Jitbit Helpdesk Ticket Generation (Exchange Server)

Standard Ticket Generation


If you wish to use an email other than the one provided by Jitbit then the Helpdesk supports logging directly in to IMAP and POP3 email servers to create a ticket. In situations where your company uses a different email server or doesn't wish to log in they instead have a feature which will create tickets from Forwarded emails. The process automatically detects the "FW:" or "FWD:" tag at the start of an email subject and attempts to parse out the original sender and create a ticket. The ticket will also include that the ticket was logged by the Forwarding email, so you can use that for automation rules such as categorizing multi-company tickets.

In order to be a Forwarding email like this you need to set it up as a User and give it technician rights.


Internal Exchange (Outlook) Users
Since the City of Oklahoma City uses Outlook Exchange and the vast majority of our customers are internal that causes some issues for us. As a Government entity we wish to provide users with an @OKC.GOV email, but aren't able to use the Forwarding option. Below are the issues and solutions I've found to this issue and have been communicating with the developers to find improvements in this area for us and any other of their customers this affects.


Issue
If you are on an Outlook Exchange server and your customers are Internal then the Forwarding method will not work. This is because the process relies on being able to parse the "From: <email@domain.com>" portion of the forwarded email and for Internal Exchange users Outlook doesn't provide the email, it instead only shows the user's name, i.e. "From: Last, First". Unable to parse an email out the Helpdesk will instead log the ticket under the forwarding Inbox's name. Note that if you receive an email and wish to manually forward it to the helpdesk you can still use the Forwarding option, but you have to type in the person's email on the "From:" line.

Solution
A work-around for this is to that instead of using a Forwarding rule you use a Redirect rule. Redirecting will cause the email to be re-sent to the destination you indicate and appear to be from the original sender. The helpdesk will then log the ticket as if the person had sent it directly to the Jitbit email.



Multiple Companies Ticket Logging

Initial Complications (Resolved as of 01/25/2017)

Having to used redirect to log tickets caused another complication. While it worked for logging directly to a default inbox there wasn't any way for us to tell where the ticket had been redirected from, which means we couldn't automatically split tickets to different inboxes based on where the user sent the ticket. I contacted the developers (Ticket#6476378) and requested that we utilize the 'resent-from:' header in the email properties in order to populated the 'logged by' field. They were able to implement this and redirected tickets will now log under the initial email, so long as that email is set-up as a technician.

Set-up
In order to use multiple inboxes and sort them based on the 'Logged By' technician name you have to add a few rules and disable some of the default email templates. You will need to do the initial set-up as described above.

1. Disable 'Ticket Confirmation Notification': If this is enabled it fires off when the ticket is initially received but before the automation rules (later) categorize the ticket, so it will show the wrong email for replies and while everything should still work it can be confusing. Instead, we'll add a customized New Ticket confirmation to the rule that categorizes the ticket.
2. Notify technicians of a new ticket in their categories: Same as above, we disable the default and add a customized one to the rule that categorizes the ticket so that it doesn't fire until the ticket is in the proper category.
3. Add An Automation Rule: Set-up an automation rule for your category's email. You'll also need to set-up new ticket confirmations for the entry user and technicians in that category. These are customizable so feel free to include any necessary information. Clik the 'email template tags' link when making email templates for information about variables or formatting.