I'm curious. Has anyone out there built out a Help Desk management system with Nintex forms and Workflow? I'm not all that satisfied with our current Help Desk system and I thought hey why not build out my own system. That way I have only myself to complain to when a feature doesn't exist :). One area that I'm really struggling to figure out is handling our incoming emails and voicemails. So basically if someone sends an email to our Help Desk, it will auto create a ticket for that person and our Help Desk is immediately notified of the new request for assistance. The same is performed when someone calls in and leaves a voicemail. Since our system reads AD fields, it can decipher who sent in the voicemail or made the phone call and the correct customer is added to the request. I know I can create mail enabled sharepoint lists. If someone has something out there, I'd like to see how you handled these types of situations. Thanks
I built quite a few ticket systems with forms and workflow and I think it can be an option until you hit a certain level of complexity. A bit drawback for me is the SharePoint permission system. SharePoint is a collaborative tool so it wants to communicate stuff but you will likely separate tickets from each other ending up with a lot of single item permissions. Those aren't bad by default but will draw performance if you don't archive closed tickets regularily.
For mails zou can work with email activated lists what create tickets as you said.
As you can start workflow externally there might be also options to start a workflow when you call a specific number in your phone system by using the external start feature. But that depends on how much influence you have over your phone system.
Thank you for your helpful response. I figured the easy part was setup a mail enabled list. It was the voicemail piece I was struggling with. We do employ a Skype for Business 2013 environment and I have full control of how the system is setup. Our voicemails already drop into our email, so it shouldn't be all that difficult to direct the voicemail to a mail enamble list. I think trying to decipher who sent the voicemail is the more challenging thing. Right now, Exchange knows who is leaving voicemails as we have everyone's desk and cell phone listed in AD. I don't know if this would be easily translated to the mail enabled list. Granted, I could have it setup that if a person isn't identified as a sender, to notify the Help Desk to look into the ticket (they would anyway) and assign the ticket to the correct customer. I haven't played around with mail enabled lists. I'm guessing the message becomes an attached document to the list item.
Also, I think I can setup what I refer to as landing pages so only people see their requests. I've done this with several different forms. I create various views based on all kinds of criteria. I display those views on a separate page so people are not actually working in the site library. I have add buttons to create new forms and you can still access the forms directly by clicking on the links to the forms. It works well.
One more question, which type of app did you use when creating the baseline library. I've almost always used custom lists when creating forms. I don't think you can make a custom list mail enabled. If you used a different library type, which one did you use? If you were able to get a custom list to accept mail, how did you get that to work?
Only document libraries can be mail enabled as mails and their attachments are stored as documents. In your scenario you could have a custom list for tickets and an additional library for incoming mails. A workflow could create a ticket for each incoming mail in the document library.
Yea, I figured that out yesterday. Your workflow idea would work when new tickets are created. Now how would (do) you handle communcation within the ticket? Our current system receives a responded email, and populates the content of the email into the notes section of the ticket. That one, I might need to think on a bit. If you reply to the notification email from the workflow, I'm not sure it will make it to the correct destination. I could setup some looping process that will allow the customer to enter request reviews that takes that content into the ticket. However, I can see that could cause the workflow to get stuck or problematic if the customer is attempting to make multiple statements. I'd rather not force our customers to jump into the form everytime they need to make a comment. Since our sharepoint enviroment is on Prem, they would need to log into the VPN on either their phone or computer to make an update (assuming there is no way to email into an existing ticket).
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