Setting up Frappe Helpdesk

Introduction

Recently at ONE Facilities Management , we have been in the process of migrating from Support module in ERPNext to Frappe Helpdesk. I could not find any documentation available on how to setup and configure it. A lot of the information in this article has been acquired through trying things out, reading code and doing a bit of hit and trial.

Originally, I was going to write an internal wiki on how to setup Helpdesk but then I thought why not write an article on LinkedIn and get some social media attention? ??

In all seriousness, I hope this helps anyone trying to configure Helpdesk themselves.

Usage

So Frappe Helpdesk is designed to work even standalone with only Frappe. But we are going to use it in the same system with Frappe, ERPNext and a bunch of other apps. I found that we can use Helpdesk even with the others app installed.

Installation

The installation steps detailed in the GitHub repo are very clear. In case you are using it with Frappe and ERPNext apps, just install the Helpdesk app like any other Frappe app.

Setup

Once installed, this is how the Helpdesk workspace looks inside Desk.

Helpdesk portal can be accessed by clicking on the "Visit Helpdesk" link in the above screenshot or by going to "https://[yoursitename.com]/helpdesk". The below image shows the Helpdesk Portal.

While going to the portal for the first time, there will be a setup wizard.

Disabling the email workflow enables the below option in HD Settings doctype.

Afte completing the steps, we are able to see Helpdesk in action. The tickets section should only have a Welcome ticket on first setup. The screenshot was taken after testing and hence so many tickets.

On the left side, we have a collapsible sidebar with all the options available to us.

Configuration

I found it easier to setup the Helpdesk from the workspace. In the section we are going to quicky setup some configurations.

• Ticket Type - By default, Helpdesk comes with Question, Bug, Incident ticket types. e.g. We can add Unspecified, Bug, Feature Request, Login, Enhancement/Change etc.
• Team - By default Helpdesk creates Billing, Product Experts team. We can add users in the team as well. e.g. We can add Support, Development teams.
• Agent - If we want to assign a Ticket to a user, they need to be created as an Agent in the system. Mark Is Active and add Team(s) in the Groups table.
• Support Policy - A default Support policy is created by Helpdesk which can be tweaked to our liking. Or we can also disable and recreate a new one.

• Assignment Rule - This is the most interesting part to configure Helpdesk. We can have multiple assignment rules with multiple priorities which will dictate how the tickets are assigned to Agents. e.g. We have a very cool process called Bug Buster at ONE Facilities Management where every member of the Development team works solely on the issues/bugs for a week. And this is assigned in a round-robin fashion automatically. So we added a custom field in HD Ticket doctype which enters the current bug buster when a new ticket is created and in Assignment Rule, we use the "Based on Field" rule. The other rules are "Round Robin" and "Load Balancing". As we can see from the screenshot, there are a ton of configurations possible using this Assignment rule itself.

• General Settings - This is more like global settings for Helpdesk. We can configure this based on our organization's need.

Miscellaneous

Suppose we have a support email account, and we want any email(s) received in that email account to be created as a ticket in our system. For this use case, we can create an Email Account with the below settings. The email address, domain, authentication and Incoming settings depends on the domain we are going to use, so I'll skip going into details about them.

We need to make sure the Enable Incoming is checked, and the IMAP details table is set as per the screenshot below.

If there is a need to respond via email to the tickets, an Email Account with Outgoing Enabled will also need to be setup. This below link can be followed to configure it.

Conclusion

By now, I hope anyone following this article has a working Helpdesk. Please feel free to reach out in comments or DM if this was helpful or if anyone has any further questions about this. I'll try my best to answer them.

There is also a small but active community on Telegram for Frappe Helpdesk. Do check that out as well.

#frappe #erpnext #helpdesk #frappehelpdesk