Each departmentneeds to have at least one category in order to show up on the "New Ticket" screen. An example category in a department for IT would be "Printer Issue". Categories are accessed from the Settings | Department screen when editing/adding a department. They are listed below the department name and other department settings.
Categories let you direct requests to specific owners, allows you to ask unique questions when a ticket is created, and provides a way to set up approvals for specific requests.
Categories
Categories only require a name, but you can also set a longer description, default owners, custom questions, a approval steps. In addition. you can click on a category to view more statistics such as the number of owners, questions, and approval steps
Category Edit Screen
Description
You can provide a longer description for the category. This description is shown on the new ticket screen after they have chosen the category. This can be used to provide instructions, links to resources, etc.
Default Owner(s)
You can make new tickets that are in this category assigned to people automatically. If no one is an owner of a category, it defaults to "Unassigned" until it is hopefully manually assigned. The only people that can be set as a owner are people with "Edit" permission to the parent department. If an agent doesn't show up in the drop down, they likely need to be added to Settings | Permissions for the associated department first.
Also see Owners
Other Category Settings
Custom Questions (optional)
The question mark icon next to a category will open a window allowing you to set custom questions that will be asked when someone selects this category.
Questions in this list are shown to the user in the order they are displayed here, you can also drag them to re-order them.
Edit Question Screen
When you add or edit a question, you have the option to choose what type of question it is
- Text - A normal single-line input
- Textarea. - Larger multi-line text input
- Date - Calendar date picker
- Date/time - Calendar date picker with a separate time picker
- Dropdown - A list of options to choose from
- Multi-select - A list of options to choose from, more than one can be picked
You can also decide if the question is required or not
Dropdown / Multi-Select
If you choose one of these types you'll also have the ability to provide a list of the options to choose from. The options are displayed to the user in the order you see them here, and you can drag them to re-order them.
Approval Steps (optional)
See Approval Steps for a more detailed explanation of approval steps you can set for tickets.