Common Scenarios - Helpdesk - High Priority Active Issues

The company's IT Helpdesk use a SharePoint Issues list to issue 'Tickets' in order to track and control progress. The tickets are not set a Due Date - it is up to the Helpdesk staff to attend to them in the most appropriate order.

The Helpdesk team leader wants to setup SharePoint Reminder to send an email to her and the helpdesk team for any High Priority Ticket that is open. A new email should be sent every hour, assuring that open tickets do not get overlooked.

Create a new View to show only High Priority Active Issues and call it "High Priority Active"

 

Create a new Web Part Page for the Reminder Web Part

 

Add a Reminder Web Part to the page
 

 

Select the first web part and "Modify Shared Web Part", configure the web part as shown.

 

Expand the Appearance section and set the Title of the web part for future reference
Set the Watch List to Helpdesk Tickets - High Priority Active

Set the Watch List to the view you created in the first step above.

 

Set Email To to helpdesk@...

In this example we don't want to send an email to the whole team - so we use an email alias.

Put in an appropriate Subject and Message for the email.

If your message is large then use the Builder button (...) to open up a separate dialog box to enter your message.

 

Choose Send When - Always

In our example we want to send reminders as long as an issue is open - it doesn't depend on a particular date.

Tip - Another way of doing this would be to setup the reminder so that it is sent when the field Created is overdue by 3 hours. I.E. emails will only start to be sent out 3hrs after the issues been raised - giving the helpdesk staff time to sort out an issue before it gets 'escalated'

 

Set Check List to be every 1 hour, Monday through Saturday

 

     

The web part show a summary of its configuration

 

In our example we have the following items in our Issues List

SharePoint Reminder will check the list every hour and send the following emails.

  • No email will be sent for "Monitor Flickering" as not High Priority and won't appear in our High Priority Active view.
  • No email will be sent for "Printer low on Toner" as not High Priority and won't appear in our High Priority Active view.
  • No email will be sent for "Printer low on Toner" as it has already been closed, won't appear in our view.
  • An email will be sent for "Email server not receiving messages" as its High priority and hasn't been fixed.