Integrated HD Setup and Installation
This document explains how to set up install the Integrated Help Desk. Areas where special technical knowledge are required are identified with an asterisk.
Plugin Installation and Activation
Integrated Help Desk is a WordPress plugin. It is encrypted using ionCube
technology. Your web server must have the ionCube Loader installed* in order for you to use the Integrated Help Desk.
Plugin Installation Steps:
1. Upload plugin zip file to your web server
2. Unzip the file from within your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Load the WordPress dashboard in your browser 4. Go to the Plugins page
5. Activate the Integrated Help Desk plugin
Please note: if you web server is not set up to support ionCube you will not be able to activate Integrated Help Desk.
Plugin Configuration
The Integrated Help Desk plugin is configured via settings on several different
WordPress dashboard pages. All of the pages will appear under the “Integrated HD”
tab in your dashboard. Each section of settings is described below.
General Settings
The General Settings page contains the most important settings for your installation of Integrated Help Desk. Without the correct settings on this page Integrated Help Desk may not operate correctly. Each setting is explained below:
Contact Settings:
• Username - Integrated Help Desk username, this will usually be the email address you entered when you purchased Integrated Help Desk
• License Key - an alphanumeric value you should have received with your copy of Integrated Help Desk. This value is unique to you.
• Business Name - you business name. This value may appear in Integrated Help Desk emails.
• Phone, Address, City, State/Province, Zip Code/Postal Code, Website - other business contact information. These values may appear in Integrated Help Desk emails.
• Password, Confirm Password - use these fields to reset your password at http://integratedhelpdesk.com
Infusionsoft Settings:
• Infusionsoft Application - you Infusionsoft application name. You may enter this value with or without the .infusionsoft.com suffix.
• Infusionsoft API Key - you may find this value in your Infusionsoft account under Settings > Misc Settings... > Miscellaneous
General Settings
• Timezone - set this value to the timezone your web server is running in
• Maximum Attachment Size - contacts may add file attachments to their support tickets. The size of these attachments is limited by the valid specified here. Please note that there may be additional file upload size limits imposed by your particular web server or hosting company. In many case these limits can be increased.*
Email Settings*
• Email Handler Mode - this setting determines how your support emails will be processed.
There are two modes:
1. Pipe Email to Script - in this mode emails are directed by your web server to the email handling script
2. Read From Inbox - in this mode the email handling script runs periodically and pulls email from your email inbox
• Email Account - usually this will be your email address but in some cases it may use be a simple username
• Email Password - the password associated with your email account
• Email Host - the domain name (or IP address) of you email server. Sometimes this will be your web site domain with a prefix of ‘mail’, ‘pop’, ‘imap’ or something similar (e.g.
imap.mysite.com). If your email is hosted elsewhere, then the domain name may be
something entirely different. For example, if you email is hosted by Google you would need to enter imap.gmail.com.
If you are unsure of what value to use here you may leave the field blank. Integrated Help Desk may be able to determine proper value. The Test Email Settings button will check your current settings to determine if they are correct. An ‘Ok’ message will appear if they are.
Please note that this test may take a minute or more to complete, especially if your settings are incorrect.
• Email Domain - enter the domain name your emails should be sent “from”.
Please read the Email Handling Setup section below for more information about how these settings are used.
Refresh
• Check License - Integrated Help Desk will automatically re-validate your license (usually once a week), you can manually re-validate any time by clicking this button
• Refresh Plugin - This button is used to tell Integrated Help Desk to refresh its settings. This is sometimes useful to do after installing a new version of the Integrated Help Desk. Some information may be cached by Integrated Help Desk and this button can be used to flush that information if necessary.
• Re-install Tags/Templates - Integrated Help Desk uses a number of Infusionsoft tags and email templates to perform different activities. Default versions of these are automatically
installed when Integrated Help Desk is first activated. If for some reason your copy of these tags/templates become lost or damaged you can reinstall the defaults by clicking this button.
Agents
Integrated Help Desk is designed to operate with two types of users: contacts and agents. Contacts are the people that will submit help desk tickets. Agents are the people that will be answering and administering the tickets. Help desk contacts are Infusionsoft contacts and agents are usually Infusionsoft users - the people with administrative access to your application.
The Agents settings page allows you to view the agents Integrated Help Desk recognizes. All of your Infusionsoft uses are automatically added to Integrated Help Desk as agents along with their contact information.
You may also add additional users as agents by filling in values under the “Add an Agent” section and clicking “Add Agent”. These agents are separate from Infusionsoft users. Their information is stored locally in the WordPress database.
Help Options
The Help Options page is where most of the Integrated Help Desk behavior is configured. There are many options:
Infusionsoft Settings
• Contact Tags - select one more tags that identify the contacts that will be using your Help Desk. Avoid selecting more tags than necessary as some of the requests that Integrated Help Desk sends to Infusionsoft need to be done separately for each tag.
• Contact Sort Order - this setting determines how different contact information is ordered when display contact names. Do you want you contacts sorted by company name first, by last name then company name, etc?
• Invitations - Integrated Help Desk will send invitation emails to all Infusionsoft agents in the application when it is first set up. This button can be used to resend these emails to users that have not yet logged in to the Integrated Help Desk.
Autoresponder & Notification Settings
• New Tickets - select the list of agents that want to receive a notification email when new tickets are created.
• No Ticket Updates - agents are automatically sent a notification email when a ticket assigned to them is updated. Agents can be opted out from these emails by
selecting them here.
• Automatic Assignment - if one or more agents are select here, new tickets will be automatically assigned to the selected agents in a round robin fashion.
• Updates - update notification emails may be sent at different times depending on how a ticket is modified. Select the event types you are interested in receiving notifications about.
• Reminders - set the age at which a ticket becomes “old”. The number of “old” tickets appears in the Ticket Summary widget details.
• New Ticket Email - select the email template that you want to use by default when a new ticket is created. This email template is sent to the contact that opened the ticket.
• Except - You can set up a simple filter for new emails. Tickets will not be created for emails with a subject that matches this filter. This may be of use for spam or regular emails that are sent to your support email address. Leave blank to disable.
• Update Ticket Email - select the email template that you want to use by default when a ticket is updated. This email template is sent to the contact that opened the ticket.
• Closed Ticket Action - select an action to run when the ticket is closed. The action is run on the contact associated with the ticket. Only actions with a name that starts with “IntegratedHD” are shown in this list.
• From Email Address - You may set a from email address to override the from email address used with all of your ticket emails. If set this value will override the from email address defined in the email template.
Ratings/Feedback Settings
• Rating Threshold - defines the minimum rating value at which ticket feedback is considered positive. Feedback is based on a 1 to 5 star rating.
• Positive Ratings - these settings describe what should happen when a ticket is rated positively. Contacts may be tagged with a specific tag, sent an email, or redirected to a particular Integrated Help Desk page.
• Negative Ratings - these settings are the same as the Positive Ratings settings except that they apply when a ticket is rated negatively.
• Referral Email - when a contact fills out a referral form, this the email template used.
• Invitations
• Suggestion Box - the Integrated Help Desk can show a floating suggestion box on the side of your web site. The suggestion box allows contacts to offer feedback.
You may choose not to show the suggestion box or show it on either the right or left side of the screen.
Integrated Help Desk Links
• New Ticket Page - provided for your reference, this is the URL to the page where contacts can use a form to create a new ticket. You may want to include this link in emails you send to contacts.
• Help Documents Page - if you have the Integrated Help Desk Documents plugin installed on your site this URL will point to the main document list page. You may want to include this link in emails you send to contacts.
Login Settings
The Login Settings page has settings for the Integrated Help Desk login and logout pages and widgets.
• Login Template - the template used to generate the login form.
• Login Authorization Error - the error text displayed for the contact when the information they provide is incorrect.
• Login Redirect Page - the page the contact should be redirected to after successfully logging in.
• Logout Template - the template used to generate the logout form.
• Logout Redirect Page - the page the contact should be redirected to after logging out.
Both the Login template and the Logout Template support a set of replacement strings that can be used to insert agent specific information into the form. These replacement strings must be enclosed in square brackets (e.g. “[First Name]”). The replacement strings that are supported include: Username, Business Name, First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone, Address, City, State, Zip Code, and Website.
You may add the login (and logout) form to any page on your site by embedding the [ihd_login] shortcode.
Ticket Settings
The Login Settings page has settings for various ticket forms. There are standard pages for each of these forms created by the Integrated Help Desk when it is activated. You may also embed these forms on any page in your site using the [ihd_tickets] shortcode. Example shortcodes are shown for each form type.
• Feedback Template - template used to generate the Feedback form.
• New Ticket Template - template used to generate the New Ticket form.
• Rating Template - template used to generate the Rating form.
• Referral Template - template used to generate the Referral form.
• Thank You Template - template used to generate the Thank You form, which is usually shown after a contact fills out the feedback form.
• View Template - template used to generate the View Ticket form.
All of these forms support a set of replacement strings that can be used to insert contact specific information into the form. These replacement strings must be enclosed in square brackets (e.g. “[Business Name]”). The replacement strings that are supported include: Business Name, Email, Phone, Address, City, State, Zip Code, and Website. Please note that the values that will be used to replace these strings are the values for your business - not the contact’s values.
Notification Emails
The settings on this page define the templates used to send notification emails to agents when various actions occur. Each template supports a variety of replacements strings. Please see the bottom of the page for a full list of replacement values.
Support
The Support page has no settings but can be used to email support requests or suggestions to the Integrated Help Desk team.
Email Handling Setup
Integrated Help Desk can be set up to automatically process emails sent to your support email address. Each new email will generate a new ticket and responses will
automatically append to existing tickets. Emails will also be automatically assigned to contacts in your Infusionsoft application when a matching contact can be found.
Email handling is managed by a script included with the Integrated Help Desk. It can be set up either as a cron job that reads email from an email account or as a script to which emails are directed ("piped") by your web server. Either method should only be set up after your email settings have been configured from in the Integrated Help Desk settings in your WordPress Dashboard.
Having emails piped to the handler script is the easiest method to set up and will result in the most responsive handling of emails.
The steps for this method are:
1. Log in to your web server Control Panel (cPanel).
2. Click on the "Default Address" option 3. Click on the "Advanced Options >>" link 4. Select the "Pipe to a Program" radio button 5. Paste the following value into the text input box:
public_html/wp-content/plugins/ihd/scripts/email_handler.php -p 6. Click "Change" to save these changes
7. Make sure the email_hander.php script (step #6) is executable
Piping emails to the email handler may not work with all web hosts or the steps may be different than those indicated above. If you are unable to use piping you can also have the email script handler read emails directly from your email inbox. For this to work you need to set up a cron job to run the email handler script periodically.
If your host supports cPanel follow the steps below to set up the required cron job:
1. Log in to your web server Control Panel (cPanel) 2. Click on the "Cron jobs" options
3. In the "Add New Cron Job" area select "Every 5 minutes(*/5 * * * *)" from the Common Settings dropdown.
4. For the command enter:
5. /home/mysite/public_html/wp-content/plugins/ihd/scripts/email_handler.php -i (Please note that the '/home/mysite' portion of the command must be changed to match the location of your site's home directory).
As with the piping method, the exact steps for setting up a cron job may differ for you and your web host, especially if your web host does not offer cPanel. You may need system administration assistance to set up either option correctly.*
PLEASE NOTE: emails sent to the support email address may - and usually will - be unavailable after they have been processed by the email handling script. In the case of the piping method, the emails will be directed to the script instead of being saved in an inbox. In the case of the cron job, the script will delete the support emails after it has read them from the inbox and created a ticket. Furthermore, in the case of the cron job any emails that are already in the inbox at the time Integrated Help Desk and the cron job are set up will be processed by the email handling script and will be deleted
afterwards. This may result in many tickets being created when the cron job is first set up.
To retain a copy of your support emails, you may want to set up an an internal email address that will be used only by Integrated Help Desk (e.g. [email protected]), configure that as the email Integrated Help Desk should use, and then forward all emails from your main support email address to the internal email address.
