Company name for users and other data.

[Bengelbe]

We deal with a number of companies and interact with multiple individuals within those companies. My question is Has anyone come up with a way to track what company a user is from and a way to be able to sort and track tickets by company?

I have thought of Reusing the Full Name field in the user profile for this but I would rather not lose this item of detail when looking at and sorting tickets.. There is no current support for Sorting via Custom Fields, you can work around this by using a customizing the view but its not intuitive for a user to do so.

Also on that note.. The only way (that I can figure out) to associate information from a user profile (Such as Company name or Department Ect) to a ticket would be to use a custom field associated with the ticket template. Doing so would require the field to be filled every time a ticket is generated or copied from the user profile but ultimately ends up as a static entry on the ticket which is less than an ideal solution.

Has anyone worked on this type of an idea or found a elegant hack to achieve this?


Note for trolling Devs:

In general I see benefit from the ability for the user to answer a number of questions once when they create their account rather than having them enter the same data every time they create a new ticket. They don't always see the value in some of the questions asked when filling out a ticket but from a support standpoint the fewer clicks and the more info you have in front of you the faster you can come to a resolution to a customers issues.

Why would you not want to have the ability to sort Custom Fields in a summary view? If its important enough to display in a summary view, it would also be important enough to sort by. I just don't understand the logic of this(It could be just me).

[craigbrass]

You could create groups for all those users I suppose. Best way is just to have each company use one account really.

[supportskins]

Creating groups will work as suggested by Craig but at one point it can get too difficult to manage. As of now there is no other way. You can take up this issue with the Kayako devs.

[Bengelbe]

Thanks for the reply but I am missing something here.. I don't see how creating a group for the users will address anything.. Let me give you an example


Bill, Bob, and Bart All work for Company X

Both Bill and Bart are having a an issue with Product A
Bob is Having an issue with product B

They each work in a different region of the country so none of their contact information is the same..

Our different departments Provide various services for Company X but possibly different services or products to different regions.

We will end up working with a fairly large large volume of tickets with a fair majority of the information we would trend on would be in Custom fields. Without a way to sort by custom field easily the task will be monotonous and very time consuming.

I don't understand how group management will help sort tickets... I have looked and a fail to see how this will help. Company name is just one aspect there are a few more aspects that we would like to end up associate with user accounts or even tickets if it needs to be.. even though the information will end up being redundant for 90% of the tickets that will be entered for that user.

Asking users to only use 1 account will remove detail when I am looking to add more detail.

[Bengelbe]

I guess the path of least resistance might just to be custom code my own module to generate usable summary views that contain information from custom fields.

The more i look at this the more I am puzzled why the Dev's didn't see/add in the ability to sort summary views based on Custom fields.

[richm]

The only thing that grouping helps with in the scenario where you want all users (who have access to esupport) within a given client (company or group if you will) to have access to see all open tickets for that company. In order to have that happen, each user within that group must be made a manager (vs user) when you set them up.

This does nothing to help you not recreate the wheel in terms of the companies information (please integrate this soon Kayako!)

The only other thing it buys you is the same "group" settings for all users set up under that group.

HTH,

Rich

[craigbrass]

Best thing you can do is submit EXACTLY how you think it should work inside the feature requests board (http://forums.kayako.com/f63/) so the devs see it when they have their meeting about features for V4.

[Bengelbe]

I am looking into the php code to see how much needs to be recoded to support sorting of Custom fields when in a summary ticket view.. That alone will deal with most of what I would like to do.. after that I can add in a few fields that will copy into each ticket created from the user profiles..