Knowledge articles are a way of providing your staff and/or customers with a clear and common understanding of your services. Examples of information you might publish as knowledge articles could be:

• Overviews of business processes and services provided to your customers
• Training material for each of your services
• Policies or procedures for using or changing your services
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about your business processes and services
• “How To” guides and articles

You can easily link knowledge articles to any other incident, problem, change, release or related configuration items. Also just like for other beetils you can also add/remove yourself from the watchlist, view the audit log history for the article and record time against it.

Knowledge Dashboard

The Knowledge Dashboard provides a summary of each knowledge article that is of interest to you and includes:

• its title (or question);
• the service;
• knowledge category;
• number of times it has been accessed (since it was published);
• number of comments; and
• when the last activity was.

You can filter by:

• status (draft or approved/published);
• whether they are owned or assigned to you or on your watchlist; and
• knowledge category.

To see what your customers can see, restrict the list of articles to “Customer Viewable” ones.

Drafting and Publishing Knowledge Articles

To create a new knowledge article just click on New Article from the dashboard or from the Knowledge menu.

The owner and assignee will both initially be the creator and the article will be in a “Draft” state. The title of the article will often be the “question” the article is answering (e.g. for FAQs). Images can now be placed inline within the text of the article. If you mark the article as “Customer Viewable” it will be visible in the customer portal when published.

When the article is ready for review, post a comment, add reviewers to the article’s watchlist and notify them. Comments can be hidden from customers. Moving the article to a “Published” state signals it has been reviewed and/or approved.

Find Answers on the Customer Portal

A new “Find Answers” tab will be visible in the customer portal as soon as you’ve published your first “Customer Viewable” knowledge article. This will give your customers the ability to answer their own questions instead of needing to log a call with your service desk.

Customers can perform a keyword search or browse articles by knowledge category. They can then sort by article popularity (i.e. how many hits has the published article received), usefulness ranking (i.e. how many customers voted the article as being useful) and newness of the article.

Customers can add the article to their watchlist to be notified of any changes to the article. If customer comments have been enabled for the article then comments can be viewed and logged against the article too.

Reports

To get you started we’ve provided a set of out-of-the-box knowledge reports for users of Beetil. Get to these from Reports in the Knowledge menu or by clicking on Knowledge Reports from the dashboard.

Like incidents, problems, changes and releases you can roll-your-own knowledge reports based on a range of attributes and you can schedule them to be emailed to you and/or share them with your team.

Managing your Knowledge

Knowledge categories are created and maintained in the Admin form for each service by an account administrator. You can’t yet create sub-categories but you can workaround that by using the pipe symbol to achieve that - e.g. FAQs | Incidents, FAQs | Problems, FAQs | Changes.

Since knowledge articles are a bit more formal than notes you might have on a Wiki somewhere, you’ll want to have some processes and controls to manage the updates and retirement of articles. Future versions of knowledge in Beetil will provide more fine-grained control in this area too.

What’s next?

We’ve deliberately started off with a simple approach. We know there are features missing (e.g. approval workflow, more discrete user permissions, sub-categories, ability to create an article based on an incident , etc.).

We’d like to hear your feedback. E.g. What are the most important things that are missing for you? What reports do you or would you find most useful? Drop us a line at support@beetil.com or log the feedback via your Beetil Support customer portal logon.

We’ve made some enhancements and now you can do exactly that - you can now place your attachments inline with your text!

Each time an attachment is uploaded to a text area it is numbered and some special text surrounded by curly brackets is placed where the cursor was - e.g. {{attachment: 1}} for the first attachment uploaded to a text area. You can later move the curly bracket text to a different place in the text area if you want to.

Here’s an example from Beetil where we’ve attached an image into our article at the start of line 3:

And then here’s how the article is rendered when you’re out of edit mode:

If you later delete the image (or attachment) and then upload a new one it will get the next number in the sequence (i.e. {{attachment: 2}} in this particular case).

The goal here is to provide stepping stones towards a service catalog.  This latest release is the first of those stones.  When we boiled the concept of a Service Catalog right down to its utmost basic form, we found that the first step is essentially a level of categorization of an Incident (or Service Request) which both Internal Beetil Users and Customers can control when they first log an Incident.

Incident Types + Incident SubType = Service Catalog Item

What you now see when you view a service in admin is the addition of a new “Beetil Types” tab, this tab is where you go to set up your Incident, Problem and Change Types.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Incidents can now have subtypes.   Think of these as your service catalog items.

You’ll also see that the first four types map to their corresponding Customer Portal types. These Incident Types can have sub-types which customers will be able to choose from within the Customer Portal.

Additional incident types underneath the first four will not be shown in the Portal, and are for internal Beetil Users when they create/update Incidents.

Being able to further categorize by using sub-types is especially powerful for the four main Incident types that are currently viewable in the Customer Portal. Your customers can now categorize their Incidents further for you, this has all sorts of wonderful reporting possibilities.

What the service desk see when they log an Incident hasn’t really changed at all, except the Incident Type dropdown is now indented with the subtypes, and once saved the Incident will show both the parent type and sub-type.

In the customer portal, customers will be able to select a sub-type for their Incident to help further categorize any issues, requests, queries or suggestions. This additional field only appears in the customer portal when creating an Incident if there are sub-types to choose, and the title of Incident is pre-populated with the sub-type and the customer’s name when it is selected.

In the examples below, I’ve added the sub-types, New iPhone, New MacBook Pro, New Rackspace Server to my Service Request type for the Internal IT service, and I’m logging a Service Request asking for a new iPhone.

Changes and problems now have their own type

Returning to the admin of a service, underneath all the Incident Types, you’ll see that Problem Types and Change Types can now be configured independently of each other. This allows for Problems and Changes to be accurately categorized and reported on without being clouded by other irrelevant types.

When you create new services, a set of default Beetil Types are applied:

• Incidents Types: Bug, Query, Service Request, Feedback, Feature Request
• Problem Types: Bug and Fault
• Change Types: Minor, Significant, Major, Emergency

Moving forward and where to next?

We’ve already got a bunch of ideas on how we can expand on, and improve what’s currently there to provide the world’s easiest service catalog, our ideas so far include:

• Priorities & SLAs for each incident type and sub-type
• Default owners and assigned users or groups for each type or sub-type
• Pre-populated Symptom Templates, allowing users/customers to essentially fill-in-the-gaps to make request information gathering easier

At this stage we’re very interested to hear what our users want to see in a service catalog, and what’s important to you!

Your feedback and suggestions could very well shape future iterations of our service catalog. Leave a comment, or you can get in touch with us via our usual channels at support@beetil.com, +64 4 8949110, or catch us around the Campfire.

Improved UI

As part of this release that has been building up for a few weeks now, one of the big changes you’re likely to notice is that we’ve re-designed the notes section.   It’s subtle, but we think it really helps further clarify each section of an incident, problem, change and release.

Hidden Notes

The other change that you may not be so quick to notice is the “Hide comments from Customers”

Any incident or message you have opened up to your customers will now have a “Hide from customer” checkbox against each comment field.

Ticking this checkbox will mean your comment won’t be visible on the customer portal or present in any email notification sent to your customers. These comments are still visible internally but appear faded out with the word “hidden” tiled on the left hand side of the comment, making it very clear that the comment is hidden from the customer in the portal.

At the moment you can only make comments hidden from the customer. The symptom and resolution will always show in the customer portal.

What about emails?  What exactly gets sent to the customer when you select “Notify Customer”?  When you have made a comment hidden they will not see that comment, but they will see all the other updates you’ve made (e.g. changing the title, resolution due date, updating symptom/resolution etc) in their email.

In the screenshot above, our customer “David Gahan” would have received an email detailing all the updates I have made to the incident, but it will not show him the hidden comment I added, nor will he be able to see it on the customer portal.

If the only change you’ve made is added a hidden comment, then no email would have been sent to the customer regardless of the fact you’ve selected “Notify Customer” as all the changes you’ve made are hidden from the customer.

If you reply to an incident or message via email, the new comment will ALWAYS be visible to the customer, so please take care with what you put into Beetil.  The last thing you want is to be caught slamming the customer, or handing out admin password to systems.  Sometimes there’s some stuff that’s just better kept offline

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch. As usual suggestions are more than welcome.  If you need to send an SOS to support you can catch us on the normal channels at support@beetil.com, +64 4 8949110, or catch us around the Campfire.

Customising your incident statuses will allow you to build a basic workflow so that you can handle and manage incidents more effectively.   You can add customisable statuses for any service you have within Beetil.

You can configure your customisable statuses from the admin | services menu.

The screenshot below illustrates some of the statuses we’ve set up for our Beetil service, and also how to add incident statuses for a service.   You can create various unresolved statuses and resolved statuses.  To change the order of a status drag and drop the handle beside each.   The first “not resolved” status and the first “resolved” status in the list become the defaults (e.g. in our example the defaults  ”New” for unresolved, and “Awaiting Internal Review” for resolved).

You can also choose whether or not you also want the ‘Closed’ checkbox checked by default.

Once you’ve set up these custom statuses you’ll notice that’ll appear within Incidents now.

These statuses are also visible on the customer portal for your customers as well, the screenshot below shows the custom status on the customer portal.

At the moment custom statuses don’t trigger anything. You’ll notice that we have statuses “With Customer” and “On Hold” these are only arbitrary values that represent the status of the Incident mainly for reporting purposes and to gauge the state of an Incident from a glance.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch. As usual feedback and suggestions are more than welcome.  If you need to send an SOS to support you can catch us on the normal channels at support@beetil.com, +64 4 8949110, or catch us around the Campfire.

In Beetil Admin, create a new group for each of the layers of support you want to provide. In the screenshot below you’ll see I’ve created a new group called “First Level Support” which is comprised of a few internal team members with access to our Beetil service.

Checking the “send email to group members” check box will send email notifications out to each individual member (as opposed to the group’s email address) when an incident is raised or updated.

Now we have to set First Level Support to be the default assignee for newly raised incidents. If we go into a service and edit the details, we can set the default assignee (for both Customer Portal raised incidents, and incidents raised within Beetil) to be the First Level Support group.

Now when anyone creates an incident for this service the assignee will default to First Level Support (this will not in fact be an actual person but will remain in a pool of ‘First Level Support - Unassigned’ until someone from the group picks it up).

To view the incidents assigned to First Level Support on the Incident Dashboard change the “Show Dashboard For:” dropdown to “First Level Support - Unassigned”.

This is different from showing the Incident dashboard for “First Level Support” which shows each member of that group and all their incidents.

What we tend to do here at Beetil HQ, is when an incident gets assigned to First Level Support everyone in the group gets notified, and if it’s something that someone in the group can answer and/or work on, then that user will take it from the group and re-assign it to themselves.

From here, to escalate to Second Level Support (for example) we recommend creating and running a custom report - the example below showing incidents assigned to First Level Support that are older than 24 hours that no one has picked up yet. You can either chase up these incidents with your First Level Support team or manually escalate these incidents to Second Level Support by re-assigning it to this group.

This wraps up how to achieve multi-tier support in Beetil, as usual we strongly recommend you have a play for yourself and find out how this could possibly work for you!

In the near future, we’ll be working on some automated trigger functionality so you won’t have to manually do this, but in the meantime this should hopefully keep you going.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch. As usual suggestions are more than welcome.  If you need to send an SOS to support you can catch us on the normal channels at support@beetil.com, +64 4 8949110, or catch us around the Campfire.

Key features:

• Beetil branding has been removed
• The most recent discussion now comes first, other updates (such as priority and assigned user changes) now come afterwards.
• All emails now feature the “goodie” fields. (Status, Priority, Assigned User, Who else was notified and who’s on the watchlist)
• Emails also now include the last comment at the bottom.
• The email subject is now a lot more useful, and the beetil title is truncated so those using blackberries can see it all on their small screens

We’ve also focussed on the quality of the emails when they’re being sent to customers, main features here include:

• Customizable “From” address (i.e. for emails can be sent from “YourAccount Support”)
• Customizable Footer, the perfect place to insert your support hours and additional contact details!
• Customizable auto-response for when customers log incidents via email
• Beetil specific information (Status, Assigned User, other beetil-jargon) is hidden until the customer activates their account.

There’s also new section in the admin section for the customer portal for email settings, see screenshot.

• The first two fields form the sender of customer portal emails, in this case our emails come from “YouDo Support <support@youdo.co.nz>”
• We’ve also opted to send customers who log incidents via email an automated response.
• The second checkbox means that the person sending the email will be created as a customer if they don’t already exist in your customer database.
• The last two fields are customizable fields for your automatic response which sent on incident creation, and footer which is appended to all outgoing emails to customers.

With all that set up, here’s an example of an auto-response a customer will get when they log an incident via email.

Something we’ve seen and assisted many users with setting up, is trying to get support@yourdomain.com logging incidents via email.

Here’s a quick how-to set up support@yourdomain.com with Beetil:

• Create an email account support@yourdomain.com
• Create a group in Beetil with the email address support@yourdomain.com
• Create an auto-forward on support@yourdomain to automatically send emails to your-service@the-groups-email-integration-key.youraccount.beetil.com
• Test this by sending an email to support@yourdomain.com, and it should appear in Beetil, under the specified service within a few minutes.
• As this email was auto-forwarded, Beetil will attempt to find the customer based on the sender’s email address, and will at this point create the customer if they don’t already exist if you have that particular setting turned on.

If you’re a beetil user enjoy the new and improved emails! If you’re an admin or potential new beetil account holder be sure to give the customizable emails a go.

If you run into any difficulties or spot anything odd at all, then please do jump into the Campfire, or drop us a line at support@beetil.com.

We recently rolled out the first phase of these changes.

You can now select from a range of beautiful shiny customer portal templates.    Due to popular demand, we’ve toned down our Beetil branding.   You can change the name of your portal.   And you can even customise the contact details that appear in the footer.

So how do you get started with all this?  First off, you need to be a Beetil administrator.   If not, you might want to shout your administrator a coffee, or some jellybeans, or whatever makes him/her happy!

If you go into your customer portal administration page (/admin/portal) click “Edit Details” you’ll be presented with a screen much like this:

Selecting a template will update the preview on the right. Admin users now have control over the Customer Portal name, as well as the added ability to provide contact information which appears in the footer of your Customer Portal.

Uploading a logo will also update the preview, this logo is displayed on the login page of your customer portal as well as on the header of the portal itself.   Remember that for the best effect, use a transparent logo of a size that fits within our template designs.

Once you’re comfortable with how your customer portal looks, hit save, and log onto your portal with your customer account, and viola~ doesn’t it look beautiful!

Coming Soon to a Beetil Near You

Watch this space for when we’ll be releasing the next exciting installment of customer portal style goodness, where you’ll be able to upload your own CSS and images to gain even more control over your customer portal!

Need more help?

As ever, you can always contact us on email at support@beetil.com, or catch us around the Campfire.

So now that it’s finally here and ready to use, just how do you use it?   Let’s explain.

Every user has a unique mail api key and this key must be included when sending email to Beetil for security purposes.  Your mail api key can be found either under “My Details” or admin users can retrieve it for you from admin/users. Once you know your mail api key, you can start sending emails to Beetil!

Our email integration solution is simple:

• Sending a new email to Beetil will create a new incident.
• Replying to a Beetil generated email will add new a comment.

Creating a new email

The required address format to create new incidents is:
<service-path>@<your-mail-api-key>.<your-account>.beetil.com

Your service path is a lowercase version of the service name, where spaces are replaced by dashes.  ie.  ”Example Service A” would have a service-path of “example-service-a”.

For example, I would send emails to beetil@myuniqsecret.youdo.beetil.com

Beetil will even detect your email attachments and bring them into the incident.

Only YOU are able to use this email API key.   It’s the combination of this API key and your email address that validates whether you are allowed to use email integration.   We don’t like spam, and we’re sure you don’t either, so that’s why we’ve done it like this.

Replying to a Beetil Email

The email address format for replying to a beetil is:
<beetil-number>@<your-mail-api-key>.<account-name>.beetil.com
The address I’m replying to here is: 11512@myuniqsecret.youdo.beetil.com

All Beetil generated emails come pre-populated with the reply email address with your mail integration key.

To post a new comment to beetil concerned, reply above the line: “REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE TO POST A COMMENT”.  Only content above that line will be added as a new comment.    Anyone that is one the watchlist of that Beetil will get notified once Beetil receives and processes the email.

It’s all pretty simple and straightforward so please feel free to go play. Please - suggestions are more than welcome.

If you need to send an SOS to support you can catch us on the normal channels at support@beetil.com, tweet to @beetil, dog and bone to +64 4 8949110, or catch us around the Campfire.

So who can use time?

By default all existing and new users will have Time Tracking enabled, although you can change these permissions in user admin.

A Beetil Time User has the ability to log time against services they can access, and also the ability to run a personal “My Time Report”

Beetil Time Administrators have all the access of a Time User, but also have the ability to run account-wide time reporting on all users.

There are two ways to use Beetil Time.

Firstly, there’s the in-Beetil approach where on the right hand side you have the time widget.

This allows for instant time entry which will log time against the current day for the beetil you are looking at (Note: a beetil is our collective term for an incident, problem, change, or release). It will also show you at a glance how much time you have spent on this beetil, and also how much time has been spent on this beetil in total. Viewing “All Time Entries” will give a more detailed view of who, and how much time, has been spent on the beetil.

The other approach is to use the Day View in “Time” (selectable from the top right menu).

Using the intelligent dropdown, you can easily select any service or beetil you’ve recently been working on. There are 3 different possible formats you can use to enter time.

• Log time against a specific beetil - Search as you type for the beetil title, and select the appropriate Beetil
• Log time against a specific Service (but not associated with a beetil) - the format Service // Task name will log time under that service.
• Log general time unassociated to any service or beetil - for non-service related tasks // Task name will log time under the account.

Our time reports allow users to report on time spent between date ranges on certain services, and/or users, so it’s easy to see which services are gobbling up the most time, or which staff are slacking off These reports have the ability to be exported to CSV. Options include to report by service, by user, and for a specific date range. The “My Time Report” is the same as a Time Administrator’s time report, but only shows time entries for the currently logged in user.

It’s all pretty simple and straightforward so please feel free to go play. Please - suggestions are more than welcome. If you need to send an SOS to support you can catch us on the normal channels at support@beetil.com, tweet to @beetil, dog and bone to +64 4 8949110, or catch us around the Campfire.