rendering that ticket type inactive but keeping all of the core configuration um within the system ready for you to plug in as and when you need to okay below that we have some status options based on some core events in the system so the status of the ticket after a lend user customer provides an update on the ticket status after supplier provides an update States after an email comes in on a closed ticket we'll have a look at our statuses um probably in the next session um where we sort of look at the we look at our workflows and we look at actions I won't go into them in too much detail now but they are incredibly important especially for sort of tracking your your slas but we won't go into them in too much detail just now um but it's worth noting that in your ticket type this is where you can go to change the status of the the ticket in particular after the the end user updates that ticket and we also have a defaults tab so I like to think of ticket types as the sort of central Hub or a lot of the configuration options within Halo and they really drive the behavior of the ticket and that really can primarily comes down to to the ticket type itself especially by the defaults Tab and in here we have the option to assign tickets of this type to a particular team by default so of course our incidents are going to go into first line support to start with you might have an initial triaging team at which point you would you would change the team in here to our triaging team um our projects will not want to go to first line support they will want to go to our project managers so each ticket type allows us to by default assign our ticket to a particular team and we also have our default workflow in here very important for driving the the behavior of the ticket once it has been logged again we'll come on to that in our next session and then um we have our default SLA and then more miscellaneous defaults down here and I'm sure um you know when we sort of come back to the comments from these videos and we start answering questions we'll be coming in here and sort of highlighting some of these options that um I won't be going through today just because there's there's so many of them yeah I mean like I said I mean yeah I've been working with Halo for for a while and it's some of those some of those tick boxes I've never even used and like yourself I I literally have no idea what they mean um yeah I I leave them as they are and you know if I then need to make a specific um change on something I'll either go and you know hand down what that means or contact you guys or whatever the case might be but yeah for the most part you can pretty much leave the majority of that stuff um as being um uh you know just just leave it as the defaults yeah yeah I suppose the the one other point in here that I would like to mention is the show to end user um this will toggle the visibility of tickets of this type on the self-service portal so if you do have an internal ticket type uh make sure that the highlighted option here is unchecked otherwise um yeah as you say leave the configuration as is so we also have this field list tab against our ticket type and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up another tab of Halo we'll go and we'll just go to log our incident again because I just want to draw the parallels between what we see on this screen and what we see in our field list here so when we're logging our tickets uh well when we're logging our incidents we have the option to provide a summary a detail provide some details specify a category pick an agreement pick impact an urgency add an asset now if we go to the field list for our ticket type configuration we see those same options summary details category agreement asset and so on and so it's the field list that you specify against a ticket type that establishes the form that you're filling out when logging a ticket of that type now again um this is another example of that input output right based on the different ticket types that you have in the system you're going to have a fairly different set of questions fairly different set of pieces of information that you will require in order to resolve close fulfill the request um so a good example of that is if I change my ticket type to change request I see a very different form here and the the information I see on my change request is information relevant to a change request you know our start date our Target date our implementation and back out plan these aren't necessarily relevant to our standard incident so that's a that's a really important point of our ticket types they establish the form that you fill out and I think one of the things to to mention at this point and again this is this is where categories come in and very similar to to the way in which all the task categories are is um you know like you were saying for for a password reset right I might want to capture the information on what was the username right what what service do they want the password changed for so yeah 365 or what have you but but I wouldn't necessarily need that if if they were um you know logging a problem for a printer for example I wouldn't need to necessarily capture that information where these ticker types rarely come into their own as well is is things like onboarding and off-boarding well if you've got a if you're onboarding a new um a new user at your at your company's site um at that point you know you might want to again capture you know whether they want their email address to be formatted as is it name dot surname you know um those kind of things so you're capturing all of that information in the tickets in in these different fields um you know based on the type of ticket rather than um you know and and I guess having different different information based on what kind of work it is yeah exactly and um I I also sort of mentioned at this point keep reporting in the back of your mind once everything is set up and you want to start extracting data from Halo PSA um the the more meaningful information you input into the system the more meaningful reporting you can get out of the system so you know there's nothing wrong with you using one ticket type called ticket for everything but then it would be very difficult for you to sort of establish ticket volumes per type you know per request type again and without sort of populating your ticket categories without even including the category field on your ticket type it's gonna be very hard for you to report on uh ticket volume by category so uh you know the quality of information that you put in is going to equate to the quality of information that you can get out yeah okay so let's um let's have a look at adding a couple of fields in here uh so let's go to back to my ticket type configuration um what I might want to include is I might want to include the ability to assign my ticket directly at the point of logging it and then we'll also have a look at sort of creating a bespoke custom field in Halo so um again we we go into edit mode by clicking edit in the top right at which point we can now add to our field list now if I click the drop down here we actually see more or less the same set of fields that we've seen over the last couple of sessions so this is where we're establishing that input right so you can filter and sort your tickets you can show Columns of information that's your output and this is where you're specifying the input so I'll add team in and agent in we'll add those now you'll see there are dozens if not hundreds of fields in here sort of out of the box and but everyone works differently everyone has slightly different bits of information that they want to capture and Halo can handle that by creating custom Fields now you can get to your full list of custom Fields if we open a new tab foreign by going to configuration custom objects and then into custom Fields you can create these custom Fields all throughout the system so we'll create a custom field for our ticket but sort of Bear in mind that you can create custom Fields against customer records you might have a passwords field or um a remote address field something like that you can create custom Fields against assets you can create them against quotes orders invoices these custom Fields will pop up all over the place so really gives you a lot of agency to to customize the system and place exactly the information that you want to place where you want to place it so just a question around those actually in terms of the um the custom field um and you mentioned password there so you can have a you know a feel to to store your password now is that um is that encrypted in any way so yeah and and can I can I blank it out per um per agent so can I say you know I I don't want Chris to see the password but I want Morgan to be able to see it yeah yeah absolutely well um let's let's go back into our ticket type and let's add uh let's click the add button here which is another place that we can go to to to create our custom Fields against our ticket entity um and and I'll answer that that question in just a moment Chris um before I get there I just want to sort of highlight some of the options that we have in here um so so this is where we create our custom field so we give our custom field a field name um I can't think of a good example right now let's let's do customer peer number cost PO number now the the field name is not going to be sort of client-facing it's not it's not going to be returned throughout the system it's more um to store a record in the database so you don't need to worry too much about the formatting of that the field label is what you'll see uh so take a bit more care make making that presentable PO number and below that we have our type of field so so to answer your question about sort of having having password Fields you can actually create um many different types of custom fields in the system um we can we can have text which is a line of text Memo which is a box of text single or multiple select we can have a check box or even a rich text field where we could potentially copy and paste images or HTML in um now if we make our type of field text below that we have our input type and if we were to create a password field we would select the field as password um that is encrypted yes and there is a permission against our agents where we can specify um our password field visibility and we can see here that's been inherited from our role so of course we can set this based on our roles as well yeah another another handy point to note is uh in the advanced settings of configuration we have the option to audit password Fields so if you are creating password fields and you want to to keep a record of who is viewing those fields and when they've been viewed you might want to come into advanced settings and enable this option down here okay nice um and so the field configuration options they're Dynamic based on the type of field that we're we're sort of creating for example if I were to pick single select I no longer have the option to to pick the type namely I don't have the option to select password is that I have the options specific to my single select where I can pick my drop down my lookup type where it might just be a static list of values that we place below or it might be based on some SQL query extracting information from another part of the system again a really powerful tool here something that we might come back to as sort of phase two of our implementation and again for now just sort of know that that it's there and if you want more information then um hello Sports happy to provide that um and Below again just some more miscellaneous configuration options a handy one that we'll come back to in projects is having the ability to copy values from one custom field to the child ticket if the child ticket also contains that custom field so uh handy for sort of handing over um information from the sales team to the projects team namely a scope of work something like that okay so for now we'll leave that as text we'll leave everything else as it is save that that's now been added into our field list if I save and go back to create my incident we see now the team field the agent field have been popped in and predefined with the default information that we set against our ticket type and we've got our customer PO number here as well I suppose the last point to mention here is or the last two points that I'd like to mention is firstly um just like our columns we can drag and drop these fields quite easily to reorder them on our screen so now I've put custom appear number at the top and that will now appear at the the top of our form just like so and then finally with regards to our field list we can actually specify visibility restrictions per field we can do that just by editing our ticket type at which point we have edit options against each of our fields in our field list um where if we click into one of these we see we're presented with our visibility options we're really concerned with four main scenarios as when an end user is logging a ticket by the self-service portal is when an end user is viewing a ticket by the portal but an agent is logging a ticket and when an agent is viewing a ticket so um the example I always provide at this point is we might want to include in here our priority field our SLA priority field but we certainly don't want that to be visible to the end user when they're logging a ticket because if it was everything would come in as P1 so we want to make sure that against our priority field the end user visibility when they're logging a ticket while the portal is set to not visible and we actually do that by default but I just I like that as a an example of changing the visibility options or sort of at least checking that the right fields are visible to the right people cool um and yeah there's just so much I don't want the video to go on too long but I I do also want to mention this Dynamic field visibility option um just because this is another really powerful method of presenting only the relevant information to your agents slash users when when they're inputting the information into the ticket so a good example of this is if we were to change our ticket type to new starter request and we can see this is the information that will be sort of pre-configured from the trial and we have this checkbox here does the does the new starter require hardware and if I check that I now have all of these fields that have then dynamically been presented to me again there's no point showing these fields if the new starter doesn't require Hardware so our Dynamic fill visibility allows us to to specify what information needs to be populated at what point again another example of that is in our change request wherever it is in our change request if our change type is emergency then we have to provide an emergency change reason or at least given the option to um now our Dynamic fuel visibility if we actually sort of save this and we go to our new starter request we'll see how that's configured in our field list we'll go into our it requirements um and so our Hardware field for example if I click the pencil against this field we can see there's some criteria in our Dynamic field visibility option so uh to to hide a field um and and only show it based on some criteria we would add the relevant criteria into our Dynamic field visibility option so let's just put that to practice and we've got our customer PO number field that we've just created let's go ahead and create a customer po provided checkbox so I'll go into my field list I'll have my field I'll click add to create a new custom field cast po given I did yeah so you want that to be like a check box and if you if you check it yes it's then going to say um type in the number here or something like that exactly yeah so um when we're creating this checkbox field we'll pick the type of field to be checkbox save that put that right at the top why not and then against our customer PO number field that we previously created we can go in here we can go into our Dynamic field visibility option and we can add a criteria in namely customer po provided is going to be checked for this field to be present save that save that go back to our instant ticket type now we no longer have the customer PO number field present until we check that box right and okay now with the sake of keeping the video to a reasonable length I think we'll leave that there for now um next we'll actually look at logging the ticket uh break down the ticket screen and sort of have an introduction to the actions available on our tickets yeah that's awesome I mean thank you for that uh Morgan I think that's something that um you know I see a lot of people um ask questions around is you know how do we customize the screen how do we add Fields you know how do we make one field reliant on another field so I think this is this has gone into a huge amount of detail on how to do this so I think as you say on on the next call uh or the next um video uh what I want to do is to to focus more on kind of um you know as you say the the actions looking at the configs um focusing on workflow you know and and then actually creating the ticket as well so maybe what what we can do after that is we can then start to look at actually putting this into practice so let's create like a password reset it for more let's create a user onboarding form and say okay you know where when a user when a new user starts in the company what what information do we need to fill in as far as that's concerned and get all of that stuff um entered so we'll cover that off on a on a later video but I think for now this is a great place to end so you know thank you to everyone for watching and as as always Morgan really appreciate you helping out with these and uh um you know I I always learn so much from you every time I speak to you so um you know and and really appreciate um your help and and massive thanks to the guys at Halo for allowing me to to steal your time for um you know for a few hours to to record these videos so really appreciate it it's been a pleasure yeah and I will see you see you all on the next video yeah see you next one guys thanks cheers