Who wants to help me get started in Service Desk?

[alanhouser]

When jumping from Basecamp to Teamwork PM back in the day, the Teamwork team was cool enough to hop on a call to listen my desired workflow, and inject almost immediate A-HA moments. So far, my experience with setting-up Jira is more frustrating than effective, but looking for a similar boost. Even things like to determine "which version of Jira will do X?" 

I know I'm going to get pinched for missing rules here, but I'm frustrated— as I'm kicking "trial tires" (Teamwork Desk -> Freshdesk -> GrooveHQ -> Zendesk -> Jira) 

I guess I'll spill it here... 

What I want to do:

1. Invite users to join through a sign-up form on my site 

2. Possibly provide multi-tier access to "library" (KB) content 

3. Members can submit tickets for design/development work 

IMAGE: Current workflow: 

4. (nice to have) integrate with teamwork pm to post dev tasks 

5. (nice to have) integrate with Hubstaff for the time-tracking element 

Note: if Service Desk can handle internal tasks, then a direct connection to hubstaff would be amazing.  

6. (nice to have) integrate with Freshbooks to pull RETAINER hours into the system
(so clients can view remaining hours) 

[Sharon Tan]

Hi @alanhouser ! Thanks for taking the time to post here. We have a getting started guide that you would be welcome to follow, but I'd be happy to curate some resources for you.

A brief introduction -

Our Jira issue tracking family allows you to represent work for your team in the form of issues, which live in projects.

Jira Service Desk has extra features that make it easy for any type of internal team to receive requests from internal or external end users, which become assignable issues in a Jira Service Desk project. It also offers automation, email intake, queues, and features that make it easy for your team to service your end users well, whoever they might be.

Let me jump in by describing it in relation to your points:

1. Invite users to join through a sign-up form on my site

Jira Service Desk is licensed based on unique agents (internal users managing requests), while users submitting requests ("customers") are unlimited and free. Projects in Jira Service Desk are also unlimited.

Each project has its own customer base and allows you to choose its customer permissions to determine how users become customers to be able to view requests on each portal and email in requests. You would be able to choose which users are customers or allow for self-signup.

See more on managing access.

2. Possibly provide multi-tier access to "library" (KB) content 

Each service desk project can be linked to one KB Space, which is provided through a tight integration with Confluence, our live collaboration product. You can set knowledge base permissions so that customers of a service desk project can view all KB content, or you can require that customers are licensed for Confluence to view protected KB content as well. 

See more on the knowledge base integration and permission settings.

Your Jira Service Desk instance also comes with a help center (portal of portals), where searching the help center would show linked KB content from all Spaces linked to service desk projects that a customer has access to. See more on the help center and portal.

3. Members can submit tickets for design/development work 

In each service desk project, Jira Service Desk admins can choose what issue types exist to represent work for internal agents. These map to request types, which are how these requests are presented to customers in order for them to submit the right tickets for design/development work. 

You can also allow your customers ("members") to email your service desk, where an incoming email becomes an issue that you choose a default issue type for. The Subject and Body of the email become the Summary and Description of the created issue (more on email as well as request types and the customer portal. 

4. Teamwork integration

We don't have any Marketplace apps (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/) for integration with Teamwork, but you would be able to use our Jira Service Desk Cloud APIs or Server (self-hosted) APIs if you wanted. 

The parallel that we offer is that there is super tight integration between Jira Software (our flavor of Jira geared toward devs to track work toward completion) and Jira Service Desk. The integration includes some license overlap, being able to view projects in the same interface, and automation to reflect status of linked Jira Software dev issues to Jira Service Desk customers. 

More on best practices between Jira Software and Jira Service Desk if you wanted to explore. 

5. Hubstaff Integration

We have a Marketplace app for integration with Hubstaff, but it does not appear to be compatible with Jira Service Desk and is only compatible with self-hosted Jira. 

6. Freshbooks integration

Similar to above, we have a Marketplace app for Freshbooks integration, but it is only showing to be compatible with Jira Server. With both of these, you are welcome to reach out to the app developer to see if they have any plans to extend functionality to Jira Service Desk and Cloud!

Jira Service Desk classic projects offer all of these features, but we also have a new type of projects in Jira Cloud called next-gen, which offer more autonomy and simplified management (as opposed to classic projects, which can share issue type schemes, workflow schemes, and permission schemes).

You can see more on Jira Service Desk next-gen or ask any further questions to our product specialists via our contact page. We'd love to hear how your eval goes, and definitely reach out if you find that you need more time!