 Hello and welcome to our video on configuring the helpdesk ticket categories. If you're familiar with trackit version 11 or prior versions, you may be familiar with a field called work order type. In this new version of trackit, work orders are now referred to as tickets, and the type field has been replaced with a field called category. In this video we're going to go over how to set up the categories in your system, the different configuration options they have, and what that means from a ticket perspective when you're logging a ticket against a particular category. We have to remember that a category is very important to a work order ticket. The category is selected based on what is being asked for in the ticket. So if somebody contacts the helpdesk and requests something about their internet access or a problem with their internet access, there's likely going to be a category somewhere that talks about network access or network issues or something like that. These categories can then be used in reporting to show how many tickets of a particular type are put into the system every day or every week or every month. You can use that for analysis later on to see how many tickets you get on a particular type or a particular category. You'll notice a lot of times we will use the term type or category interchangeably, and usually that's just out of habit because of the years and years and years that field was called type in the old trackit system. But in the new trackit system, the field itself is actually called category. So here we are, we're already logged into our trackit system and the categories option is down here on the bottom right. If you're not sure how to get to the configuration area of trackit, it's very easy, just click the menu on the left and select configuration. To get to the categories configuration, you can either click it on the bottom right here when you're in the all setting or you can actually click on lookups and then select categories. There are some default categories here in this installation. You can see we have account administration, applications, facility, general information, hardware, network, workspace. Now, there is no right or wrong way to do categories. The one thing I will caution you on is don't get category crazy when you first start using the system. I would say the biggest mistake made by new users to any system like this is they set out with the goal of trying to categorize everything as detailed as possible. And many times what ends up happening in that situation is you end up with hundreds of categories and you end up with duplicates and people who can't find the one they're looking for when they're trying to categorize something. It leads to people not selecting a category at all or often selecting whichever category is closest just because it's easier to select than trying to find a category in some huge long list. So that's the only thing I would recommend is that you sit down and decide what your top level categories are and you may want to have four to six or maybe even 10 top level categories. Once you get those nailed down, you could then actually start using the system and start looking for trends to figure out which categories you use most often or which types of issues you have most often so that you can then create a category for them. Now, if you've had track it for a long time, you've probably already got your categories all hammered out. If you're moving from another help desk system that you've used in the past, you either love your category set up that you have and you're ready to reimplement it here or you've made some mistakes implementing your categories in the old tool and you're going to use this as an opportunity to correct those mistakes in the new system. The track of community had a great conversation going on out there maybe roughly a year, year and a half ago about what are the common types of work order types or work order categories you use in your organization. And that's a great place to go and look. You'll see some people have a very simple category tree. Some people have a very advanced category tree. So it just depends on your organization, it depends on your need and what kind of reporting or analysis you're going to want to do later on. You'll notice here these gray colored nodes in the tree don't have any children. And the yellow colored node here, those do have children. The yellow colored ones with children also have this arrow next to them. So if you click on the arrow, that'll expand as well. So now you'll see under facility, we have two categories under that. Neither of those have any children. Now in the old track system, you can only have a three tiered category set up. And that was known as type subtyping category. In this version of track it, you can set up as many levels of categories as you want in your system. So for example here, let's click on building maintenance. Let's say new and let's make a category called windows. And it's under building maintenance. You'll notice there's a parent category there. There's a description if you want to type something to describe the category better. And if we look on the right side over here, you'll notice there's a priority. If we click this dropdown, you'll recognize these priorities from the ones we configured when we went through our priority video. You can specify a default priority for each category if you like. So here we're going to say, if it's a windows problem in building maintenance, we're going to mark it medium. We also have the option to display the category in self-service. Here's a way that you can really simplify things for your end users who are using your self-service portal. We recommend that you only check the boxes on these for the categories you want end users to see in the self-service module. You can also mark categories as inactive. This helps you if you're trying to streamline things and kind of trim down some categories that you were using that you may be deciding to stop using. You can also just use this if you're playing around with a category structure and you don't want to publish it out to everybody yet. The last option we're going to look at for the individual category is the support specialist. So here you can actually assign a technician to this category. So then when someone selects this category in a help desk ticket, the technician's name under here would be automatically assigned to the ticket. Now you also have the option of adding more than one technician here. If you do that, when you go ahead and assign this category to a ticket, you'll have the option then of picking one of these specialists from a list to assign to the ticket. So I'm going to go ahead and save this and you'll notice now under facility, under building maintenance, I now have windows. Now if I click on windows, I click on this again. And I say cleaning, save that one. So now you'll notice under facility, I have building maintenance, I have windows, I have cleaning, maybe also under windows, I'm going to say we have one replacement. I'm going to save that. So now you'll notice under facility, we have building maintenance, windows, and we have cleaning and replacement. So I can make this any number of levels that I would like. But again, just make sure that you don't over complicate them. It's okay to have these go five or six levels deep, but you don't want to have 50 top level ones and then 50 levels underneath. If you over complicate this too much, it's going to lead to people not wanting to use it and having problems with that. So you want to make sure that your list is accurate, but not out of control. So now we've seen how to create new categories and how to insert categories beneath other categories. We can also go and change some. So let's say I want to change cleaning and I want to put it under workspace. So I can go into cleaning and I click this up down here and I can page over to workspace and I can select that. And I basically, now I'm just re-parenting this. So now cleaning is going to fall under workspace. If I save it, you'll notice when I go back into my category view here, cleaning now shows up under workspace. So now that we've taken a look at creating some of these categories, let's add a new ticket so we can see what they look like when we're picking one. So in the ticket screen here, you'll notice here's my category field. I'm going to click my dropdown and here's my list. So I can go under facility and I can select building maintenance. I can select window replacement. Okay. And notice the replacement field shows up here now. We do have another field. It's called category full path, which is in the system. You can customize this work order form and add the category full path. If you like, you can also add the category full path to the grid view in the help desk so you can see it in your list of tickets and that will show you the entire path all the way down from facility to building maintenance, to windows, to replacement. It will show you this entire path all the way, but the default field that shows up in the ticket right here on the default form is just the category. And so that is an overview of creating and using categories in track it. For more videos in this training series, you can visit our documentation site at docs.bmc.com. If you forget where the documentation is, you can always click the help link in the upper right hand corner inside track it. Some other useful resources are the track of community where you can talk with other track users and support representatives about how to get the most out of your product. You can reach that site at community.trackit.com. You can also reach our technical support directly by visiting support.trackit.com and for general product information, you can always visit trackit.com. Thank you for watching and I hope this video has been helpful to you.