Quick start guide - Automation

HelpMaster Automation

HelpMaster features many automation options that are useful for a range of helpdesk and service-desk environments. These automation features are currenty administered via the Desktop edition of HelpMaster, and are security controlled via the Application Security Role settings.

Each of the automation features below rely on a corresponding HelpMaster Windows Sevice to be installed and running on the “HelpMaster server” machine. These Windows services run under the context of an account that has permission to access the HelpMaster SQL Server database, email, working folders.

It is recommended that only system admininstrators have access to, and administer automation features.

These steps should only be performed after all of the basic administration steps have been completed.

Configure Active Directory Synchronization

Active Directory automation allows you to import and synchronize users from on-premise domain-based Active Directory, or cloud-based Azure EntraID.

Benefits include up-to-date user data, single sign-on to the HelpMaster Web Portal and Desktop edition.

Configure the Email Manager for email-to-ticket conversion

The Email Manager is used to convert email into helpdesk tickets, or ticket updates. It can process new email, or updates/replies to existing emails, and works by using a flexible set of profiles and filtering logic.

If your helpdesk receives email requests for support, the Email Manager is must-have automation.

Configure the Priority Manager for rule-based actions

The Priority Manager is a “If this, then that” style processing engine. Use the Priority Manager to configure rules (profiles) that will actively look for certain conditions, and then perform a range of actions once those conditions have been met.

This is very useful for things like:

• Escalation and notification
• Adjusting job priority, status, assignment, or other parameters in the ticket
• Automatically closing “stale” jobs
• Sending reminder emails to clients, staff and others.

Configure Triggered Events to automatically do things

Triggered Events is similar conceptually to the Priority Manager (if this…then that), but is able to target other entities within HelpMaster - not just jobs/tickets. Additionally, it can be triggered by date-based data - eg. Every 2 weeks, do something.

This is very useful for things like:

• Date-based actions on assets, helpdesk tickets, users and sites
• Recurring events such as maintenance requests, or system checks
• Flagging clients, sites, assets, jobs, knowledge base articles based on some data-point
• Perform a periodic database query, and act upon the results