Beginning September 1 we will be using a new work tracking system that we designed using Microsoft Forms and Flow. This will effect you a little bit so allow me to tell you about it and what to expect.
The new Office 365 application Forms is turning out to be very popular with our clients that have seen it. We’re churning out forms like crazy for them and if you haven’t seen it yet we’ll be introducing you to it soon. It comes with your Office 365 subscription.
The new ticket system
I’ll walk you through what it looks like from end to end. This is the form that my staff will be entering in the work that they have done for you. They can do this from their phone or computer.
The Form collects all of the pertinent information that we need to track. The information collected doesn’t change much but you will notice some standardization of the ticket titles. The summary of work done will continue to be just a couple of sentences so you know what we’ve been up to on your behalf.
Your notification
We will continue to send you a copy of the entered ticket via email. This will happen automatically thanks to Flow. Flow takes the information and composes an email based on the fields in the form and then sends it to you. It will look something like this:
Sometimes it also arrives with lousy formatting, like this. I have pinged Microsoft on this issue. Hopefully they will figure it out and it will stop happening.
Hello, We completed some work for you on 2017-08-22. Here is a summary for your records. Title: HelpDesk solution for employee Work Summary: Fixed the email prompting issue We spent 15 minutes working on this issue. Thank you for allowing us to continue to work for you. We care about your business. ⛵ ⛵ If you have any questions please simply reply to this email. Please note: Although we may sometimes respond to email, text and phone calls instantly at all hours of the day our regular business hours are 8:30 am – 5:00 pm Monday thru Friday.
Technically this software is still in “preview” so we’re going to cut them a small amount of slack on it but I would expect it to go back to the better formed email soon.
Invoice Attachments
Some of our customers get a summary spreadsheet attached to their invoice and those will continue to be sent as well. You will notice a change in the formatting but the information provided will be the same with the exception of ticket numbers. There are no ticket numbers in this new system.
No more portal
The only loss that we have in this move is that we will no longer have a customer portal. Very few customers were using it so we just couldn’t justify keeping it around. You still have all of the information in your email. However, here’ an idea, if you would like somewhere to view all of your tickets in one place we could create a Flow on your system that would take the content of the email you receive and populate it into a list on your SharePoint site. This way you’d have your own history.
Behind the scenes
We are archiving all of our tickets into SharePoint. I created another Flow that takes the information from the Form and adds to a SharePoint list. It looks like this:
Once the form data starts flowing in I’ll will create different views so that we can easily review the work that has been done for each of our clients.
Also behind the scenes Ted and I receive a copy of the email that you are sent so that we can keep abreast of the work that has been completed and where projects stand.
In the grand scheme this is a minor change but it should result in more timely ticket entries. It has also afforded us the opportunity to showcase how Forms and Flow and work together to become a functional application.
If you have any questions please send them to amy@harborcomputerservices.net
–Amy, president
About Harbor Computer Services
Harbor Computer Services is an IT firm servicing Southeastern Michigan. We work exclusively under contract with our clients to provide technology direction and either become the IT department or provide assistance to the internal IT they already have. We have won many awards for our work over the years, including the worldwide Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2010. We’re the smallest firm to have ever won this most prestigious award. Most recently we were recognized as one of the top 20 visionaries in small business IT by ChannelPro Magazine (2015). And in 2016 as the top Michigan IT firm for Manufacturing. There are a few simple things that make Harbor Computer Services the best choice for your business. •We are Professionals •We are Responsible •We are Concerned About The Success of Your Business
