Departments Menu

When viewing the support manager, the departments menu is the frame on the left side of the screen.  The menu consists of few links to specific ticket lists and a hierarchy tree of the departments currently defined in Ubersmith. 

View My Tickets: This link is at the top of the frame and when clicked will reload the ticket list frame on the right with a list of 'my' tickets.  'My Tickets' are any tickets that are currently open and assigned to the logged in user.  The tickets listed will be taken from all departments in the system.  The specific department that a particular ticket is assigned to will be noted in the ticket list.

View Unassigned Tickets: This link is the second item in the departments menu frame and when clicked will reload the ticket list frame on the right with a list of all tickets that are not currently assigned to an admin user.  This is an easy way to get a list of any tickets that have not yet received a response from an admin yet.  The tickets listed will be taken from all departments in the system.  The specific department that a particular ticket is assigned to will be noted in the ticket list.

Departments: The department menu lists each of the departments in the system in a collapsible tree format.  When the instance is first set up, 3 default departments are included.  They are General Support, Sales and Billing.  These departments can be modified or removed and new ones can be added using the 'Manage Departments' page in the setup & admin section of Ubersmith.  The only department that can not be removed is General Support.  This is the default department.  Any tickets that are not filtered to a specific department are assigned here. 

When the user clicks on the '+' next to a department's name, it's branch of the tree expands.  In the expanded branch are four links.  One for each of the different states that a ticket may be in.  Next to each link is a number.  This is the number of tickets in that department that are set to that state.  For example, a (5) next to the 'Open' link means that there are 5 open tickets in that department.  The different states are as follows:

Open Tickets: When tickets first arrive in the system they are listed as 'Open.'  An open ticket is one that is still considered current and active.  It is presumed that a response will received from the client or sent by an admin before the ticket is finally settled.  Any time a response is received to a ticket in any state (on hold, closed, deleted), the system automatically re-opens the ticket.

On Hold Tickets: An 'On Hold' ticket is one that may be considered settled for the time being but will most likely be picked up some time in the future.  This can be useful to make sure that the open ticket list does not get too cluttered with tickets that may be awaiting a specific event or response.

Closed Tickets: A 'Closed' ticket is one that has been fully addressed and settled.  Closed tickets are left in the system as a record of the communication.

Deleted Tickets: A 'Deleted' ticket is one that the admins have no use for.  These deleted tickets can be removed from the system permanently by using the 'clear' link in the 'Manage Departments' page in the setup & admin section.

Reload Departments: This link reloads the department menu frame.  This will make the page update the numbers of tickets in the departments if it has changed recently.  Left alone the departments menu will reload on it's own every few minutes.