[Technical] Do you use a helpdesk system or just regular email for user-support and job tracking?

[Jim Maunder]

Hello Paul -

Firstly some background - we have 750 students from K-12, kids get 
laptops in Yr5, nearly all teaching staff have laptops. That makes 
about 600 lappies to look after. We have 3 and a bit computer labs, 
the JS rooms have 3 desktop PCs K-4, and 2 PC yrs 5-6, and then there is admin.

We have the network manager (my boss), me the laptop technician, and 
a 30 hours a week support person who mainly looks after the junior 
school and the admin users. My boss mainly looks after the servers 
and infrastructure. We all help each other out as needed. I am not so 
busy that I can't spend a few minutes responding to posts like this.

The computer labs hardly ever need attention (I re-image them every 
term break), the admin staff are quite competent as computer users 
and in general only ask for help with things like mail merge or how 
to query the student records. The teachers main troubles are e-mail 
and network issues.

When staff (either teachers or admin) want help they either email, 
phone, or visit in person. Junior school have a paper system to 
request help. When students need laptop help they visit me.

I record only those jobs that need attention by our 'laptop program' 
provider (Computelec) using MS Access. I keep all the e-mails 
requesting computer help.

All pretty basic really. Being a girls' school helps. Maybe being a 
Novell site helps too.

rgds
Jim


At 03:10 PM 29/07/2008, you wrote:
...
>Reasons we looked at using a helpdesk system:
>- Allow helpdesk staff to make notes on each issue so other helpdesk
>staff could follow it up if required
>- Easy tracking of sent and received emails per issue
>- Gather statistics on the types of problems encountered and time spent
>on them (not a primary requirement)
>
>I'm interested to hear what you use in your school to manage emails from
>staff..


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Jim Maunder
Laptop and PC Support Technician
Ruyton Girls School
Melbourne, Australia
ph 03 9290 9374