Seamless integration of SharePoint based Knowledge Base in Microsoft Outlook

 Information Retrieval Systems, Knowledge Base & Expert Systems, Team KB for Outlook & SharePoint  No Responses »
Feb 232012
 

It’s simple! Computers are so much engraved in today’s businesses, but in the end, the ultimate goal is all about maximizing knowledge wealth and enhancing human intelligence. And for any company, this acquired intelligence is the single most valuable asset. When such intelligence is utilized, shared and factored in, innovation and inventions take precedent, spiraling the business and profit level of the company. Therefore, in today’s competitive world, companies take a great deal of efforts to implement an effective knowledge retention and management policy, to prepare and compete for the future. This is where, a knowledge management system or what we popularly refer to as ‘knowledge base’ can make all the differences in aiding productivity and operational skills of the people of the company.

Besides, enabling knowledge retention for future, a knowledge base system can be effectively used for addressing recurring issues reported by your end-users. Consider a scenario, where you and your support team frequently find trying to solve the same issue over and over. Your end-users send you emails on similar issues repeatedly. And if you are already aware of the solution, typically, you will try to compose the solution or if you have vague recollection of it, you would try to navigate to your existing document libraries, past email conversations etc. Just consider how much time and effort you had wasted in trying to find the right information at the moment of need, not to mention the delayed response to the support request. If there was a knowledge base system at place in the organization, you could have shared your knowledge with other team members so that everyone has the same understanding and are communicating the same message when asked about specific issues.

There are many ways of implementing knowledge management systems. One of them is using Microsoft SharePoint repositories. In most cases, you might already have a SharePoint based site already running in your company’s network, or may be using one of the hosted SharePoint services, such Microsoft Office 365, which is becoming quite popular for small businesses. And we already know, one of the great capabilities of SharePoint is its collaborative and sharing feature. This makes it very versatile for storing knowledge base articles, which can be shared among the staffs and personals, especially those involve in customer service.

However, there is one crippling limitation of SharePoint based knowledge base, which is its isolation state and lack of integration with email clients such as Microsoft Outlook. This is at disadvantage for customer support team that relies on email as the primary mode of communication. Because when a support request email is received, support staff would need to refer to the SharePoint site and search for the relevant knowledge base article, and if they manage to find it, there is no direct and effective way of using that article along with its associated documents and files in the email reply. One can copy the content from the KB article to the email, however, that is time consuming and cumbersome, and often not all information and files make it to the email. So, after putting much effort and time, you still didn’t get the complete KB article inserted into the email reply. Moreover, the frequent switching back and forth between the email client and SharePoint site tends to loosen the focus of the support staff, leaving him/her frustrated. Evidently, organizations and teams that leverage SharePoint as knowledge base would need to reinvent the wheel and implement an efficient way of importing SharePoint based article or document, to outgoing email reply.

Because of such limitation in SharePoint based knowledge base system, it made me thinking on how to bridge this gap and come up with a solution that offers a seamless integration of the SharePoint based KB articles in Microsoft Outlook. The effort of this work leads to the development of an Microsoft Outlook add-in, called ‘Team KnowledgeBase for Outlook & SharePoint‘. Currently available as a beta offering, with Team KnowledgeBase installed, one can effortlessly locate a KB article (stored on SharePoint) relevant to an issue from within Outlook itself, and insert it into an outgoing email reply in a single click. All these and more making sure, the outgoing email retains all the actual files and the original formatting of the selected KB article. No more frequent switching between Outlook and SharePoint, no more copy-paste job etc. In fact, you don’t even need to type in anything into the email reply. Team KnowledgeBase add-in does that for you on the fly.

There are two portions of Team KnowledgeBase – an admin install and a user install. The former is for managers and administrators, who would perform the global configuration of the knowledge base, choose and setup SharePoint KB lists, and map fields between Outlook and SharePoint, whereas the later is for individual support staff that will be making use of the KB articles stored in one or more of the administrator chosen SharePoint lists, from Outlook. Even though KB articles are stored on your SharePoint list, every user can make use of it in Microsoft Outlook to reply to emails in a snap.

A pop-up dialog box allows you to browse through the existing knowledge base articles, and select the relevant article to be embedded either as attachment, inline or as URL into the email reply.

You can make use of a filter, to refine your search. For example, you can display the KB articles listing by specifying a problem category and/or a type. Alternative, you can also specify keywords for a full text search such that matching KB articles that meet the criteria are only displayed, for selection. Selected KB article can be applied or inserted into the replied email in varied format.

You can choose to insert as attachment in the form of a word document (*.doc), Adobe PDF (*.pdf), Microsoft XPS (*.xps) or as single file MHTML (*.mht).


You can also embed the selected KB article directly into the body of the email reply. Any inline images and formatting are preserved in its original state in the reply also.

Alternatively, if your SharePoint site is opened (i.e., accessible via the web), then you can also insert the hyperlink or URL of the selected KB article into the reply, so that the recipient can simply click the hyperlink to open the relevant article in their web browser.

The good thing about a SharePoint based knowledge base system is the accessibility, not only for the staffs, but also for the end users. Over time, the knowledge base repository would have enough solutions on common problems and issues. You can exploit this wealth of knowledge, by allowing your SharePoint knowledge base site accessible on the web. Such that your end-users and customers experiencing technical challenges can self-service the answer to their problem by accessing this web-based knowledge base. They can even make use of the SharePoint inbuilt search functionality to query KB articles by keywords. This can eliminate unnecessary phone calls and allows your customers to quickly get answers to questions and maximize the use of your knowledge base.

On the cost front, as Team KnowledgeBase leverages your existing Outlook and SharePoint resources, there is no extra hardware/software cost that you will have to incur in implementing an enterprise-wide knowledge base for your team. As your team members are already familiar with Outlook, there is no requirement for any elaborate training, further lowering the cost. As you have network and SharePoint administrators in place, you don’t require dedicated personnel for maintenance. And the bigger advantage, in long-term, is the reduced number of inbound customer support questions, which will reduce the amount of time it takes to respond to support issues. This can reduce the number of support engineers needed, thereby reducing costs to your support desk at the long run.

Product Summary:
Name: Team KnowledgeBase for Outlook and SharePoint
Product site: http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamKnowledgeBaseSP/

Video: Administrative Configuration


Video: Using KB articles to reply to emails in Outlook

Posted by Bahrur Rahman at 12:41 PM  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part II

 Helpdesk & Issue Tracking, Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint, Knowledge Base & Expert Systems  No Responses »
Feb 012012
 

(This is the second part of the previously published blog ‘Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part I’. You can find the first part here)

I wonder how a support team can work together and collaborate on issues without some form of tracking and ticketing mechanism put in place in the organization. And lately, with SharePoint becoming as a preferred repository for sharing documents and enabling collaboration among staffs and workers from within or outside the organization’s network, I am seeing a trend for IT managers to make good use of the inbuilt Issue Tracking template in their SharePoint list, to meet their basic ticket recording and tracking requirements. Well, no doubt, Microsoft SharePoint is very powerful and popular. Just like a sculptor producing a piece of art-work from a raw wood, in the hand of a creative designer, SharePoint can be molded into doing anything they want it to do or, sort of. However, to be that something useful, it requires a good level of customization. And that’s where the problem and its potential pitfall lie. Because, without extensive experience and skills, there is no way one can build the logic of their helpdesk application and integrate their in-house workflows such as importing tickets from Outlook emails into SharePoint. In fact, SharePoint development is a huge business with hundreds of consultants or ‘third parties’ delivering web-parts, add-ons and other SharePoint customizations. And yes, it is certainly an expensive investment.

Well, a SharePoint based issue tracking system is useless if there is no easy way of sourcing and tracking ticket information from emails stored on your Outlook. Further, most trouble tickets cannot be resolved within a single e-mail and response. Feedback from the end-user and suggestions from other technicians or stakeholders often occur and lead to multiple request-response emails in Microsoft Outlook. Moreover, different members from the support teams may provide resolutions during the course of the request. So, in practical scenario, a trouble ticket might have various e-mail versions of the resolution steps, and the ticket should reflect the compete snapshot of these responses and resolutions. The question is, how will these emails from Outlook get updated to the ticket item in your SharePoint list? This is where our expertise and solutions comes into the picture to fill this glaring void! With our Outlook add-in (Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint), you can establish and maintain a live connection between your email clients (Microsoft Outlook) to your SharePoint lists, such that, you are able to simply press a button to raise and log a trouble ticket from the selected email to your Issue Tracking SharePoint list. The generated ticket item in SharePoint will inherit metadata information from the email or sender, such as name, email address, phone number, address, problem description, attachments, and any number of custom fields, your administrator might have deployed.

You may think, just clicking a button to raise a ticket from an email to a destination SharePoint list is a big leap in the efficiency of the helpdesk. However, in a typical service desk environment, where the email is the main medium of correspondence, there is a feel of a ‘disconnect’ between the technicians and the ticket tracking system. The reason being a technician has to manually create and log in new trouble ticket from email and this can be a major drawback if there is considerable emails traffic. Moreover, during off hours, weekends or holidays, support emails will remain unattended in your mailbox, increasing the anxiety and frustration of curious callers. It can increase response time affecting the overall performance of the help desk. So, an ideal issue tracker system should provide a way to automatically log a trouble ticket from an email and assign the appropriate technician who has the relevant skill to resolve it.

This is precisely why our Issue Tracker add-in is designed to operate in automation mode based on administrator defined ticketing workflow. When certain mailboxes or mail-enabled public folders are configured for automation, Issue Tracker will intercept incoming emails and automatically raise trouble tickets to the specified SharePoint list. Contact information is automatically extracted and populated from the emails along with the problem description into the tickets. The generated tickets will also inherit the default problem category, type, status or technician defined for that mailbox/folder in the workflow. As a consequence, automated emails of assignment will also be sent out to the technician. So, no longer you need to manually monitor your mailbox for support requests. Issue Tracker does that all for you in a blink, enabling you to focus and concentrate on resolving the ticket rather than spending on the technicalities of ticketing process. This helps to improve the efficiency, and response time of your helpdesk team.

You’ll be wrong to think that the functionality of an Issue Tracker system ends with the capture and logging of trouble tickets. In fact, the real purpose of an Issue tracker system is to enable tracking of a ticket over several communication loops and responses. But when you and other technicians start working on resolving to your assigned trouble tickets stored in SharePoint lists, unless you have managed to create some specialized web parts and workflows, most likely you would be unable to respond to the caller or other stakeholder from within SharePoint, or set SharePoint to send out notification alerts to the caller or the technician on the ticket progress and escalation. So, what do you do? Open up Outlook and get back to the caller, and when caller replies back, you again update that information into the ticket in SharePoint. Well, just imagine how laborious and manual procedure it is, switching back and forth between Outlook and SharePoint! And not to mention, the risk of making erroneous entry. Our Issue Tracker add-in in Microsoft Outlook overcomes this limitation, by monitoring and tracking incoming or outgoing emails associated with a trouble ticket and accordingly updates the corresponding ticket on the fly.

Talking about the Outlook and SharePoint integration, when the time arises to edit or re-assign to another technician, or add a comment to a ticket, normally, you would do that directly from the SharePoint site. Another way of doing this is from the comfort of your Outlook itself. You can simply select or open the email from which a ticket was raised previously, and press the ‘Edit Ticket’ button and that would allow you to easily edit or update the data into the ticket or add new comment without using your web browser and searching for the particular ticket list item amongst the lot. You can add comments, hours of work done, reschedule the due date and update the status, mark it resolved, in just a single click. If the ticket had been resolved already, and if the caller contacts the helpdesk to inform about the problem resurfacing again, you will have to reopen the ticket. In such a case, you can un-check the ‘Mark As Resolved’ option and update the ticket. Doing so, it will trigger a case reopening notification alert, which Issue Tracker add-in will send out to the assigned technician.


Would not it be nice, if you were to be able to see all the tickets that were assigned to you, from Outlook, and even work and update the ticket from within? From the ‘My Tickets’ panel, the tickets assigned to you are listed in tabular form with detail information on other columns. When you select a ticket from the list, based on the state of the ticket (ongoing or resolved), the actions and tasks that can be performed on the ticket are enabled. From within your Outlook, you can quickly reply to the caller, choose a relevant KB article to embed to the reply, forward to a third person or stakeholder, edit and comment to the ticket, mark as resolved or reopen or delete the ticket and more.

If you are the manager, and are assigning the ticket to a technician, Issue Tracker will automatically send out notification alert on the ticket assignment to the technician, and insert due date appointment to the technician’s default calendar as well. Optionally, Issue Tracker will also add or update the due date information of the ticket into an administrator specified dedicated SharePoint calendar.

Your end-users may send you emails on similar issues repeatedly. It is typical of any support team to frequently find themselves trying to solve the same issue time and again. And if you are already aware of the solution, typically, you will try to compose the solution or if you have vague recollection of it, you would try to navigate to your existing document libraries, past emails etc. Just imagine how much time and effort you had wasted in trying to find the right information at the moment of need, not to mention the delayed response to the support request. You wish you could share your knowledge on a centralized information system with other team members so that everyone has the same understanding and are communicating the same message when asked about specific issues! One of the important goals of implementing an issue tracking system in an organization is to minimize the occurrence of recurring issues from their end-users. Our Issue Tracker system includes an integrated Knowledge Base system that allows your helpdesk team to document best practices and solutions to common problems, in the form of KB articles stored on a dedicated SharePoint list. A Question and Answer format is used to intuitively display KB articles. Each article may have any number of file attachments associated, rich-text elements, and hyperlinks to other web pages. All articles are tagged with a related problem category and problem type, so it is easy to find a particular resolution at time of needs.

So, the question is how can technician make use these knowledge base articles in replying to emails? Well, individual technician even need not go back and forth between the email (Outlook) and the KB articles (SharePoint). In the Issue Tracker toolbar or ribbon in Outlook, there are KB buttons, which the technician can use to choose one of this relevant KB article directly for replying to tickets or emails.

A dialog window allows the technicians to browse through the existing knowledge base articles, and select the relevant article to be embedded either as attachment, inline or as URL into the email reply.

Selected KB article can be applied or inserted into the replied email in varied format. You can choose to insert as attachment in the form of a word document (*.doc), Adobe PDF (*.pdf), Microsoft XPS (*.xps) or as single file MHTML (*.mht). You can also embed the selected KB article directly into the body of the email reply. Any inline images and formatting are preserved in its original state in the reply also. Alternatively, if your SharePoint site is opened (i.e., accessible via the web), then you can also insert the hyperlink or URL of the selected KB article into the reply, so that the recipient can simply click the hyperlink to open the relevant article in their web browser.

As these knowledge base articles reside in your SharePoint server, you can allow your end-users access to the KB website so that end-users and customers experiencing technical challenges can self-service the answer to their problem by accessing this web-based knowledge base. Once on the Knowledge Base web interface, end-users may click through the tiered problem categories and type to find articles they are looking for. They can even make use of the SharePoint inbuilt search functionality to query KB articles by keywords. A knowledge base repository acts as an effective knowledge sharing medium, boosting support productivity by leveraging collective knowledge and providing invaluable KB Articles to support technicians in a snap! It also helps in improving the average “First Call Resolution” timing significantly, as technicians find resolution to problems quickly.

Another long term expectation or goal of implementing an issue tracking system in the organization is to be able to re-engineer business processes, reinforce resources and forecast problem areas and exploit all these factors for competitive advantage. Senior managers should be able to perform information mining to seek out trends and other hidden measures such as response and resolution durations. Analyzing these mathematical values for cues are critical to devise an effective strategy for helpdesk best practices. In a nutshell, an ideal issue tracking system should aid in extracting mission critical information and intelligence that will enable better decision- in the team and organization. In our Issue Tracking system, we have implemented two kind of reporting tools – Summary Reports generator and OLAP Statistics and Reporting.

With the Summary Report tool, managers can generate summarized reports on support tickets based on different time interval. It appraises on the current happenings on the helpdesk and enables tracking the progress of tickets. It provides an overview about when tickets are logged, due, worked and resolved over a period of time. Any fields can be selected for inclusion into the reports which can then be exported to Excel, Text, XML or HTML web page or printed for sharing and easy distribution.

The OLAP tool on the other hand, provides statistics on trouble tickets from the SharePoint lists. It supports displaying multidimensional data structures in grids, charts and graphs and support most common operations such as pivoting, drill down/slice and dice, filtering etc. This gives managers a unique opportunity to analyze their helpdesk data – slice and dice performance data to seek opportunity, drill down into trouble spots to reinforce and strengthen policies. It also provides various inbuilt reports specific to Issue Tracker tickets. Helpdesk managers can also easily create and save their user-defined reports for future references. Any report, chart, grid or graph can be saved to PDF, images, web pages or printed.

Therefore, in addition to providing a mechanism to resolve customer problems, our Issue Tracker system provides senior IT managers with statistical information and understanding that aid in the decision-making process concerning the whole of help desk, and the organization as a whole.

I know, I have gone a bit lengthy on writing this particular blog, but I believe it was necessary, as we have put considerable amount of time and efforts in the development of this application (Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint). The fact is, there are whole lots of other features which I have not covered in this blog, doing which would have turned this blog into a journal of some sort. Anyway, if you want to get first insights and learn more on our issue tracking system, watch out the video demonstrations.

Product Summary:
Title: Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint (Team Edition)
Website: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/
SharePoint: WSS 2.0, WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010 (Foundation and Enterprise), Office 365 SharePoint Online and any other cloud based SharePoints
Outlook: Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 (32 bit Office 2010 only).

Part-I: Administrative Installation & Configuration

Part-II: Technician Installation & Raising tickets to SharePoint

Part-III: Editing and Searching tickets from Outlook

Part-IV: Configuring a KB SharePoint list, use KB articles to reply to emails and tickets

Part-V: Embedding ticket due date appointment to Outlook or SharePoint calendar

Part-VI: Generating Reports and Statistics from trouble tickets

Posted by Bahrur Rahman at 12:41 AM  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

It’s here! Office 365 support on our products!

 Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint, Team Helpdesk for SharePoint and Outlook, Team TimeSheet for Outlook and SharePoint, TimeSheet Reporting  No Responses »
Nov 192011
 

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.

1. Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint (Team Edition)
2. Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint (Personal Edition)
3. Team Helpdesk for Outlook & SharePoint
4. Data Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint
5. Team Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint
6. Team TimeSheet for Outlook & SharePoint

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 Vista 32 bit (Windows6.0-KB974405-x86.msu)
For Vista 64 bit (Windows6.0-KB974405-x64.msu)
For WIndows 7 32 bit (Windows6.1-KB974405-x86.msu)
For Windows 7 64 bit (Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu)

Posted by Bahrur Rahman at 9:24 PM  Tagged with: , , , ,

Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part I

 Helpdesk & Issue Tracking  No Responses »
Oct 172011
 

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.

Part-I: Administrative Installation & Configuration

Part-II: Technician Installation & Raising tickets to SharePoint

Product Summary:
Title: Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint
Product page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/
Download page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/Download.asp
Video page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/TutorialClips.asp
Current Status: Release Candidate 3 (as of 15th Oct 2011). Available for free.

Posted by Bahrur Rahman at 1:06 AM  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

PDF Document Exporter add-in: A must have companion for business and power users of Microsoft Outlook

 Document Conversion, Document Export, Document Exporter for Outlook, General Category, Inbox Management  No Responses »
Oct 092011
 

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:

  1. Convert individual Outlook item
  2. Batch convert multiple Outlook items
  3. Append Outlook items to an existing PDF file
  4. Merge multiple Outlook items into one file
  5. 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.

Product Summary:
Name: Document Exporter for Outlook
Website: http://www.assistmyteam.net/DocumentExporter/
Download: http://www.assistmyteam.net/DocumentExporter/Download.asp
Video Demonstration: http://www.assistmyteam.net/DocumentExporter/Videos/

Posted by Bahrur Rahman at 9:55 AM  Tagged with: , , , ,
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