Support

How to submit a service request to Avensoft How to upgrade to the latest version of nService How to enable Active Directory integration How to restrict access to certain areas How to keep nService running What variables are available for the email templates?

To ask questions, submit problems, or search the knowledge base, please go to the Avensoft Help Desk and Support Website powered by nService.

Getting Started with nService

1) nService helps you provide services to your customers or coworkers. So the first step is to set up your services. To do that, sign into nService as ns4.admin with no password, go to Services and click Add Sub-Service.

When you set up a service, you can specify its Product/Asset relationship. A pure service is a pure service, for instance, a payroll question. A product specific service would require a product to be selected when a user submits a request. An example of it would be a sales question regarding a product you sell. An asset specific service allows you to link service requests to assets. For instance, you can set up a Printer Services. When sumitting a request for this service, the user would need to specify which printer is needing service.

2) The second step is to set up users and decide what services they can request. Users are organized into groups. A service has four group associations. Users who are in the user group can request that service. You can let the users sign up by themselves on the sign in page. You can create user accounts for the end users. You can also pull your users from Active Directory. To do that, go to Users and click Import Users from Active Directory.

Technicians are the users in a technician group of any service. You need to sign in to nService as an administrator and create user accounts for them. You can also promote an end user to a technician by editing her account and adding the Technician group to her group memeberships. Administrators are the users in the pre-created System Administrators group. They have access to everything in the website. You should rename the default ns4.admin administrator account and change its password.

3) Optionally, you can set up request routing and notfication rules. To do that, go to Services, select the service on the left panel, and click the Routing or Notification tab on the right panel. You can also set up products and assets by going to the respective pages.

Now your helpdesk and service management website is ready. End users can come and submit requests. Technicians can work on and respond to them. Managers start to feel in control knowing what is going on in their departments. You can start thinking about how to populate the knowlege base to help end users help themselves without bothering the technicians.

How to take a screen shot

When submitting a support request to Avensoft, please provide as much detail as possible. Screen shots are usually very helpful in understanding your problem. Follow these steps to do a screen capture:

Hold down the Alt key and press PrintScreen.
Run Paint, select Edit | Paste or press Ctrl-V.
Save the new file as a 16-color bitmap or a .gif file
Zip up the file containing your screenshot before submitting it.

Log files

nService requires some IIS and database knowledge. If you have difficulty setting it up, please send us an email. When you run into unexplained problems, there are three log files you can take a look.

nService errors are loged in nService, Admin, Event Log. If you have problems with sending or receiving email, you can take a look at this log.
Windows HTTP errors are loged in \WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\HTTPERR
IIS errors are loged in web site log files