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Content publishing
The two content publishing modules (the news module and the downloads module) are available in all of our help desk solutions.
News
All of our support desk solutions are equipped with news publishing capabilities. News articles can be published to appear on your support desk front page, and broadcasted by RSS feeds.
Common uses of the news features include informing your customers about service outages, offers, new products and services.
Broadcast news to an e-mail list
As well as being able to send out news to your existing support desk end-users, you can maintain a separate e-mail address list that requires people to provide only their e-mail address to subscribe, without any further registration.
Send recent news in ticket auto responders (SupportSuite and eSupport)
When enabled, links to the most recent news articles published to your support desk can be sent out as part of an autoresponder to new ticket submissions.
Publishing news articles about important events at your organization can cut down on ticket submissions by concerned customers by alerting them to the event before the fact. For example, if you ran an ISP and had an outage, your customers would know about it before they decided to write in and ask what the problem was.
Article commenting and rating
If enabled, your end-users can comment and rate (out of five stars) your news articles via your support desk. Comments can be moderated, requiring the approval of a staff user before they are published to the support desk.
Private news articles for staff users
News articles can be marked as private, available only to staff users via the staff control panel. Private news items can be found on the dashboard after logging into the staff control panel.
Downloads and file publishing
With any of our help desk solutions, you can maintain an easy-to-use repository of file downloads. A 'download' can either be a directly uploaded file (hosted on the same server as your helpdesk) or as a masked link (so it looks like the file is hosted on your helpdesk) to an externally hosted file.
Each download can have a description and be placed in a folder (a category). Folders can be nested, allowing you to keep the repository clearly organized and accessible.
Uses for the file repository include distributing program files, patch files, hotfixes, user manuals, agreements and documents.
Files can be marked as public (available to end-users and staff users via the staff control panel) or private (available only to staff users).
Password protected files
Files can be password protected, allowing you to control access to a file by setting an access key.
Commenting and rating
If enabled, your end-users can comment and rate (out of five stars) files in the repository via your support desk.
Use the repository to attach files to ticket responses (SupportSuite and eSupport)
As well as the ability to attach files stored on your computer to ticket responses, any file uploaded to the repository (public or private) can be attached to a ticket response.
RSS syndication of news articles and files
An RSS feed is automatically generated each time you publish a news article or file download. Content syndication lets your end-users to subscribe to your content feeds (for example, using Google Reader) and automatically receive updates as and when you publish new items.
RSS syndication is also a useful content sharing mechanism, should you wish to mirror the content you publish to your support desk elsewhere. For example:
- Blogging and community software such as WordPress and vBulletin allow you to automatically create new posts from RSS feed updates.
- RSS is an XML-based protocol, making it easy for developers to retrieve and manipulate published content on another website or in an application.