After installing PerlDesk you need to follow a few steps to get your help desk up and running and ready to handle customer inquiries. This post will guide you through the steps required to get PerlDesk ready to run.
This post is intended as a quick start guide and does not cover the extensive features related to the below steps.
Step 1 - Create Departments
You must create departments in PerlDesk, a department could be ‘Support’, or ‘Billing’ and represents where your tickets will be assigned and the options your end-users have to categorize their submissions.
Create department(s) by logging into your Administration and going to:
Settings > Departments.
Step 2 - Create a Staff Login
It is staff users who respond to and manage incoming tickets, please create a staff account in the Administration by going to:
Staff > Add Staff
After creating a staff user, they can login to the http://<yoururl>/staff.cgi file. Staff users must login to this unique access point. Your staff users can have access to particular departments (created in Step 1) or given global access, meaning that login account will have access to all tickets in the system.
Step 3 - Setup Incoming Email
If you would like your hosted PerlDesk installation to handle incoming email you can do this by allowing it to access a POP3 account, similar to a normal desktop mail client. Simply follow these steps:
In the Administration go to:
Settings > Incoming Email > Email Piping
Enter the email address you would like PerlDesk to manage and map that email address to a department, meaning any emails received will be routed initially to the department you specify. This allows you to setup several email addresses such as support@domain and billing@domain and map them to relevant departments.
Now you must configure your POP3 account details by going to:
Admin > Incoming Email > POP Retrieval
Simply create a new POP server by entering the required credentials. That’s it! PerlDesk will now check your POP account(s) every 10 minutes to retrieve emails.
Step 4 - Set your Logo
PerlDesk can be easily customized to carry your branding on the PerlDesk front-end. To set the logo you simply need to specify the Logo URL in the Admin> Settings section. Specifying this will immediately update the logo displayed on pdesk.cgi for your users.
You can further customize the PerlDesk front-end by editing the templates in the /include/tpl/v4 folder. Please see the related blog post ‘Customizing the PerlDesk design’ for more information.
If you have any questions please contact us for assistance.
Tags: configuring perldesk, email piping, help desk guide, perldesk email handling, perldesk guide, quick start guide