Highlight High Priority Help Desk Tickets

If you are running a busy help desk or customer service centre it would be easy to miss the high priority tickets in the mass of items coming through.

With SharePoint Highlighter there is no need for that any more, as we can quickly and easily Highlight High Priority tickets as they come in.

Here's how:

First, create your list, for this example we are going to use an Issue Tracking List, as this is pretty much ideally set up for help desk tickets or customer service issues - though remember, Highlighter will work on any SharePoint list or Library.

Now, go in to the list set up and check out the columns.  To get the effect we want we need a Priority column, which is a choice column.  You will see that there is already one set up there as a default column within the list.  Great.

So now we can add a new column, and choose "Pentalogic Highlighter" as the column type.

Now format the column.  For this example we are going to choose "Highlighting"  but we could equally well have done this using icons, or if we wanted to be really belt and braces we could have done both.

Now to set up how we want things to be displayed.  We can go for icons, row or cell highlighting; in this case we are going for cell highlighting to make sure things really stand out.

And we are going to get Highlighter to base its highlighting on the values it sees in the Priority column.  We want "High" priority items highlighted.

Now on to the view section of the set up to decide where we want to put the new column within the list view.  Because we are highlighting the whole row, and not just a cell it's not so important that we see the Highlighter column, so we are going to put it at the extreme right of the view. 

Now on to the rules.  It's here that you get to format exactly how and when you want your Highlighting to appear.
Highlighter is set up to "auto create" highlighting for many common scenarios, so let's take a look at what it's offering us for this one.

Hmmm, OK, so if we leave things like this we are going to get our High Priority items highlighted in red, which is what we want, but also normal in yellow and low priority in green - it's going to turn in to a bit of an amazing Technicolor nightmare list I think, so let's edit these and calm things down a bit.

So, here I have simply deleted the rules applying to "Normal" and "Low" priority items, by clicking the red "-" to the right of the rules I want to get rid of.  So there will be no highlighting on those. Then we have changed the color, simply by clicking on the color block in the rule and choosing from the color picker, from eye-popping red, to more subtle magenta.  And here's the result.

It's easy to pick out the High Priority SharePoint list items, which need special attention at a glance.

Why not try Highlighter? Download the 30 day Free Trial now