Alerts vs Departments vs Staff

[PeteV]

I have been trying to figure this one out, and searched the forums, but without any luck so far:

A number of our staff do not want to receive Alerts from eSupport, to avoid a large number of e-mail messages (i.e., very senior experts). In contrast, other users want to see each and every New Ticket/Reply/Note as an Alert (i.e., day-to-day customer support personell).

Many of our staff work in far-away locations, are not very computer-savvy, and do not have much time at all to learn eSupport. Consequently, using Private Alerts (in contrast to Public) is tricky for us. For example, during routine "maintenance" of Tickets, the Administrator turns Public Alerts off, so that this not cause an avalanche of "Edit Ticket" Alerts.

Currently, we assigned staff to departments, and turned on Public Alerts for them. For the staff that does not want to receive these Public Alerts, I assigned them to a special "dummy" department, to which we never assigned Tickets.

In terms of Alerts and e-mail flow, this works fine. However, the staff in the "dummy" department cannot view any Tickets in other departments of course, not even their own.

The tedious solution would be to turn off all Public Alerts, assign all staff to their departments, not use the "dummy" department, and make sure that all staff set their "Private Alerts" properly. But as I mentioned above, this is difficult to achieve for us.

This may seem odd, but... We really like eSupport a lot, and have been able to use it fairly efficiently, with some compromises and workarounds here and there. We are still in the evaluation phase, but this issue with the Alerts may actually turn out to be the hurdle that we cannot overcome (i.e., show-stopper). I am just hoping that there is some solution out there.

Bottomline:

=> allow staff to view Tickets that are assigned to them, but that are not in the staff's assigned department

OR

=> be able to set Public Alerts per staff (e.g., from a multiple-selection listbox of users), or something equivalent

OR

=> have a setting somewhere that "blocks" Alerts for certain staff (e.g., a staff property)

By the way, we are using hosted eSupport 3.11 for the evaluation, such that code changes are not yet possible for us.

Any thoughts?

PeteV.

[craigbrass]

Sadly it isn't possible to filter alerts by staff member. I believe it is planned for V4.

[PeteV]

Yes, we figured as much.

Actually, I forgot to mention this:

I expected the abovementioned experiences to be a problem, and we quickly discovered the limitations of Staff Views, Filters, Alerts, Departments, and Groups with that respect. However, we always figured that there would be some workaround, such as an Advanced Search, that would list a Staff's Tickets from Departments that the Staff is not assigned to. But that does not work either.

=> (Advanced) Search for Owner = [Staff's name] SHOULD display all of the Staff's Tickets, regardless of the Department that they are in. Currenly, even the count (e.g., Search Results: 0 entries found) implies that no Tickets exist at all.

There is no hint whatsoever that a Ticket is (accidentally) hidden in an off-limits Department. And it is so easy to assign a Ticket to such an off-limits department.

In fact, I just realized a second ago, other Staff has no way of knowing which Staff belongs to which Department. So, this scenario should be not be unlikely at all.

This is a bit off-topic of course, but still related to my thread. And this Staff-vs-Department issue looks (to me at least) more and more like a very serious bug (and not a feature request at all).