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[[!meta title="Request tracker for help desk"]]
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Having a request tracker powering our help desk will be key to fulfilling their
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[[updated mission|contribute/working_together/roles/help_desk]]:
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**Gather qualitative and quantitative data to understand better our users and
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prioritize our work.**
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Requirements
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============
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MUST
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----
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- Track easily what's been done and what's left from previous help desk shifts:
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- Make it easy to ensure everything is answered
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- Allow a single person to follow an issue from the beginning to the end
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- Statistics:
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- Know how many users encountered the same issue. Spot the "Top bugs"
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- Be able to have stats on common issues
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- Be able to categorize issues ("tags")
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- Allow building a responsible data retention policy
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- The platform will handle sensitive information (email addresses of
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users, their hardware, their problems, etc.). We'll have to do some
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threat modeling to figure out how to store each piece of
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information and for how long. The platform might have built-in
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capacity for this...
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- Handle incoming and outgoing OpenPGP emails
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- Allow searching in the archive of tickets
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- Plain text search
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- Search on metadata (eg. filter by the version of Tails)
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- Make it easy to forward logs to devs (who might not have a direct
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access to the platform)
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- Provide a separate queue of tickets per language [[!tails_ticket 9080]]
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- Make it easy to onboard new help desk members
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- Keep a database of template answers
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- Allow cross-referencing Redmine tickets and help desk tickets
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- For example, in order to know when a particular issue will be fixed
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- Make it easy to contact the user back when there is a solution
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- Parse automatically at least some metadata from WhisperBack reports
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- We might want to parse automatically all kind of data from
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WhisperBack reports but that might be hard to do (eg. hardware
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information) but the platform should at least parse automatically the
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WhisperBack headers (email address, version number, etc.)
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SHOULD
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------
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- Keep track of hardware compatibility (Tails works on XYZ, Wi-Fi card XYZ doesn't work)
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- Replace the list of bad users and flag them automatically as nasty
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- Allow users to express whether they were satisfied with our answers
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MAY
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---
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- As a start we'll aim at creating a tool that's only accessible to
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help desk members (and maybe a few other core contributors) but not
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to members of the Foundations and UX team in general.
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But for the future, the platform might have built-in capacity to
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handle different type of accesses to the data in terms of privacy.
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- Shift management:
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- Replace the calendar of shifts and do something smart about that (send notifications to the person on duty)
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- Automatically clock user support time
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- Allow forwarding issues from and to other user support projects (Tor, Access Now)
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- Have a disposable chat system for tricky cases (Tor does that)
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Budgeting
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=========
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This work is directly related to the work of four of our core team:
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- [[Help Desk|contribute/working_together/roles/help_desk]]: they will
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use the platform to do their work.
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- [[Foundations
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Team|contribute/working_together/roles/foundations_teams]]: they will
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use the data of the platform to investigate for example hardware
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compatibility issues.
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- [[UX Designes|contribute/working_together/roles/ux]]: they will use
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the data of the platform to investigate usability issues and help
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prioritizing our work.
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- [[Sysadmins|contribute/working_together/roles/sysadmins]]: they will
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administer the platform.
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Making sure that the platform will work for them is part of the core
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work of these teams (eg. building the requirements).
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But researching implementation options doesn't fit in their scope of
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work and should be budgeted apart. This work could either be:
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- Clocked and paid only once we'll find a grant or a budget to build the
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platform.
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- Paid after requesting an exceptional budget line to tails@boum.org.
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For example, if we decide to get the help from external contractors
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for the research phase.
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If we decide to work with external contractors, we'll have to be
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careful about not spending more time being the point of contact than
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doing the work ourselves (for example, this might not work for
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intrigeri).
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It might be good if the researcher and the implementer are the same
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person. This might be groente but not before the end of the year.
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Options
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=======
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- [[!wikipedia Comparison_of_help_desk_issue_tracking_software]] (Wikipedia)
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### OTRS
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- <http://www.otrs.com/>
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- <https://otrs.github.io/doc/manual/admin/3.1/en/html/configure-pgp.html>
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### RT
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- <http://bestpractical.com/rt/>
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- <https://bestpractical.com/rtir/>
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- AccessNow have a RT behind their help desk. It's run by Gustaf
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Björksten <gustaf@accessnow.org>.
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- <https://www.bestpractical.com/docs/rt/4.2/RT/Crypt/GnuPG.html>
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- <https://forge.puppetlabs.com/darin/rt>
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- Koumbit is using RT and told us about their experience in <ead91b4d-8a87-5855-de55-2c4ffcb40377@koumbit.org>
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### Faveo
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- <https://www.faveohelpdesk.com/>
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- Online demo: <https://www.faveohelpdesk.com/online-demo/>
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### Helpy
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- <https://helpy.io/> |