nService Manual - Overview

nService Overview

nService helps you provide services to your customers or your co-workers. It is really about two things: knowledge management and service request management. Knowledge management enables technicians to publish and share knowledge with end users and other technicians. End users can try to look for information themselves before submitting a service request. Service request management keeps track of service request information and cost, provides request routing and notification, and generates management reports.
Services	Services are the services you offer to other users. For example, on a customer service website, you can offer Accounting Services to answer billing questions, Technical Support Services to help users with their technical questions. You can organize your service offerings in a multi-level tree structure. For example, under the Technical Support Services, you can offer Microsoft Office Support Service and Microsoft SQL Server Support Service. You can set up the User Group, Technician Group and Administrator Group for each service. This way, you can specify who can use the service, who can provide the service and who can administer the service. These groups can be inherited form the parent service. For example, you can set up a group of your support staff to work for the Technical Support Services. The child Microsoft Office Support Service and the Microsoft SQL Server Support Service inherit this group.
Service Requests	Service requests are requests for the services you provide. A service request can be a billing question, a request for product information or a request for technical support. A user submits a request for service. A technician receives the request. She can reassign it, responds to it or close it. The submitter can also submit more information.
Service Request Routing and Notification Rules	New service requests can be routed to the right technician according the routing rules. You can define routing rules based on service type, service zone, product and priority. For example, you can specify that all billing questions go to the accountant group, all technical questions go to the technical support staff. Email notification can be sent throughout the life cycle of a service request according to the notification rules. You can also define your notification rules based on service type, service zone, product and priority.
Tasks and Calendar	You can create tasks for service requests. For example, you can create a task to go to the user’s site to setup her computer at 3:00pm. It shows up in the calendar of your group. Supervisors can also use the calendar to schedule group members for site visits.
Products	Products are the products your users use. Products are organized in to the product tree. Products are linked to organizations. Assets are associated with products.
Knowledge Base	Knowledge base is the place where you store all your knowledge about your products and services. It also has a tree structure. The security is also based on the User Group, Technician Group and Administrator Group. You can designate certain area to be accessible by everyone. Most questions and problems are repeated ones. Having a knowledge base with good content will dramatically reduce the number of service requests you will receive. You can store question and answer wizards (QnA wizard) and knowledge article in the knowledge base. QnA wizards are powerful troubleshooting tools. You design a series of questions and provide information based on the answers the user picks. You can link knowledge articles, questions and answer wizards to services and products. This makes it easier for the users to find the service or product specific information.
Organizations, Sites and Organizational Units	Organizations represent companies, non-profit organizations, government agencies, etc. An organization may have multiple sites. Sites are used to record the physical locations of users or assets. Users and assets belong to different organizations. Organizational Units are a way to organize users and assets. You can think of it as business units and departments in a company. Users and assets belong to different organizational units. The organizational unit tree is modeled after Active Directory. If you use the Active Directory integration feature of nService, the organizational unit tree will be populated with the data from Active Directory. If you use nService to power your internal help desk website, you don’t have a large number of users and assets. You can put them in the organizational unit tree. This way, you can browse them easily. If you use nService to power your customer service website, you may have millions of users and assets. These users are your customers. Organizing them into the organizational unit tree will take too much time and becomes impossible. In this case, you can put the employees and internal assets in the organizational unit tree, and put the customers and their assets under their own organization.
Users and Technicians	Users include the service staff, other employees in your organization and your customers. When a user is in a service technician group or a service administrator group, she is considered a technician. There are two pre-created users: ns4.anonymous and ns4.admin. ns4.admin is in the System Administrator group. Note that there may be who don’t belong to any organizational unit. In that case, use the All Users & Assets page to search for it. Users can be created from five places: the organizational unit page, the organization detail page, the All Users & Assets page, the Sign Up page and the Email Importer. Users created from an organizational unit are assumed to be employees of the website owner. Users created from the detail page of an organization are assumed to be the employees of that organization. When a user is created from the All Users & Assets page or the Sign Up page, if the organization name field is not blank, an organization is created along with the user. The Email Imports creates an account when it imports an email from an person unknown to nService.
Groups	Groups are groups of users. Users can have multiple group memberships. Groups are used for authorization, i.e. who can do what. Services, products, knowledge folders, organizational units all use groups for access control. There are four pre-created groups: Everyone, Service Technician, Service Administrator, System Administrator. The Everyone group is the default group. Everyone who has been authenticated by the sign in page automatically has the membership of the default group. This default group membership doesn’t show up on the user’s group membership list because it is implied.
Assets	Assets are properties of your organizations or your customer’s. They can be computers, printers, cars, houses, etc. Service requests can be associated with assets. You can keep track of the history of service requests on the assets.
Email Integration	You can set up nService to automatically send out notification email and import service requests submitted by email. Go to Admin, Email page to set it up.
Active Directory and Windows Integration	You can set up nService to authenticate users in three modes: nService, Active Directory or Windows integrated authentication.