Hello there!
We want to setup Plumsail for a shared IT mailbox.
As far as I know now mails to that mailbox need to be forwarded to our plumsail email in order to automatically create a ticket. So far so good.
I want to keep the impact on the IT staff as small as possible: How can we ensure that they can reply from that shared mailbox and register these replies in plumsail?
Cheers!
Hello! The replies from a mailbox are processed as comments in a HelpDesk ticket if the mailbox belongs either to requester or to CC contact or to the assigned agent. But I think it will be inconvenient for agents to distinguish which ticket belongs to which agent and reply only in their own. I would advise to use personal e-mail addresses of agents and if required, add the shared mailbox to CC of tickets to keep the correspondence in that mailbox too.
That's not gonna work for us: All staff are supposed to only contact one email address for support. I can forward from there and let IT only work in plumsail, but they refuse at the moment to change much about the way they are working.
So my idea was, a little bit like "assign ticket to first responder", to grab the user ID of the agent replying from that shared mailbox and their reply.
The requesters will receive notifications about new replies either from the default HelpDesk address or from the custom one that you configured in the Custom SMTP settings, i.e. form one common address, not from personal agent's one. So for them there is still one e-mail address for communication. Both parties (agents and requesters) will receive messages from the common mailbox to their personal ones and send messages from their personal e-mails to the common one.
HelpDesk has a default trigger that you can use for notifying all the agents that there is a new ticket.
You can configure another one to assign tickets to the first agent who replies - more detail in this article. But in any case, they will receive the notifications and hold the discussion in their own mailboxes.
I already used the " Assign ticket to first agent who replies" trigger, which worked fine, but only in Plumsail/Sharepoin
However, the IT team won't accept a solution that alters their twenty odd years old behaviour and way of working too much. And they work with email!
So my idea, which I hopefully expressed correctly, is not to let them actually work in Plumsail at the beginning. They are supposed to keep working from their shared mailbox via email, but all communication should be accessible in Plumsail.
To clarify where I'm starting: For now not even the individual replies to support calls are being stored in that shared mailbox. One agent cannot see what the other one has been doing and information is shared on the phone etc.
Therefore, as a first step I simply want to make information and communication accessible and transparent.
The approach I suggested does not require the support agents working outside e-mail. For example, you as an admin, configure HelpDesk site in SharePoint and set up all the required triggers. The agents will be notified to their e-mails about new tickets. To add a new comment to the ticket, any of them can just reply to that notification being in their mailbox interface. HelpDesk will process that reply as a new comment in the ticket. If you set up the trigger for automatic assigning tickets to the first agent who replied, his contact will be set as an assignee automatically. He needs do nothing. As an assignee, he will receive e-mail notifications about further replies in the ticket. To add his own, he needs just to reply to the notifications he receives - all of them will be automatically processed as new comments in the tickets.
All replies, both from agents and requesters, are sent to the shared mailbox and then forwarded to HelpDesk. If you set up the forwarding rule to keep the forwarded messages in the mailbox, they all will be available in it. Each message will have the full history of the communication quoted below the current message. Also, it will be available in the HelpDesk site in tickets (which is more convenient to track as for me).
The result: agents just write e-mails, requesters just write e-mails, you see the communication on HelpDesk site.
Perhaps, I do not understand your use case and requirements fully. If so, I am sorry and hope on your patience in explaining it to me.
The only thing is that they work from personal e-mail, not from shared one. Using the latter will not allow to distinguish which ticket belongs to which agent.
Hi Evgeniy,
I can definitely follow your approach, but still believe it's too much of a change at this point.
I interviewed one of the IT guys again yesterday and right now they handle emails as follows:
Email with request is sent to shared mailbox -> first one to open it (marking it as read) is assignee -> no-one touches already read emails 
I'll try and find out whether it's possible to catch the actual user-account replying from the shared mailbox...
But who is supposed to be a requester and assignee in a HelpDesk ticket? To keep order in the conversation, it is necessary to reply to the HelpDesk notifications, and the address that is used for the reply should belong either to the requester or to the assignee to define whose reply is. For now, I can hardly imagine how to make it working when all the agents use the same mailbox. And how do they distinguish their requests now? By their signatures in the thread?
