1. 1
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
About the Technology Help Desk*
*but were afraid to ask
Help Desk
ESPRIT - 2010

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Outline
• What’s a help desk anyway…?
• Functions
• Help desk structure
• Benefits of a Help Desk
• User and Roles
• Client/Server Architecture

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Introduction
• The spread of information technology and
change in society
• Many questions/Same answer
• Knowledge is not shared
• Need of a centralized portal to handle this issue.

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What’s a help desk anyway…?
• Help desk is a broadly applied term referring to
a staffed resource—often, an actual desk, or a
telephone service—that can help persons answer
questions or to use resources such as audio-
visual or computer resources.

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Functions
• A typical help desk provides the users a single
point of contact, to receive help on various
computer issues.

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Help desk structure

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The Three Service Levels of a Help
Desk System
• End User
• Hotline (Level 1)
• System Administrator, Application Specialists
(Level 2)
• Maintenance and OEMs (Level 3)

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Deskside team
• Desktops
• Laptops
• Peripherals
▫ PDAs.
▫…

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Network team
• Network services
• Network software
• Hardware
• Infrastructure
▫ Servers
▫ Switches
▫ backup systems
▫ Firewalls.

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Server team
• Servers within the organization
▫ Active Directory
▫ Network Shares
▫ Network Resources
▫ Email accounts
• Advanced services
▫ SQL
▫ Microsoft SharePoint

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Telecom team
• Phone infrastructure
▫ PBX,
▫ Voicemail
▫ VOIP
▫ telephone sets
▫ modems
▫ fax machines

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Application team
• Development of any in-house software
• Software bugs
• Requests for new features or capabilities to in-
house software

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Technician team
• Solve many help desk issues from another
location or their home office
• Audit workstations

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Benefits of a Help Desk
• Technicians do not have to re-derive solutions to
problems
▫ This wastes company resources
• Attribute Value Pair
▫ Good for answering trivial question
▫ Good when users of the help desk system are
inexperienced

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Kinds of Cases
• Approved cases
• Opened cases (everyone can see)
• These case are separated into a case buffer
(opened) and a main case base (approved)

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User and Roles
• Help desk operator
▫ Lowest access rights
▫ Use application on a regular basis to solve problems
▫ Case retrieval and case acquisition
• Experience author
▫ Responsible for case maintenance and case approval
▫ Checks for redundancy and consistency
• Experience base administrator
▫ Creates and maintains the domain and case model
▫ Administer users and access rights

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Client/Server Architecture
• Allows all users to get the same up to date
information
• Eases the maintenance of the domain model and
the case base

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Demonstration

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Summary
• Help desk systems
▫ help solve problems faster
▫ give more people more knowledge
• Building
▫ long and difficult
▫ need to convince people go give up their
knowledge
• Maintaining
▫ Requires constant maintenance

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• Thank you for joining us for this presentation
today…