By now, most of you might be aware of latest Microsoft’s Cloud based Office collaboration and services – Office 365. The offering consists of Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.
In the last few months, Office 365 has grown tremendously and widely adopted by small and medium businesses. Add to that, many of our existing customers keep nagging me when the support for Office 365 is planned. Reluctantly, it was decided that the time has come to finally do it. But wait, there is no blueprints or easier way to achieved it. One aspect of Office 365 is the claimed-based authentication which is quite different from the usual NTLM or form authentication, that are quite common in in-housed Microsoft software environment such as SharePoint 2010. So, spent 2 days learning about the new claim-based authentication implementation in Office 365 and another day for finally coming out with a working prototype. The journey was painful, but the end it was worth it, because now, I can proudly display ‘works on Office 365‘ for our products. Moreover, I would be scanning less emails on Office 365 support from now onwards – a relief actually!
The following products are now updated to support Office 365, especially the SharePoint Online service.
The update does not add any new UI or options to go along, only the logic that drives connection to the Office 365 SharePoint Online site is piggyback into existing module. So, there is no new steps to get accustom to and you can keep on using the product the way you had been doing before. What is new is now, you can specify your Office 365 SharePoint site to interface and work with our product, by simply keying in the office 365 team site URL and you will be prompted to provide the credential to log on to the site.
For example, below, the Office 365 team site URL is http://amt100.sharepoint.com/TeamSite
And in the credential dialog prompt, you will enter your Microsoft Online Services ID, as the user name. In this context, it is john@AMT100.onmicrosoft.com and the password characters.
Note that, Microsoft Online Service ID is the same that you use when signing in to Office 365 site in your web browser.
If the credential provided is correct, it should load up all the lists and sub-sites as shown below.
Edited (30th November 2011): Please note that you need the following requirements to be able to integrate Office 365 SharePoint Online with our products:
Operating System – Vista SP2 or above. Windows XP and 2003 won’t work with Office 365 SharePoints. .NET Framework – 3.5 or above Windows Identity Foundation – This component is required to be installed on the system so that our product can work with Office 365 SharePoint lists.
You can download and install this component from below:
For any product or project life-cycle, issues from end-users and workers are inevitable. Any business processes that require the organization or team to track a high volume of issues or tickets, such as customer help-desk, sales leads or project activities, needs a defined and structured methodology of issues collection, assignment, deployment and resolution. This is where an issue tracking system can prove indispensable and blessing to support staffs. An organization or team can benefit a lot if these issues are identified and recorded, in a way that allows qualitative analysis for improving the product or service, in the long run.
Using SharePoint for Issue Tracking
For organizations that already have invested in Microsoft SharePoint platforms for collaboration and sharing, support team can easily implement a simple issue tracking list and exploit the SharePoint inbuilt tracking and workflow capabilities to track issues and risks throughout the product life cycle. Such SharePoint based issue tracking list is good enough for teams that receive phone calls about product and service issues. A technician can simply log a new ticket within the SharePoint list, and key in the information as per the phone conversation. Using the SharePoint workflows, automated notification can also be sent out to the assigned technician.
Limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking
But for organizations that rely on emails partially or wholly, it is a lot of inconvenience and hard work. Because, there is no direct and easy way to source the ticket information from your emails, except to resort to copy-paste trick, which is time consuming and laborious, and not to mention, the precious human resources needed for data gathering. Moreover, the inbuilt issue tracking list template in SharePoint is only good for basic tracking requirement and lacks the automation and sophistication, to function as an effective help-desk system.
Besides, Microsoft Outlook integration of SharePoint is limited, and does not provide the capabilities to connect and export to a SharePoint list at the item level. One of the important goals for a help-desk is staying on top on the growing amount of support request emails from end-users. But without an organized and structured link between Outlook and SharePoint, caller and problem information from Outlook mails cannot be added or updated to SharePoint tickets in a timely manner. This can lead to delay in response time and even support requests falling through the crack. These limitations prevent many help-desk teams from implementing an effective SharePoint based issue tracking system.
Connecting Outlook to SharePoint based Issue Tracking
To exploit the sharing and collaboration features of SharePoint for Issue tracking purpose, we need an easy way to source the problem, callers metadata information and attachments from emails stored in client application such as Microsoft Outlook, and feed to the trouble tickets in the SharePoint list. Keeping this requirement in mind, I have invested considerable time to design a generic solution that can be used by every team and organizations. The outcome is an Outlook add-in that enables to create and maintain a link between Outlook and your Issue Tracking SharePoint lists, such that you and other technicians can easily raise trouble tickets from emails from within your Microsoft Outlook, in a single click, or even better, automatically (if you have set Issue Tracker to watch and process incoming emails, that is)
‘Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint‘ runs within Outlook.exe process and extend the functionalities of Outlook, by allowing custom actions to be triggered and additional feature sets and capabilities to be implemented on top of the host application (Outlook). It is currently in ‘release candidate’ 3 and was developed as an offshoot from my other application ‘Team Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint‘ (i.e, help-desk and issue tracking functionalities built upon Team Publisher application).
So How Does It Work?
The team edition of ‘Issue Tracker for Outlook and SharePoint’ is designed as a groupware solution i.e., multiple technicians working on the same set of tickets in the administrator chosen SharePoint lists. So, we have an administrative installation and configuration, only needed to be performed by the help-desk manager. And a client installation, that is required to be installed by every technician on their system.
Being a groupware, the help-desk settings and configurations data need to be stored on a central repository. Because your help-desk staffs can be scattered in different geographical locations, and might not have access to the company’s local network remotely, using a network database or shared folder won’t be feasible. Instead, in Issue Tracker system, the help-desk configuration and settings data are stored in a special SharePoint list (having the name ‘TeamIssueTrackerSettings’) which is accessible to all help-desk staffs, on the local network, VPN, HTTP, WAN.
From within Outlook, using the administrative add-in for Issue Tracker, help-desk manager can choose the destination SharePoint lists where trouble ticket raised by other technicians would be stored. The fields of the email and each of the chosen SharePoint list are then mapped, so that you have control over what and which data goes to the ticket. These chosen SharePoint lists are the deployed to all the technicians in their Outlook.
To allow technicians to add extra meaningful information to trouble tickets, apart from the ones extracted from the email, help-desk manager can maintain and deploy a list of problem categories and types, statuses and any number of custom fields drop down values. These help-desk specific fields would be then available in the Outlook application of each technician.
To raise a trouble ticket, simply select one or more mail items, and Choose and click the particular SharePoint list under which the ticket item will be generated. When you do this, relevant metadata such as caller and problem details, attachments etc. will be extracted from the email to the ticket item. You can add further details to the ticket to be generated such as, the technician that will be responsible for solving the ticket, due date, by which the issue should be resolved, and problem category, type and status and any number of custom metadata.
Once a trouble ticket is generated successfully in the chosen SharePoint list, information regarding the ticket, such as the ticket ID, data/time and the URL to the SharePoint ticket are tagged and embedded into the email item in Outlook. This not only provides an easy way to go to the ticket item in the SharePoint site directly, but also prevents other technicians from generating a duplicate ticket, from the same email (a possible scenario on shared mailboxes and mail-enabled public folders).
In the subject of the email from which a ticket was raised, a tracking code containing the prefix code of the SharePoint list and the ticket ID is embedded. For example, [CMA-4]. This is done so for tracking purpose on subsequent email conversations that might happen. As long as this phrase is intact when sending out response to caller, or when caller replies back to the help-desk, Issue Tracker System will automatically track and associate it with the correct SharePoint list and ticket item. This means, the ticket item and description field will be updated live automatically, as and when the email is sent out or received. This greatly enhances the productivity of the help-desk because, no technicians are required anymore to monitor the mailbox for new replies from caller, nor there is need to add and update the new information to the relevant ticket manually. Issue Tracker system does that for you automatically, to provide a commentary on exactly what happened and the series of actions taken to achieve resolution.
If you have a dedicated mailbox only used for support purposes, you can automate the whole process of ticketing experience from incoming emails. You can set Issue Tracker to monitor your mailbox and automatically raise trouble tickets from incoming emails, without requiring your intervention.
Since its first beta release on August 15th 2011, there has been more than 300 downloads. And our site statistics indicates that the product page gets listed within the top 5 rankings of the Google search of common keywords such as ‘issue tracking outlook SharePoint’, ‘trouble tickets SharePoint’, ‘incident management SharePoint’ etc. So naturally, I am very excited for the general applicability of this application, because it overcomes the limitation of email integration, or the lack of it, in SharePoint based issue tracking system, by linking Outlook to SharePoint. In being able to raise tickets from their emails in the comfort of Outlook, Issue Tracker system empowers help-desk staffs to focus their valuable time and efforts into resolving the issues rather than spending on the technical processes of gathering tickets and doing manual tasks.
Here are two high definition videos I have composed, to demonstrate the capabilities and feature sets of Issue Tracker.
With presence on about 500 million computer systems, Microsoft Outlook is by far the most widely used email application in the world. It is more so entrenched in the business community, where it is not only used for email exchange, but also as a personal organizer able to handle just about everything from your email to your calendar and easily transfer tasks, contacts, and more. In a nutshell, Microsoft Outlook enjoys an enormous popularity.
However, being the most popular email application does not necessarily mean it is perfect. In fact, is far from it. One of the glaring omissions is the feature to extract and export emails from Outlook data store to document formats such as Adobe PDF, even Microsoft own proprietary XPS and Word document formats.
PDF or Portable Document Format is an industry standard for document exchange and archiving. In other term, it is an electronic replacement for paper. Converting emails to PDF can serve many purposes. First, PDF format preserves the source file information such as layout, styles and format of the email. Second, PDF exists in compressed form that reduces the size of the file significantly, making it simple to distribute by e-mail or post on a website. This also makes it an ideal to archive and backup emails so that you have a record of your information in a format that can be easily opened in the future. Additionally, because of archiving, mailbox size can be maintained at reduced level. Third, it is very easy to share with other users because of its size and portability. Fourth, PDF files are viewable and printable on virtually any platform, including Windows, Mac OS, UNIX, Linux and mobile platforms such as iPhone, iPad, Android etc.
Because of the popularity of PDF, Microsoft started supporting it in Office 2007 via a special ‘Save as PDF and XPS’ add-in, available as a separate download. With SP2, PDF and XPS support is natively inbuilt into the Office suite. So, now you can easily save your Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents to PDF natively. Unfortunately, Microsoft chooses to leave support for PDF/XPS out of its Outlook application. Whether that was deliberate or limitation in PDF licensing term, we don’t know for sure. But what we do know is the devoid of PDF and XPS export feature in Outlook is a big limitation. So, as usual, most of us has to either rely on Adobe Acrobat Outlook plug-in (which means, you will have to buy it and yes, it costs a lot too, $299 for a personal license for the standard edition!) or, make use of a PDF printer driver, to generate PDF document that is not searchable and contents that is not easy to recover or exported to another format. Some even resort to copy-paste of the content of the web page to Microsoft Word and convert to PDF/XPS document, albeit in a crude fashion.
For these reasons, a year back, in an attempt to bridge the gap, I wrote a VBA, that puts a button in the mail inspector window in Outlook, clicking which would feed the HTML version of the email item to Microsoft Word application through command line execution, and convert it into a PDF document. What started as a simple script to meet my own requirement for document generation from emails, has now evolved into a full-fledged commercial add-in application for Microsoft Outlook. It really is a lot nicer. It has a lot of conveniences that make it easy to use, encapsulating all the complex and dirty processes within the familiar Outlook toolbar and ribbon user interface. But in the end it still does that same core function that got it started – it generates PDF, XPS, word documents and web archived pages from any items in Outlook (be it emails, appointments or tasks), with a single click or on its own through automation. These are all achieved, by leveraging your existing investment in Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 suite. There is no requirement to install a PDF printer driver or a third party library or Adobe Acrobat application.
In its new avatar, Document Exporter is a lot more than just being a PDF converter. Once you convert an email to PDF or other document format, generated PDF files of the email and attachments can be named with the metadata information contained in the email item itself, such as date, sender, receiver, subject, etc. This way you don’t even need to input and key in the name of the document.
Document Exporter can also convert the underlying attachments of the email to PDF. You have the choice to output each individual attachment to a separate PDF file, or merge all attachments into a single PDF file where each attachment is joined to one another, or merge the email along with the attachments to a single PDF file such that, each attachment is joined and appended to the email PDF. However, the support for converting attachment to PDF depends on the file format of the attachment. Most of the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Web or simply plain text file formats are supported. Here is a list of different file formats supported for converting to PDF: docx, docm, doc, dot, dotx, dot, htm, html, mht, mhtl, rtf, txt, odt, wpd, wps, xl, xlsx, xlsm, xlsb, xlam, xltx, xltm, xls, xlt, xla, xlm, xlw, odc, uxdc, ods, csv, prn, pptx, ppt, pptm, ppsx, pps, ppsm, potx, pot, potm, odp, bmp, gif, png, jpg, jpeg, tif, tiff, pcx, psd
One unique feature of Document Exporter that sets it apart from other PDF converter tool for Outlook is in its support to export emails to other popular document formats such as Microsoft own, XPS (*.xps) and Word Documents (*.docx, *.doc), Rich Text (*.rtf), Open Document (*.odt) and Web archive (*.mht). There are five ways of generating PDF and other document formats from Outlook items:
Convert individual Outlook item
Batch convert multiple Outlook items
Append Outlook items to an existing PDF file
Merge multiple Outlook items into one file
Automatically convert new incoming emails
One recent feature addition is the real-time generation of PDF or other document formats from incoming emails. This works by setting Document Exporter add-in to monitor an Outlook folder or mailbox, for new emails. So, when a new incoming email hits the folder or mailbox, Document Exporter automatically processes it to generate PDF or other documents, without any intervention from the user. Now, you can easily maintain a parallel copy or backup of your current Outlook items.
You can also opt to maintain a single PDF file for an Outlook folder or mailbox, such that every new Outlook item received or added to the folder or mailbox will be automatically appended over this single PDF file, containing iteration of pages just like an e-book. This entire process will appear seamless to the user, and you will have a PDF file that has the latest update of your Outlook folder or mailbox.
Finally, you have complete control over the PDF document generation through the Output settings panel. You can customize the default file naming scheme by choosing your own metadata fields, specify the attachments output behavior, choose single or multiple PDF merge options and modify the page setup and layout etc.
The latest release of Document Exporter add-in is version 6 and works with Outlook 2007 and 2010 (32 bit). I have also composed a 15 minutes video demonstration on its capabilities on Outlook 2010, which is now available on the product website. If you have any opinions, feedback or questions on this product, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me at bahrur dot ipham at assistmyteam dot net.
One of the much anticipated feature which was frequently requested, is now finally implemented in Team Helpdesk for Outlook. Helpdesk Service days and hours feature enables manager and administrator to specify the service days and hours optionally, their helpdesk operates. With this mechanism, any automatic assignment of due date to support cases, including those triggered by an enforced Service Level Agreement (SLA), would be dynamically adjusted to fall within the service days and hours (if specified). By default, service day start from Monday and ends at Saturday. You can choose the service starting and ending days as per your helpdesk requirement.
Once a service days and hours are specified, due date assignment will take note of the helpdesk unavailability accordingly. When specifying a SLA to a support case, the response time would be added to the current date/time, plus any helpdesk off-hours such that, the due date is always set within the service hours band. So, no longer you or other technicians would be sent due date lapsed or SLA breach automated notifications and alerts in off hours of the helpdesk.
Another new addition to version 6.5 is the licensing mode for up to 5 technician seats. Often, I had been approached by many users looking out for a helpdesk solution based on Outlook, if there was any special version of Team Helpdesk, for fewer teams, such 3 or 5. The cost of the enterprise license for unlimited seats is beyond their reach. After looking out for such user base, I am happy to announce the availability of a limited license version for Team Helpdesk for Outlook. This license can used to deploy Team Helpdesk up to 5 technicians. The cost of this license is fixed at 750 USD, one time payment, life validity. This includes a year support and maintenance support subscription. As I write, this license is now available on our web store. Related to licensing is the bumping of 1 year Support and Maintenance contract for the Enterprise license to 3 years, without any increment to the cost. Of course, this offer is available for a limited time. For more on this limited license option and the 3 years Support Contract offer, refer to the purchase page at http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamHelpdesk/Purchase.asp
With the growing amount of emails and enforced limits on mailbox sizes, today’s organization needs an environment to effectively manage these information assets and apply the appropriate retention policies for emails containing company records. SharePoint is the ideal platform to facilitate this requirement, and no wonder, many organizations are adopting it to manage and share documents from a central location.
On the users’ side, publishing documents to SharePoint from the latest version of Microsoft Office applications had never been easier. However, SharePoint integration in Microsoft Outlook still leaves a lot to be desired, as it makes it very hard and inconvenient for users to publish contents from their personal mailbox to SharePoint. For instance, it is nearly impossible to upload and publish emails selectively to a SharePoint list, from Outlook. Even if you do manage to succeed, you will certainly find that most of the required metadata information did not make it to SharePoint. If the Outlook items have custom fields, they would certainly be skipped or ignored in SharePoint. What good is SharePoint integration in Outlook, when you can’t figure out an easier way to push emails and other data from Outlook to SharePoint conveniently! The process of capturing and publishing of business contents from personal mailboxes and public folders has become a core issue for most organizations, as they come to rely on SharePoint for storage, retrieval, search and collaboration on documents enterprise wide.
To cut the discussion short, we have a solution that addresses the shortcoming of SharePoint integration in Outlook with our latest release – Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint. This exists as an add-in process in Microsoft Outlook and is designed to provide enterprise users a means to bring contents from their Outlook to SharePoint, without needing you to be a techie or programmer. In other words, Data Publisher extends your Microsoft Outlook to effectively act as a content provider for your enterprise SharePoint repository.
All you need to do, is associate one or more SharePoint lists to each Outlook folder, or to a particular Outlook item type such as mail, appointment, task or contact. If you choose the former, the configured SharePoint lists will be visible to that folder exclusively and items from the particular folder can only be published to one of the associated lists. For the latter, the configured SharePoint lists will be available in the common pool, which means, any mail items in Outlook from any folder or stores can be published to one of this common SharePoint list. Associating SharePoint lists at the folder level exposes Data Publisher to custom fields that you might have defined in a customized Outlook form, on that particular folder. This means, data from both inbuilt fields and custom fields will be available in SharePoint list items, when published. So, if you need to include information from custom fields to be made available in SharePoint, you will choose the folder level association with SharePoint lists.
Mapping fields between Outlook and SharePoint
Before you can publish any items from Outlook to SharePoint, you will also need to decide or choose the SharePoint fields that will store the value extracted from the Outlook fields. This is easily done in Data Publisher with the mapping tool. With this, you can map the fields between Outlook and SharePoint, enabling minute control on what data is being published to SharePoint. Besides the standard inbuilt fields of the Outlook item type, you can also include any number of user defined fields. This mapping feature also allows you to dynamically create new field of the relevant data type in the SharePoint list, so that you can associate it with an Outlook field. These are the least settings required to be able to start publishing.
Choose to which SharePoint list the selected Outlook items will be published to
You publish items from Outlook to SharePoint by simply clicking the ‘Quick Publish’, in which case, it will be published to the default SharePoint list that is set in the settings panel. If you have multiple SharePoint lists configured, simply choose one of the lists from the ‘Publish To’ drop down menu. With this arrangement, you can easily file and publish emails, attachments, appointments, tasks or contacts to SharePoint, without worrying for loss of metadata.
This is how the Outlook item looks like after successful publishing to SharePoint
This is how the published item in SharePoint will look like
What if you want Outlook to perform the publishing of items to SharePoint automatically, without requiring any input from your side? Yes, Data Publisher will let you do this automation in Outlook. How? Data Publisher can monitor any number of Outlook folders real-time, to automatically publish incoming mails or newly added appointments, tasks or contact items to a SharePoint list of your choosing. Such automation comes very handy and useful, in maintaining a parallel copy or backup of your current Outlook items in SharePoint. This spares you from having to do that laborious work of copying and pasting the data from Outlook to SharePoint manually.
Automatically publish Outlook items to SharePoint
One of the core designs in Data Publisher add-in for Outlook, is the user experience – making it very easy and effortless to publish your mails, appointments, tasks or contacts from Outlook to SharePoint manually or on the fly. And because SharePoint is ideal for sharing documents and collaboration, Data Publisher can be adapted and used for variety of content management purposes in SharePoint:
For filing trouble tickets to an issue tracking SharePoint list from Outlook emails, so that tickets can be collaborated and assigned to relevant technicians in SharePoint accessible by all members of your support team.
For submitting personal time sheets from Outlook calendar on work done, to a SharePoint calendar list.
For submitting meetings and schedules from Outlook calendar to a SharePoint Calendar list
For publishing attachments and emails (as .msg) on document libraries
For email retention and archival purpose in SharePoint
Data Publisher is currently available for free. If you want to learn more, you can refer to the product home page – http://www.assistmyteam.net/DataPublisherSP/. A team edition is also under development.
You can also watch this 20 minutes video demonstration on ‘Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint’ in action.
In an effort to help professors, scientists, researchers and staffs to take advantage of their organization’s investment in Microsoft Office, Exchange and SharePoint, AssistMyteam SMB Solutions has launched the Acadamic Programme for educational institutions and universities. The Programme allows the Institution the right to use an unlimited number of my products for educational purposes, free of charge, with surprisingly little bureaucracy! This includes the enterprise groupware products such as Team Helpdesk, Team TimeSheet and Team Publisher. The programme can cover any disciplines and departments, engineering, science or arts course. It will come in force starting 1st May 2011. More instructions would be posted on this blog soon.
The following products will be offered for FREE licenses:
Document Exporter for Outlook
Document Exporter for Internet Explorer
Attachment Manager for Outlook
Database Exporter for Outlook
OLAP Statistics & Reporting for Outlook
OLAP Statistics & Reporting for SharePoint
OLAP Statistics & Reporting for Access
Team KB for Outlook
Team Helpdesk for Outlook
Team Helpdesk for Outlook & SharePoint
Team TimeSheet for Outlook
Team TimeSheet for Outlook & SharePoint
Team Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint
Having been in this ISV business for a year, there is a thing or two to celebrate – because with the financial year end, our premium clients with enterprise licenses have now crossed 100 (102 to be precises as of today). Total licenses sold during the financial year stands at 368, of which 102 are enterprise license, and rest personal licenses. Of the 102 enterprise licenses acquired, 9 comes under the Non-Profit License scheme, and were granted to educational institutions, universities and other non-profit organizations around the world.
Premium clients list with enterprise licenses now updated on the website:
Danfoss India Pvt. Ltd
University of Cambridge
Hunter Water Australia
SOS-Kinderdorf International
Tometich Engineering, Inc
KTH Sales, Inc.
Commonwealth of Kentucky
Daily Legal News, Cleveland
Diserio Martin O’Connor & Castiglioni LLP
Library of Congress
Res Consortium Ltd
Ingersoll-Rand plc, Dublin, Ireland
JTM Clinical Services, LLC, Hilliard
City of Thornton
Weeks Marine, Inc., Cranford
iiNet Australia
Creative State, Tulsa
Jenson Pharmaceutical Services Ltd
Amtac Professional Services, Australia
The Codemasters Software Company Limited
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Nooter Corporation
National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA)
New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
CenturyTel, Inc
DCI Cheese Company
Sonic.net, Inc., Santa Rosa
CSC Holdings, LLC.
Correctional Healthcare Companies
Lifespan, Providence
Arcor Germany
Medisse BV, Netherlands
Danfoss Australia Pty Ltd
INITSOL, Germany
Elkonor, Norway
Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, Canada
Blycolin, Netherlands
Hestia Housing & Support, UK
Professional Computer Systems
GBSYS, S.A.
Notore Chemical Industries
Dynamix Consulting Corp.
Thybar – Roof Curb Products
Bridge Betriebsdaten AG
Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene
Peachtree Special Risk Brokers
Polycor Inc.
Austrian Development Cooperation
WEAVEonline
Turf Care Products Canada Limited
Tidsam AB
Wells Fargo
Orange
Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE)
James Madison University
INSEAD The Business School for the World
The Financial Services School, Queensland
AGIL Freight Logistics Group
Bryan, Pendleton, Swats & McAllister, LLC
Virgin Media, UK
eircom Limited, Dublin
Vestil Manufacturing
CFP Solutions Limited, UK
CenturyTel, Inc
Aerial Cartographics of America, Inc
LogIn, Inc
Columbia University, City of New York
Merial Ltd
Buck Consultants, LLC
Widerøe Internet AS
Marcuard Family Office Ltd
Bell Canada
Shaw Communications
Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd
ProSys, Inc
FUJITSU United States
Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Houston, Texas
IMPACT INDUSTRIAL SERVICES, Indianapolis
Justified Type
The INSEAD
Florida Tourism Industry Marketing Corporation
GMX International
Mailing Services of Pittsburgh (MSP)
Hindustan Engineering
Sibcy Cline Realtors®
Swan Analytische Instrumente AG
The Kroger Co.
Austrian Development Cooperation (ADC)
Valassis Communications, Inc
Fire Creek Resources Ltd.
MASS Precision, Inc
Glenwood, Inc
Camber Corporation
SOS Children’s Villages International
North Star, Minnesota State Government Online
Community Care Access Centre (CCAC)
Curtis & Green LLP
Watervliet City Council
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ)
The last blog I had written was on my issue tracking and ticketing system (i.e., Team Helpdesk for Outlook), based on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server. When implemented on an enterprise network (as groupware), this add-in solution aids in providing timely response and resolution to end-users queries, something which is very critical to the success of the business, in long run.
My latest release is a variant of the issue tracking system (known as Team Helpdesk for Outlook & SharePoint), that is based and integrated on three commonly used environments in most IT workhouses – Microsoft Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint. Designed to be deployed on an enterprise level, this add-in can drastically reduce the workload of the typical help desk technicians or agents, through automation, accurate logging and tracking of tickets. In this help desk system, the support tickets are stored in both Exchange (either a public folder or a shared mailbox) and in SharePoint (in a list). The idea is to provide technicians and support staffs access to their assigned tickets through the comfort of Microsoft Outlook or SharePoint site. The SharePoint integration is seamless to the users, as is in Microsoft Outlook, facilitating remote technicians and other stakeholders to view, track and work on support request in a web browser, thus realizing the benefits of the help desk company-wide.
As this is based on Exchange & SharePoint, it is highly scalable, and requires less or no special maintenance efforts. The advantages are high rate of user adoption, (because of their familiarity with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint) and little or no special skill sets requirement.
The flowchart below, pretty much sums up the processes involved:
You have a business that you aim one day to grow and be profitable. If you are one person support team and have fewer customers, sure, you can provide resolution to their grievances by writing or speaking to them, without logging the details of the customer and nor documenting the nature of the problem. However, what happens if you have a large customer base? Of course, there will be multiple support staffs attending to high number of support requests. How would each one of them remember who sent what and who needs what? How would John know that Monica has already resolved this particular customer’s issue? How would you prevent them from working on the same issue concurrently to avert duplicate effort? What if Monica solved an issue virtually identical to a separate issue John is currently working on? How would John know this issue has been already resolved, so he could use this information to reply to the customer’s issue ? For strategic decisions and intelligence, senior managers would certainly like to know how many times has this particular problem come up for this particular product? How long has this problem been an issue for them?
It is said that success of a business is measured against the level of customer satisfaction on sales and services. In fact, the higher the customer satisfaction is, the repeated business it creates. This is one of the key reason why successful enterprises have a dedicated help-desk team or call centers to caters to the queries and grievances of their customer base. But what makes a help-desk team productive and successful? Well for sure, choosing the right helpdesk system is the first step that can make all the difference.
But how do you arrive to the decision of choosing a particular helpdesk system? Do you need a helpdesk database system that works standalone within your local network? Or do you need a web based helpdesk to enable your scattered support personnel to work on troubled tickets? Or do you require a helpdesk that make uses of your existing email infrastructure such as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange?
Typically, an ideal helpdesk system should support the organizations’ internal logic and workflows, integrates easily and leverage existing infrastructures, caters to the support technicians on the move, enables automation and processing based on customizable rules and most importantly, should be easy to use with little or no training requirement. This is where a helpdesk system based on email client such as Microsoft Outlook scores over other type of support systems. This is because in most businesses, most support staffs use Outlook extensively – all day, every day for email communications, appointments, contacts, tasks etc. As they have relied that heavily on Outlook, it is only natural for them to turn Outlook to a sort of a ticketing system to support requests and calls from customers. Moreover, as Outlook provides quick access to company’s contacts, address books, mailboxes and public folders stored on a central Exchange server, it makes it much easier for support personals to track, collaborate and log support requests in Outlook.
So Microsoft Outlook is a great productivity office application, something more of an indispensable companion for many businesses. However, Outlook itself is highly optimized for personal email exchange often falling short when it comes to providing a complete history of an event over time. When an email has been forwarded on to another helpdesk team member, the original owner loses insight into the progress. This has a serious implication, that is, in its original state, Outlook simply lacks the automation, reporting, reminders, and workflow to manage a support ticket request, which is critical for growing helpdesks looking to optimize and uniformly improve support staff/customer interactions.
This is where ‘Team Helpdesk for Outlook’, a plug-in application that I developed two years back, completes the picture. Team Helpdesk overcomes the limitations mentioned above by extending your Outlook as an ideal platform to collect, track and resolve trouble tickets while sharing this information with your entire team. It does this by bringing help desk functionality and automation, and integrating seamlessly with the easy workflow of Outlook. This allows support team to work in the same way they do with emails, something which they are already familiar with. It also adds integration with fixed phones, Skype or SMS gateways to facilitate relaying helpdesk response over these phone or SMS.
Designed as a groupware, Team Helpdesk, when used with a public folder or shared mailbox (with Microsoft Exchange, that is), provides a way for multiple support team to work in collaboration on a number of issues. Monica resolves an issue, marks it closed, and John can search though all of the resolved issues to see if the problem he’s working on has already been resolved. John can also find out how the problem was fixed and use this solution to solve his issue.
By enabling assignment of a particular support agent to work on an issue, Team Helpdesk helps you to ensure your helpdesk staffs are not unnecessarily duplicating effort – John and Monica are not both separately working on Mr. Francas ‘s printing issue at the same time without knowing the other is working on it.
The Ongoing Cases subfolder in Team Helpdesk System in Outlook
The support case form used for logging new support request assistance from customer in Outlook
Another major obstacle many support staffs face is the lack of clarity and overall picture of the reported issue. Most support requests cannot be closed within a single e-mail and response. Feedback from the caller and suggestions from the respective support staffs often occur over multiple request-response emails. Moreover, different members from the support teams may provide resolutions during the course of the request. So, in practical scenario, a support case might have various e-mail versions of the resolution steps, making it cumbersome to get a complete picture of responses and resolution. With the conversation threading feature, Team Helpdesk captures the complete course of the conversation chronologically, from all email communications received or sent (including those automated notifications sent to caller and technicians in due course). The end result is a consolidated view where all the responses to a support request are collated together. Redundant and repeated conversations are filtered out to present only the relevant communications.
The Conversation Threading view of all email communications that had taken place on a particular case
This eases the task of the helpdesk and minimizes repeating what has already been done, while keeping support team members to stay on the track. Another advantage is it allows the technician to quickly glimpse through the thread and get a complete overview on the responses in chronological order and resolution applied to the particular support request, something which is hard to extract from viewing multiple email responses.
Another useful information that senior managements can tract and extract from Team Helpdesk is trend analysis. Let’s say you get a lot of support requests on how to rectify papers getting jammed inside printer. By running statistics or searching through the resolved cases, you can articulate how often this particular topic needs assistance. If you find support requests received on this particular issue rampant in the past, you may decide to create a knowledge base article on the problem and publish this KB on your support website. This would, in turn, serves as a first level support service to customers. Therefore, without a helpdesk system to track these types of questions, you would never be able to figure out which knowledge base articles or frequently asked questions need to be published.
Team Helpdesk works great when automated. You can put your customer service online 24/7, even after office hours or holidays. You can install the managerial tool of Team Helpdesk in your windows server (as it runs 24/7 non-stop) or you can simply designate a particular workstation that is pretty much 24/7. With this arrangement, Team Helpdesk can continue to monitor your support mailbox, without any human intervention and generate tickets out of incoming emails automatically, assign technicians and notify callers and technicians with ticket number allotment with emails or as a SMS message to their mobile devices.
Support request received via emails seldom contain basic details on the nature of the issue. And often, there is a back-and-forth communications that goes between the helpdesk and the customer, in just try get hold of these information, long before the technician can start resolving it. With the Team Helpdesk Customer Web Service website, you can guide a customer in the way they report their problem to the helpdesk. By having required fields such as the model number of the printer, brand and driver version, etc. you not only cut down the communication loops, but also put in place a structured format of logging new support cases in the helpdesk system automatically.
As you can see, there is no excuse really not to have some kind of helpdesk functionality for any kind of business that involves an end-user. Even if you have a small business and are managing the support requests yourself, you will find some kind of helpdesk ticketing advantageous to use. For enterprise business, you will find helpdesk system an absolute necessity in order to save time, money, and effort tracking your support request issues, as well as to enable collaboration, eliminate duplication of effort and documenting problem resolutions for reuse.
The publication of this blog incidentally, falls in the same period as the release of version 6 of Team Helpdesk for Outlook. Version 6 added three main features which are described in this 6 minutes video tour
If you are interested in learning more, or even evaluating it for a free 60 days trial, you are welcome. Just visit the product home page at http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamHelpdesk/
I have been working on Business Intelligence and OLAP technologies for more than 3 years, extensively. Initially the very sound of it, gives jitter or boredom, and it was a less favorite subject during my academic year. When I enter the workforce after my masters’, never did I expect to work on OLAP extensively as part of my new job. But with time, I soon find myself digging more into OLAP technologies and eventually, became a love affair, and till today resonates in my entrepreneurial pursuit. In fact, every enterprise products that I have developed on Microsoft Office, Exchange and SharePoint platforms integrate an inbuilt OLAP solution to analyze business data and generate reports, that fits every level of management and accounting requirements.
Okay, now to the purpose of this blog, the new release of ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting tool for SharePoint list‘. For those of you, who are not aware of my products portfolio, I also have two other OLAP tools – one for Microsoft Outlook and the other for Microsoft Access. Each of this OLAP tool is designed to serve a purpose, which is to extract business intelligence out of the Outlook or Access data.
Before digging down more on the new OLAP tool for SharePoint, let me put forward the reasons on why these specific OLAP tools were developed in the first place.
For Outlook, there is hardly any specific OLAP tool that one can use to analyze Outlook data. To some extent, one can use Outlook views of presenting information in a more obvious way in folder, but it does not give you the summarized data that one needs often, to see broader trends based on aggregation, and to see these trends broken down by any number of variables. This leads to the development of what is now known as ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting for Outlook‘.
For Access database, there is no inbuilt OLAP tool in Access that one can use to analyze aggregated and summarized data. Traditional query (Or OLTP) is slow in aggregation task, provides limited interactivity, and reporting is well suited to handle textual information mostly. Moreover, complex calculation are oftem difficult to implement. In short, there are major drawbacks with regards to answering, analysis and reporting with Access database. One can use Microsoft Excel to create an OLAP cube, and analyze it. But the process is cumbersome, and present a learning curve, for average workers and managers. The absence of a simple, and yet productive OLAP tool for Microsoft Access database leads to the development of what is now known as ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting for Access‘.
OK, now coming to the new OLAP tool for SharePoint list. SharePoint can store business data in lists, such as meetings, time-sheets, contacts, tasks, announcements, sales transactions etc. The main purpose of storing it on SharePoint list is to enable sharing among team members in organizations, which is its selling point. However, one of its weak point is the absence of any inbuilt OLAP tool to analyze data in the list. Due to this limitation, often managers find themselves spending a lot of time and resource in exporting data to spreadsheet, and performing manual computation and parsing. Some even use specialized data professionals, web parts and a dozen different software packages, just to produce simple reports. Worst, if the report doesn’t have the required information, you will have to start over, wasting precious time.
As there is a time and expense involved in getting answers from SharePoint lists, a lot of business intelligence information often goes unused, due to the fact that, SharePoint is designed to store data, and not to help you analyze it. This leads to the development of ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint‘, to let you configure OLAP cube from your SharePoint lists, and then analyze and create reports straightaway, out of the box.
Summary: Product Title: OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint Home Page:http://www.assistmyteam.net/OLAPStatisticsSP/ Requirements: OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint works with WSS 2.0, 3.0, MOSS 2007 and the latest SharePoint 2010 Foundation and SharePoint 2010 Server. And yes, you need to have .NET framework 2.0 installed on the system to be able to play with my OLAP tool.
I have also put up a 9 minutes video demonstration to give you a brief walk-through on how to use OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint.
With the widespread adoption of SharePoint for intranet and portal services, many organizations store useful lists of information, including announcements, contacts, events, tasks, issues, meetings and custom lists for other types of information to SharePoint. And as workers with the appropriate permission can use Microsoft Excel or Access to view and edit data stored in lists on SharePoint from anywhere, it offers an excellent platform to share information, make use of information that is already published, and provide standardized lists of information that can be used throughout the organization.
Though workers can easily feed their time-sheet data directly in the company’s SharePoint portal, it is not an ideal technique at most time, such as when you are offline, you can’t keep track of your time-sheets. A viable solution is to use a bridging application such as Microsoft Outlook. In fact, as Outlook being the most extensively used application in a corporate environment – all day, every day for email communications, meetings and contacts makes it an ideal platform to prepare time-sheets for projects or for any entity via the calendar or task feature. Unfortunately Microsoft Outlook lacks a direct and an efficient solution to track time and expense in its original state. This is further aggravated with little support for a centralized management and distribution of projects, activities and other meta-data. But nevertheless, many workers resort to capturing time-sheet data from appointments and tasks in Outlook and feeding to an external data source manually (often crudely – using copy-paste technique).
Team TimeSheet for Outlook & SharePoint
Keeping this in mind, we have launched Team TimeSheet for Outlook and SharePoint, a groupware application, that leverages your existing investment in Microsoft Office and SharePoint, to make it very easy for your employees and staffs to prepare time-sheet and other project deliverable in Microsoft Outlook and publish to the company’s SharePoint repository.
With Team TimeSheet system, access to centralized project data are streamlined and automated in Outlook with the integration of the company’s project repository. This enables individual worker to prepare time-sheets, tag project meta-data, enter expenses and other deliverable from the familiar interface of Outlook appointment or task items. Once a time-sheet is finalized and ready, it is published to one of the administrator specified SharePoint list in just a single click. This submission process is seamlessly integrated in your Microsoft Outlook and the whole exercise is transparent to the worker. Managers can then use these submitted time-sheets for calculating expenses, payroll or billing on projects, clients or resources etc – to mention a few.
Outlook 2010 calendar with appointments color coded with projects. Ribbon shows time-sheet #11 already reported to SharePoint
This is how the published time-sheet #11 looks like in your SharePoint site (mapped to a calendar list). Notice the calculated total cost and other expenses as well as the project fields.
Our time-sheet reporting solution can be adapted easily to track, plan and calculate expense for payroll purposes, billing to clients, or simply to record and estimate expenditure on projects. What set it apart from other time reporting solution is the seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint. And as your workers are already familiar with Microsoft Outlook as they use most of the time, the advantages are maximum user adoption, minimum training time and administrative costs, and more importantly, streamlined process of reporting for all employees. The end result is a highly accurate and scalable solution for the organization.
Summary: Product: Team TimeSheet for Outlook and SharePoint Page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamTimeSheetSP/ Platforms: Microsoft Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010 – 32 bit only), WSS 2.0, WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010. Even supports SharePoint hosted on web or cloud, such as Microsoft BPOS) Scope: Groupware (Unlimited Users) License: Enterprise
We have provided 4 video demonstrations on Team TimeSheet for Outlook and SharePoint, covering administrative configuration, preparation of time-sheets in Outlook, publishing to SharePoint and finally, generating reports and statistics.
Video 1: Configure a Project Data source in SharePoint, Map Outlook fields to SharePoint list fields, add or change drop down list for Projects, Activities, Custom Fields and deploy to all members. Set hourly rates, reporting and notification options for all members.
Video 2: Establish Project Data source connection, choose own Projects and Activities, and reporting behavior in Outlook. Prepare timesheets, record time and expenses against configured projects, publish to SharePoint, make revisions or withdraw timesheet from SharePoint.
Video 3: Work with Team TimeSheet specific views in Outlook calendar and task folder, to ease recording, reporting and updating time and expenses information from Outlook. Present project information in Outlook in an understandable and intuitive way.
Video 4: Generate summarized and aggregated reports on different time interval, analyze timesheets data in multi-dimensional view with OLAP Statistics and Reporting tool and extract business intelligence.
bahrurBlog is written by Bahrur Rahman, founder and CEO of AssistMyTeam SMB Solutions. It contains information and insights on the products offering from AssistMyTeam SMB Solutions. You can also learn more about the founder's perspectives and ideas on efficient CRM, ERP and collaborative solutions based on Microsoft Office, Exchange and SharePoint platforms, to help drive the success of Small & Medium Businesses.
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