Product Reviews

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but in the world of tech support, a little knowledge base is just something that needs to be grown. Knowledge bases can take many forms, from the highly sophisticated one that Microsoft uses, to a simple set of notations on a piece of card, or even the knowledge stored in someone's head.

Knowledge bases also vary in degrees of usefulness. Microsoft's Knowledge Base is extremely useful because it's available for everyone to look at, whereas the knowledge base scribbled on a piece of card, or just contained in someone's head is rarely useful unless you're able to read from the card, or talk to the person who has memorised the information.

For any company with a decent-sized IT infrastructure, fast and easy access to a program that can provide answers to users' questions is essential, especially if that same program incorporates the ability to let users enter support calls into a log that can be perused and acted upon by the IT staff. Sunrise's Help Desk does all that and a lot more. The Enterprise version is a fully-featured help desk product aimed at large-scale organisations which need 24 hours, seven days a week support, with everything from remote login to video conferencing capabilities available on top of what might be considered a standard support set of utilities.

Deployment

Installation of the Enterprise edition isn't a task for the faint-hearted. I did it myself, but not without having to call Sunrise's own support staff to help me out on a few issues. However, I hasten to add that these were cleared up very quickly. Normally, you'd expect Sunrise's consultants to come and set up the package with your support staff, so that everyone can be happy about how it all goes together, and how it functions. As this is a fully-featured application, with plentiful options and customisation capabilities, you won't be able to get the best from it without having had some guidance as to how it all works.

In addition to Sunrise's own product, some of the other functionality comes through third-party software, and I have no problem with that at all. If your core business isn't the development of remote access tools, for example, but you do want remote access to be part of the solution you can provide to customers, it makes sense to have an optional third-party remote access solution available should the customer so desire.

For the purposes of this review I've focused on the standard Enterprise software set without any of the third-party add-ons, but just to give you an idea of what's available, this includes items like Caller Line Identification (CLI), which provides both notification of in-bound calls, coupled with the ability to pop up caller details onto the screen, along with a list of past calls they may have made.

Netopia's Timbuktu (reviewed enterprise, issue 71) takes care of remote desktop control, coupled with Timbuktu Intercom, which enables voice communications over IP. Video conferencing is provided courtesy of PictuteTel's VideoShare, and if you want natural language support for your queries, and a dash of neural intelligence to help you on your way to a solution, KMS Deskartes is another optional integration item in the Sunrise Enterprise suite.

Two other options, that really aren't optional, come in the shape of Web access for users and IT support personnel. The Sunrise Help Desk Web Client is the one designed to be used by the IT support personnel. It allows them to view a subset of a number of the features they would access via the desktop client were they in the office, including the ability to make new entries in the support calls database, edit existing calls, and to update calls by adding 'actions', indicating what they've been doing with a particular problem. They also get full access to the knowledge base, aiding their ability to solve problems out in the field.

No complex software is required here, just a modern browser, and it's all hosted on a Web server using pre-defined interface templates. As with many of the items in Sunrise Help Desk, you could, of course, make changes to the format of the pages being viewed, applying your own company logos and backgrounds perhaps, which would help make it look a lot more professional to a client viewing what your support

ADVERTISEMENT

engineer was doing, for example.

The polished InternetDesk

In a similar vein to the Web Client is another Web server-hosted application, InternetDesk. This is aimed directly at the end user and has a more polished interface than that of the Web client. Users can employ it to browse the knowledge base, add new support issues, update existing logged issues and, of course, browse any existing calls they have in place.

This is useful for people at home who want to log in quickly and see how the support staff are dealing with a problem. By implementing a procedure where your support staff instantly upgrade logged calls when they've done some work on them, you should be able to cut down the number of calls being made by users to your support desk who are calling to see how the problem solving is going on.

Every one of those calls is a waste of time for your support personnel, and eats into the time they have available to fix problems. If you can train your technicians to update logged calls straight away, and your users to check what's going on via a browser, rather than the telephone, you'll probably find the productivity of your support staff will soar. That, of course, will mean your users' productivity will also increase, because faults will get fixed quicker.

Logging problem reports via a browser is just one of the ways that users can contact your help desk staff to let them know there's a problem. Naturally, the phone can be employed, and if you implement the policy I mentioned earlier, calls will be answered much faster because people wanting to know what's happening with their issue won't jam the lines.

When it comes to being able to inform support staff who are out of the office about support issues, then the support for pagers and mobile phones using the Short Message Service (SMS) will be instantly appreciated.

Alerts of this type are handled by a series of four Agents that are part of the help desk package. These are Alert, Escalate, Mail and Time. The Alerts agent sits quietly in the background, monitoring help desk activity all the time, and when one of its watch criteria is triggered, it will send out an alert to wherever you chose the alert to go, via the method you chose to get it there.

The Escalation Agent also sits quietly in the background and watches what's happening with each call in the system. If a set of user-defined criteria is activated, the agent will raise the priority of the call to the level specified by you.

A classic example of this would be setting criteria based on time. Thus, if a specified amount of time had passed without a support call receiving any attention, the call can be escalated to a higher priority. This avoids the situation where a constant stream of high priority calls means that lower priority calls can be easily lost in the system and never answered.

The Mail Agent is used to provide standard replies to customers that send you their problems via email, showing them information like the support call ID number, when it was logged and so on. The Time Agent creates a log that shows you at a glance how long any particular support call has been open. You can set various criteria including having control over the number of times the database is polled.

Naturally, the ability to view calls and their status is of some considerable importance, and Sunrise Help Desk employs Crystal Reports to provide well-formatted reports, forms, graphs and so on. This includes the ability to view reports on the audit trail that the help desk lets you configure.

In fact, Sunrise takes security of data very seriously, and you can restrict access to a range of items within the help desk area on a user and/or team basis. Other items that can be coordinated on that sort of basis include staff scheduling, a vital ingredient in any support solution, as it's always nice to know who's available at any given time, and how best to deploy your staff.

If you order an evaluation version of Sunrise Help Desk to look at, make sure you specify one that includes a database with some records in it, or you'll find yourself spending a great deal of time entering data as you wander around trying to see just what the product can do. The ability to customise the standard templates is important, as it means you can tailor the Help Desk software to work the way you want it to, rather than trying to fit yourself around its structure.

There are a number of versions of the Sunrise Help Desk available, and I'd strongly recommend that you take a trip to the Web site to examine what the different packages have to offer. There's certainly something for everyone, albeit highly complex for the inexperienced support manager. All are fully capable of servicing the help desk requirements of large organisations both internally and via external access, with a full range of features applied with aplomb.