Getting More Into Your Quick Incidents

I've often been asked how to set more fields in quick incidents to fit specific needs and yet, hide some of those fields when creating a quick incident. (Many times those of us who have been using helpdesk for awhile will take our experience for granted and forget that those new administrators and workers often don't know how to do the basic stuff.)

Here's a general guide to set those items into your Quick Incidents and a few ways to get additional information about each of them.

In our organization the workers can create Quick Incidents themselves. It is something that I would highly recommend you allow. Giving them the freedom to do this will reveal a number of opportunities to streamline processes that many administrators may have overlooked.

When you first begin to fill out a quick incident you'll notice that not all of the fields you initially see on the incident creation page are there. This can be especially frustrating if your organization is similar to ours and you have extensively customized the helpdesk console and incident creation templates.

A first glance at the items that can be set by default with a quick incident reveal following fields.

Click to view.

The key to setting those additional fields are under the "Advanced Assignment" option. After clicking that option the following screen will open.

Click to view.

A frequent request I get would be automatically assigning an incident to a worker or queue. By entering workitem_assigned_to_worker_id into the first field and a valid ID into the bottom field and clicking okay the "Assigned worker" appears in the list of options to edit. I always advise my workers to use 21 (the default for Article Review) for the worker ID. Then once it has been entered you can edit the option and it will provide the list for you just as it would in other locations in the helpdesk module.

Click to view.

While this is good it will be difficult to keep a good legend of each SQL column in that "Workitem Current View" table that is available for editing. Another great tip I've found to help workers find the information they're looking for is on the worker report's main screen.

By clicking the button to modify the table on the worker report view you can access a handy list of the fields that can be set by a Quick Incident.

Click to view.

After clicking the above marked button you'll be brought to the "Format table: Incidents" screen. Here you'll see all of the columns of your worker report displayed.

Tip: Another great tip for workers is to modify this to show the information that is most important to your role. I will warn you that some of the fields listed in the drop down on the right side shouldn't be selected as they can often times cause problems with your worker report. You'll want to familiarize yourself with the steps listed in the Knowledgebase on resetting a worker's view to defaults before attempting to do any exploratory inclusion of fields. It will usually give you a good idea of what will and won't work on your quick incident's "Advanced Assignment" fields.

If you look in our example below you'll notice that we have some custom lookup fields listed here (workitem_sla_lookup_id and such). These fields can be added to both the worker report screen, to help workers make decisions when working with incidents, and on our Quick Incident.

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In our organization another field that is often requested for Quick Incidents are our Workitem SLA fields. (This customization operates much the way that other lookup values normally do) By choosing the correct field here we can effectively set the lookup for the incident properly. In this case the item is the ID and our value will need to be 1 for our "Standard" SLA.

Once we enter the information for this customized lookup, save it, and go back into our edit screen for this field on the quick incident we again get the dropdown of applicable values so it can be modified.

Our custom lookups however don't always show properly when you look at the quick incident edit screen. For example when looking at this one you'll notice that the "Set" value is blank leaving it to look like this:

Click to view.

It is quite alright however, because once we edit the value the SLA information is viewable and running the quick incident still functions as should be expected. It is important to remember not to panic and that the fields are quite alright.

By taking the time and using a few common processes you will find it is quite easy to make some of these modifications and greatly improve the quality of life for your workers.

If you hold official training sessions with workers when they start or if you hold any kind of update or discussion information with them, such as the occasional lunch time information sharing session, I would highly recommend showing this feature off. You will be surprised at the reactions you will get when people are shown that those menial tasks that often do not seem to be worth the time it takes to input a ticket can be done instantly and your organization will get a better and more accurate accounting of the amount of work performed by your helpdesk staff.