The HelpMaster Pro Priority Manager

What is the Priority Manager?

The Priority Manager is a powerful escalation and service level agreement (SLA) management tool. It can be used to automatically modify existing helpdesk jobs, send email to both staff and clients, and perform other actions relevant to your helpdesk environment. By using the Priority Manager, the helpdesk can build up a rich set of escalation and service level agreement profiles that will help your helpdesk achieve goals and provide useful managerial reporting.

The Priority Manager is an add-in utility to the desktop version of HelpMaster Pro. It is licenced separately, so you require a Priority Manager licence in order to use the Priority Manager.

How does it work?

At the heart of the Priority Manager are "priority schedules". Think of these schedules as the "business rules" that are defined by your helpdesk - they are your service level agreements. These schedules are "run" at regular intervals against your HelpMaster Pro database and can perform a wide variety of functions with your helpdesk data. Every "priority schedule" contains the following 3 elements as depicted below.

While the desktop edition of HelpMaster Pro is used to build up your Priority Manager Schedules, a separate Windows Service program is responsible for regularly executing the Priority Manager schedules. Typically, the Priority Manager Service is installed on a centralized, server style computer that has access to your HelpMaster Pro database. It will run at regularly defined intervals on that machine and will apply your schedules - your service level agreements to your HelpMaster Pro database. For further information about this, refer to the Priority Manager Service.

What are some examples of what the Priority Manager can do?

The Priority Manger is a very powerful tool capable of applying many different service level agreement scenarios. It can be used as a sales management tool, a contact marketing campaign manager, an ITIL compliancy utility, a simple messaging system, or a complex, SQL driven workplace business rules enforcer.

At a basic level, it can...

• Escalate job priority based upon the time a job has been opened for
• Re-assign jobs
• Automatically close jobs
• Send email to clients, staff and others
• + more

More advanced features include...

• Completing template actions against a helpdesk job
• Adding “Actions to do”, or tasks to an existing action
• Fully SQL scriptable actions