Unfortunately, the decision has been made to stop using Helpdesk for O365...
Exporting tickets, comments and attachments for archiving purposes seems to be a nearly impossible task without completely reverse engineering the lists and relationships and building extensive Flows...
So I was wondering if it is still possible to access the site or data after the license has expired, be it in read only mode or something like that?
We would not want to create new tickets, comments or change status or anything.
Hello Erik! I am sorry to know that. Yes, all the data you have will be available after expiration of your subscription since they are stored only on your SharePoint site. The stop of the service will affect only processing messages and HelpDesk automations.
But could you give more details on your use case and the troubles that you encountered in finding the way for backup? If you want to archive the old tickets, you can just create a folder for them in the "Tickets" list. Or do you need to save all the data in external files?
I would like to have at least the current tickets and comments exported to Excel for import in the new system (Topdesk) and as far as I understand it I would have to do this with Flow / Power Automate.
The export will include all the columns of the current view. But the comments and tickets are items of different lists (find all of them in the "Site contents"), HelpDesk defines the relations between them through a technical field which is hidden and by default can't be included in the exported data. You can definitely grab the data through Power Automate. Perhaps, we could reveal the technical field so that it could be included into the export to CSV but this should be discussed with developers, I am not sure.
Anyway, I hardly imagine how it will allow to import the data into another service desk system. And still I don't understand why it is an issue to stop using HelpDesk: you refuse from the product because it is too complicate to archive data which you are going to use for migration to another product... Am I missing something? It is not an interrogation. I just try to understand what is the problem you had and how I could help you (if you need it, of course). =)
Noooo, we're not stopping because of archiving but because new management finds the product limited in fields like asset management, license management, reserving rooms, reserving equipment, things like that for multiple support departments. More like facility management.
As a pure ticketing system Plumsail is great in my opinion and I have enjoyed working with you.
I myself also don't think it is feasible to export and import because I then also have learn how the other database is structured.
I did notice the comments list has a field including the title of the ticket so a very dirty way would be to connect on that
I'll 'play' with it for a day and then tell them it is not possible to export and import
Oh, I am sorry for misunderstanding. Indeed, the listed tasks would require deep customisation and it seems a reasonable decision to switch to another product that provides you with the required features out-of-the-box. Just for your reference, the relations between comments and tickets are set through a "GUID" lookup field. So there is a fail-safe way to keep the connections between them in the exported files. If you nevertheless decide to export the data, let me know and will ask developers whether it is possible to include the field into the CSV files.
Thank you for the offer, but if I were you I wouldn't go through that much effort for a customer that is leaving...
We've decided on a more practical approach: with Power automate I will export tickets that are still open and include a link to the ticket in Plumsail in the body instead of all comments.
can you provide more details on the benefits using the folder in the ticket list and how the links to the comments and metadata work in this case?
I stumbled upon another topic with a similar approach for archiving tickets, but in my opinion creating a new internal status "archive" and filtering on it will do the same or do miss any detail?
I assume tickets older than X months and which are solved can be moved per scheduled power automate into the archive folder, right?
The comments and metadata will not be affected by moving the ticket to a list folder. It is just an alternative to editing list view that some users may prefer in their cases. Earlier, when the classic SharePoint UI was used, it was a main approach for archiving. And the latter was necessary because of the issue of the 5,000-item threshold. As far as I know, now it does not occur and archiving is just a problem of structuring view of tickets.
You are right that filtering tickets in the list view by some field will do the same trick. Also, you can create several views for different time ranges of resolution dates, for example. As regards moving tickets with a Power Automate flow, I think it is possible only with HTTP requests to SharePoint (check this approach for example), at least I could not find the accordant property in other SharePoint actions.
we built the flow to move tickets into the folder of the ticket which works fine as well as rendering the solved tickets in the widget.
We like to go a step ahead and filter on non-archived tickets which is only possible if we limit the view to the items inside the folder but afterwards, we cannot switch to the other views.
Do you have any idea how to handle it as the tickets inside the archive folder have the content type Ticket and we only can filter on the folder but with no return to the ticket list is possible?
Is it possible to include a separate folder in a query for the widget view?
Aglika, could you raise a support ticket with this issue (refer to this topic)? Unfortunately, I do not fully understand it so could you provide screenshots and/or screen video records so that I could reproduce your case and see the required result?
