How to use ticket categories in Autotask PSA

in this video I'm going to talk about ticket categories I'm going to talk about what they are how they work and how best to set them up and we'll also go through a real-world scenario on how to use ticket categories so let's go and have a look at how we would set this up so the first place we would goes into the admin module into features and settings and then under service desk tickets we're going to click on ticket categories so from here we can click on new and this gives us the ability obviously to create a brand new ticket category so let's say we had one that we wanted for new user requests so we can simply just type whatever it's about so in this case it's going to be a new user request we can then choose bits of information that we want inside this ticket so this is essentially what the ticket form is going to look like so you can see we've got a general tab details tab and an insights tab and I'll explain all of these as we as we go through them so if we look here under ticket type when we first select this we get the option of whether this is going to be a service request or an incident or problem in this particular instance we're just going to go ahead and choose this as a service request we can also choose the title or we can leave the title blank if you leave the title blank what will happen is obviously then your users will need to fill in whatever the title is so just to show you and we'll be doing this all the way through this video we have the save and try it button so if I simply say save and trying so if I say save and try it for example what you can actually see in here is that we have the ability to try this form okay this is one of the nicest features of this because you don't have to keep going back in and you know actually opening up a new ticket by clicking on the plus sign you can just simply click the save and try it so you can see here that the title is is empty so I can go ahead and fill something in to that but what if I wanted to force them to to have this information already entered in here so maybe I could say something like new user requests and then I could still actually get my user to fill something in there so maybe here you could put you know the username or something to that effect so when I click on OK and I click on safe and try it again you'll actually see now that will actually be prefilled in for this ticket category so if we open up this ticket category you can see here we've got our new user request and we've got this information that's prefilled into the ticket category ok so let's carry on going all the way through this so again you can do the exact same thing with description and what I normally like to do at this point is I uh need some thing like you know please fill in as much information as possible and I put them between two sideways braces so this now gives you the ability again to say no please enter in as much information as possible it really depends on you guys as to whether you fill this in I find that some people say if they leave this filled in then their users tend not to you know not to fill anything else in there and of course that then ends up going to the customer so it really depends on on on you as a business if you want somebody to fill in that description or you want them to say you know please enter as much information as possible in there now one of the things you can do at this point as well as you can add a checklist so you can see you know if this was for a new user category we might want to have a checklist in here that we can very quickly go ahead and and and and add about this particular thing so certain things we want users to be able to check you know before they create a new user and I'll come back to that but for now let's just go into the details tab and let's look through here in detail as well so you know if we wanted to again we can pre fill in any of this information what I normally tend to do is I would always make sure that I select the new status in here so this is going to say when a ticket is created the status is automatically going to be selected as new again if I leave this box blank then of course by leaving it blank I'm now giving the users the ability to choose what this is so you can see the status is now blank and they have to go in here and and choose something now of course they still have to do that even if it's new but at least I can I can say that you know if they do nothing else if they just click on save and close at this point so by setting this to new if they click on you know save and close when they create the the ticket it's automatically going to set the ticket to to the new status so I always tend to fill those in so now you can see it's prefilled in on the new status now one of the things to see at this point is you know if I'm an engineer and I wanted to come and change this what I'd have to do here is I've got a whole long list of statuses right and at this point I may not know what status this is supposed to be on or you know I might just you know see a long list and just select any old status so how do we get rid of this how do we actually make this ticket category only show the statuses that we want now that's really straightforward underneath the status column here you can see it says available list values is all so if we simply click on all what we can do is we can edit it and then in here we can choose the ones that we do not want available in this list and what we do want available so what I normally do so I normally just move all of them away it will give you an error message saying that obviously it's the default value so it needs to stay there but if you just push it back into the available category we're not gonna say you know what we want for this type of category is is new you know we want in progress we also want you know possibly to say waiting on customer and then maybe we just want to closed status as well or completed status so when I save and close this and I go in and now I actually do it a try you'll now see that what will actually happen on the status you'll see that it's actually now set to be just those statuses that that I've set in there so if I click on status I now can only change it to one of these things so this is where the real power of ticket categories comes in is it allows you to determine what information actually gets displayed in here it also allows you to determine even whether things get displayed so we'll go through and we'll show you how we can remove some of these fields from the ticket category so the same thing with priority same same rules apply you know we can set this to you know maybe starting it as a low priority but you know let's go in and say you know the only priorities we ever want this to be changed to is you know possibly a medium and our high you know and sorry we don't want a medium and high actually let's move these ones around so we say you know we don't want those but we want medium and high and we weren't glowing critical same same rules apply anything that's in there those are the only ones that they can now select from that particular you know drop-down so let's come back to here as well now we can see that you know on that screen we had issue type and sub issue type so again if I hit save and try it and we now have in here the ability to use the those two two dropdowns I mentioned earlier on you know that the issue type same rules right so if I click on here I can see a whole bunch of issue types but what if for this particular ticket category I don't even want to have those issue types I can simply remove those and I can do that really easily so what I can do is just simply say you know what I actually don't want to even see these fields so I can simply just click on hide I can hide this this field and then I can hide the issue type field as well and those fields have now disappeared from the form so again if I click on save and triodes what this will give me the ability to do is you'll actually see on here once we once we look at this ticket form you'll see that we've actually hid in those fields completely so they are now not even part of this ticket at all so really really gives you the ability to pretty much customize any of the information that you want on this form so the other thing we can do is we can actually get rid of entire sections as well so you know if I didn't want any of this queue or resource or any of the section I could simply go ahead and remove it or if I didn't want to display and if the billing section I could simply just hide the entire section and it will do the same as hiding those as you type and sub-issue type fields it will just hide that entire section from the form but equally what if I wanted to move that around so at the moment if I actually said you know for this particular one I do want to obviously have the assignment boxing there because this is going to determine what cue it goes into it's also going to determine the primary source but you can see it's all weighed down after this ticket information screen so what if I wanted this right at the top or want to just the cue at the top here under the ticket information well again I can actually quite easily do that so I can simply just move the cue to where I wanted to be so under the ticket information I can say put the cue in there and then what I could actually do is just drag this entire section up so I could just come onto here on section two I could move this right up if I wanted to and move every part of these these sections I could move them all the way up through the you know through that list so here you can now see from here I've got the assignment so I've got the primary resource and then I've actually got the cue sitting down here so if you really wanted to you could pretty much move these to wherever you want them to be wherever it makes the most amount of sense for you to move these things into okay so because this is a new user request ticket category you know there might be some other information that we actually specifically want to capture about this so we're obviously going to want to capture the user name we're going to want to capture the password we can do all of that really easily through something called user-defined fields so if we look through here we can already see we have a whole bunch of user-defined fields in here so you know we already have some that we have have created at some point on you know username passwords email addresses all that kind of stuff so let's actually go and create a new section here so we'll create this as a new section and maybe we'll call this you know specific information so let's say you know we'll call this specific information and then from here we can either use one of these user-defined fields that we've already got so you know in here we'll have user name for example we'll have you know we'll have the password we'll have all of that kind of stuff so let's go down and find out where we have the the user name so it's going to be done the bottom here okay we've got user name there so what we can simply do so we can just drag this UDF up to where we want it to be okay and simply we can just say you know what we're just gonna move this into that new category that we created all that new section that we created and we simply just gonna move that to where we want it to be so I'm just gonna drop it there for now and then what I can do is I can say you know here's the specific information so if I move it back down into specific information what you'll see is I've now put the username field into there so I can go and do the same thing with all of these I can simply just drag all of these fields up so there's going to be a password one in here somewhere there may be departmental or any of that kind of stuff so here we are user department so let's go and pull this back up in there as well ok so we're going to move it all the way to where we want it to be underneath the specific information field and if there's something in particular that you want you can then just go and create a new user defined field at this point as well so maybe now I'm gonna say you know something like manager name okay I want to know who that person's manager is and I can choose what kind of information this is going to be so if I click manage your name okay there is already one there so maybe if we just say manager's name so I could have obviously used that one that was there already but this is just to illustrate the point that you can go ahead and create one what it'll do is it'll drop it all the way down at the bottom so again I can just move this to where I want it to be so I think if we leave it at that for now so we say you know on this particular form what I want to do is have user name the user departments and the managers name obviously I'd probably put a password one in there as well but you can very simply see now by adding those I've now brought that field old and that category directly into here so if I scroll down I can see that they right down at the bottom now this is the other great thing about them by default they create down at the bottom here but again this is meaning my users are going to have to scroll to find this information so I want that to be kind of you know a tact line-of-sight and so maybe what I would then say is okay well tell you what I'm gonna do you know on that particular area on this specific information I'm just going to drag this whole thing right to the very top and then when I click on save and triads this is now going to give me the ability to see this right at the very very top what right at the very very top besides this information so this bit here will always sit at the very top panel but here you can see user name user Department manager's name and the user department is a drop-down box so I can choose marketing whatever the case might be now the other really nice thing is you can actually use these user-defined fields across all ticket categories so the fact that you've you've created them even if you created them here for every ticket category that you ever go into they'll always be down here at the bottom so these are globally set even though you're setting them up here on this this button but what you can do at this point which is really cool is you can say you know what like for example all these three I actually want bees to be required and I'm gonna force them on this particular ticket category to actually make these required so let's just go and do that right so you have to fill this information in because obviously this is the information we want to capture so let's go and fill this in directly ok now what we can do again if we hit save and try it we can actually see that this information will now be be set so that we have to be forced to enter this information and there it is again so you can see it's now made them compulsory and if I try and save anything on here it's gonna make them with red outlines around them which means I basically have to fill in that information okay so earlier on I alluded to this checklist so let's go and have a look at how we would set this up so for example maybe what I'm going to say is you know before we go ahead and setup this ticket category and we we're happy with it we may want there to be a few things so maybe we need to just check that they already exist in an ad for example right so what we could do is to set up a checklist we set those up globally so if we go into features and settings and then what we can do is go into application wide settings and at this point we can click on checklists so you can see we've got a whole bunch of different checklists in here but let's just create a new one what we can do in fact there there is a new user creation one here so we could probably just actually is this one so if we click on edit you can see the kinds of things that we need to check so you know create ad account add them to the groups etc etc and maybe we want an option in here that says you know before they do anything to actually you know check to see if they already exist in AD okay so we want to check to see if they already exist in AD and then the other thing we actually want to do is we want the step to happen first so again we can move it up to where we want it to be click on save and close now what we would do at this point is we can go into that same ticket category that we had earlier on so if we said you know go back to this this ticket category and from here we would say you know on this particular ticket category which will be at the bottom new user request what we can do is to click into here and say you know let's go and select a checklist and we say the default checklist for this we want it to be this new user creation one and when we click on save and try it it's going to save that ticket category and what you'll see will happen here now is that that ticket category will now have that checklist available so here is the checklist that we have to check off and you can see you know check that they already exist in ad I could have marked that as being important if I wanted to but you have the ability to to check those now what important means is that if you know if you try and close the ticket it's going to actually pop up a box to tell you that you know you're closing a ticket there's some important checklist items that you haven't yet checked off it's going to give you the option to say do you want to do this you sure you wish to close this ticket now one of the other things you'll notice against this checklist is that there's this little book icon here so this little book icon actually links into the knowledge base so you can see you can link a knowledgebase article to it obviously it's got the wrong knowledgebase article linked to it but in this particular instance you might want to link this to okay how do I go and check all of this in nad right so it's now giving my users the ability to actually check this off and the ability to say and you know how do I go create this in Active Directory okay so you have the ability to show all of that information and that's it that's really you know how you would go ahead and create a ticket category and you know potentially using this ticket category for new user requests in your business so I hope you've enjoyed the video and we'll see you on the next one