What the plugin does

ServiceDesk turns Redmine into the central point of contact for requests that arrive by email or web form.

• Every request becomes a helpdesk ticket in a project of your choice
• Tickets run through the normal Redmine workflow: assign, prioritise, resolve
• The sender is kept as a contact, the answer goes out straight from the ticket

How a request becomes a ticket

Building blocks of the plugin

Anatomy of a helpdesk ticket

Contacts: companies and people

Response templates

• Prepared answers for recurring questions, selected directly in the reply form
• Variables fill in ticket number, contact name, public ticket link and more
• Private, for groups or public, per project or for the whole system

Response templates are managed in the separate Redmine Templates plugin. Existing canned responses can be transferred with a migration step by the administrator.

Keep the noise out

• Ignore list: addresses, domains and subjects that never create tickets, with a counter per entry
• Mark a sender as spam right from the ticket, further mails from that address are blocked
• Nothing enters unseen: every ticket comes from a mailbox, a form, manual entry or the API

Web forms and public tickets

• HTML forms on your website create helpdesk tickets with the fields you define
• Public tickets: the sender follows the status via a link, without a Redmine login
• The public link is available as a template variable for the reply

Overview for the team

• A helpdesk information block on the project dashboard, query blocks wherever you like
• Custom fields such as a resolution area make requests countable
• Charts and evaluations come from the Reporting plugin

The four steps

Step 1: Mailbox and project

• Switch on Helpdesk in the plugin settings, activate the modules Helpdesk and Contacts in the project
• Connect the mailbox in the project settings, tab Helpdesk: incoming and outgoing mail server
• Define tracker, author and assignee for new tickets, plus the status on reply and on reopening

One mailbox for several projects: use email aliases, mail arrives in one helpdesk project and Automation rules move the tickets.

Step 2: Roles and permissions

• Agents need to view, triage and reply to helpdesk tickets
• Contacts and templates have their own permissions
• Keep it minimal: only administrators need everything

Step 3: Tracker and custom fields

• Use a dedicated tracker such as "Helpdesk"
• Keep the standard fields: subject, status, priority, assignee
• Add list fields for what you want to count later, for example a resolution area

Prefer dropdown lists over free text. Lists can be filtered, charted and standardised.

Step 4: Templates and dashboard

• Prepare response templates for the five most common questions
• Put the open helpdesk tickets as a block on the project dashboard
• Switch on auto-close for inactive tickets in the plugin settings, add Automation rules for reminders later

When to switch from a shared inbox

Requirements

• Redmine with the AlphaNodes plugins Reporting and Automation
• Response templates need the Templates plugin
• All of them are part of the Enterprise+ bundle

Check the current version requirements on the product page before installing.