Additionally, you can integrate with various billing softwares example WHMCS | Blesta to generate invoice.

• Auto and Manual billing time tracking for ticket — This will auto calculate billing time for a ticket based on the amount of time staff has worked on that ticket.

Timer

• Billing Rates — per ticket | per minute | per hour
• Multiple Currency Support — Add your own currency to billing module.
• Pre Paid billing — Add Credits to user accounts and use the credit while solving tickets.

Billing Settings

• Billing Notes – Add Billing Notes to Tickets.

Add Billing Note

Billing Note

• Billing Reports — Fetch various Billing reports.

Per User Invoice Listing

]]> http://www.thevisionworld.com/advance-billing-module.html/feed 4 http://www.thevisionworld.com/time-zone.html http://www.thevisionworld.com/time-zone.html#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:50:47 +0000 Vision Helpdesk http://www.thevisionworld.com/?p=1646 Vision Helpdesk allows you to manage Support for multiple companies and its possible that you have companies located in different countries or in other words each company may have its own working schedule or different timezones.

The another important factor is you may have Staff working from remote locations with different timezones.

We have added new Time Zone Feature that allows you to –

• Set Time Zone for each Company
  
• Staff can set their own Time Zone

Set Time Zone for each Company

This is used for setting up company working hours schedule and SLA calculations.

Clients or End-Users see this time on their tickets and staff replies.

Company Time Zone can be set from Admin >> Settings >> Domain >> Manage Domain >> Edit your Domain and set Time Zone.

Staff can set their own Time Zone

Each staff can set their own timezone from MyVision >> Profile section.

Having time zone set for each staff makes it simplified for Staff to keep track of ticket timings and maintain SLA.

WHMCS Billing System

A) Replacing WHMCS default Support module with Vision Support module

That is when clients log into whmcs and they click on submit ticket it will be sent to vision database that is support is completely handled by vision and whmcs is used for billing.

Check this for more details — http://www.thevisionworld.com/whmcs-billing-system-vision-helpdesk-login-share-integration.html

Click here to find steps to replace WHMCS default support with Vision Helpdesk Support Module

B) Paid Support / Per Ticket Billing Module

Vision Helpdesk integrates with WHMCS Billing Software to offer Paid Support feature, that means now you can add billing note to a ticket and create invoice right from your Vision helpdesk.

This feature is simple and does not require any technical knowledge, You need to provide your WHMCS database and Admin login details in Vision Helpdesk and your Vision Helpdesk turns in to Paid Support Helpdesk.Check this for more details –  http://www.thevisionworld.com/paid-support-whmcs-integration.html

C) Login Integration with WHMCS

Login Integration allows your users to bypass the login registration process for their support area. If enabled your users can use one common login details for login to WHMCS billing system and Vision Helpdesk.

D) Fetching fields from WHMCS into Vision Helpdesk

This allows Vision to pull client information (Package type, Server Ip, Domain name, Control Panel User & Password and more) from WHMCS enabling support staff to view client information in helpdesk whenever client post a ticket.

E) WHMCS Ticket Migration

If you are already using WHMCS for your support and wanted to use Vision — You can migrate your clients existing tickets in to Vision from WHMCS with our simple Migration Tool.

What is WYSIWYG ?

WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document is being created. In general WYSIWYG implies the ability to directly manipulate the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.

The biggest advantage of WYSIWYG editor is that you don’t need to know HTML to format a text.

WYSIWYG Editor in Vision Helpdesk ?

Vision Helpdesk now includes WYSIWYG editor for –

• Staff New Ticket Creation
• Staff Ticket Reply
• Knowledgebase
• News Articles
• Email Templates
• Signatures

WYSIWYG editor comes handy for staff while replying to tickets — Now staff can format their reply like make text appear Bold, Italic, Underlined, Colored  or even add tabular data, images and much more just like a word pad.

The Satellite feature along with Ajax implementation extends Vision’s scalability from single company support to multiple company support management.

Vision helpdesk can be configured for different applications and scenarios . In this post we will show how Vision helpdesk can be used for providing Anonymous End User Support for your Reseller, VPS and Dedicated server clients.

What is End User Support?

“End user support is nothing but offering support to your client’s customers”.

You run a Webhosting Company and want to offer End User support — How does Vision helpdesk comes handy?

With Vision helpdesk you can offer list of features to your clients to support end users..

• You can give your reseller/vps/dedicated client a complete ready to use helpdesk software, they can have their own staff logins too.
• The helpdesk offered will have your clients company name and logo.
• Takes 10 mins to setup your clients helpdesk.
• Your staff and your client both can login to vision and work side by side – your client can see your staff’s replies or reply to their clients if they want to.
• Different signatures for different domains/departments.
• If your client runs billing software like WHMCS / Blesta /Clientexec they can get the client portal integarted with vision helpdesk too.
• The end users receives replies from clients email and no different email and much more..

We have some of our clients already using Vision Helpdesk for offering Free end user support to their clients.

Client Review:

We wanted to offer free end user support to our vps clients but there was no helpdesk which could allow us to manage end user support better way. Then we came across Vision Helpdesk and thanks to its Satellite helpdesk feature  that allows us to manage end user support without any hassle.

We include Free End User Support for our VPS clients i,e free  support to customers of our VPS clients. We install a Vision client portal on our vps clients website (See example HERE). Their customers signs in and submits tickets from their website. Vision allows customization of  logo, header and footers for our vps clients – so they can match their website design. The ticket is controlled, tracked and replied to using the main Vision program on our  server.

Vision Helpdesk also easily imports data from major helpdesks like: Kayako Support Suite – Kayako eSupport – Cerberus and WHMCS. This makes switching to Vision Helpdesk easy and you have all tickets imported from your old helpdesk — that’s is a big plus.

We are thankful to Vision helpdesk developers to provide us such a wonderful helpdesk software that allows us to manage end user support without any hassle.

We highly recommend Vision Helpdesk.

Thank You,

Russell Chambers

CEO. GlitterHost.com

————————————

We are happy that GlitterHost is using Vision Helpdesk to offer free end user support to their clients.

Just like GlitterHost you can start offering end user support to your reseller / vps and dedicated clients too.

How to customize Vision helpdesk Client Portal?

Here are the files that can be edited –

You can edit header.php & footer.php to include your website header and footer.

You can also edit css/style.css file.

If you want to add new links to menu then can add it from tabinfo.php

Client Portal Showcase:

Below is screen-shot for some vision helpdesk users customized client portals  –

Vision Helpdesk SMS Alert Plugin allows staff to receive ticket alerts on their mobile phones. They can receive updates on helpdesk activity even if they have not logged in to helpdesk.

Vision Helpdesk Alert system allows you and your staff to select events (New Ticket, Ticket Reply, etc..) for which they want to receive SMS Alerts.  Further it allows you to filter event for specific Department / Ticket Status  ( Open /Awaiting/ Close etc.)

Currently we support Clickatell.com and 2SMS.com SMS gateways.

User can signup at Clickatell or 2SMS and update those login details in your Vision helpdesk.

Vision Helpdesk integrates with Blesta Billing Software to offer Paid Support feature, that means now you can add billing note to a ticket and create invoice right from your Vision helpdesk.

This feature is simple and does not require any technical knowledge, You need to provide your Blesta database and Admin login details in Vision Helpdesk and your Vision Helpdesk turns in to Paid Support Helpdesk.

Rest below images speak for themselves..

A) Add Billing Note and Create Invoice

B) Invoice List

C) Invoice Details

Please comment on what additional Billing Systems you would like us to integrate for Paid Support Feature..

Also check — Vision Helpdesk integartion with WHMCS to offer Paid Ticket Support.

What is Email Parsing?

User sends email to helpdesk and helpdesk email parser further parse this email and converts it in to a ticket. This process of converting email into helpdesk ticket is called as email parsing.

Vision Helpdesk offers two options for clients to open ticket (issue).

1. Client can open ticket using Vision Helpdesk client portal (i.e, web form)
2. Client can directly send email. In this case Vision Helpdesk email parser converts clients email in to ticket.

What is Two Way Email Parsing?

Previous version of Vision Helpdesk allowed clients to open ticket by sending email to support@yourcompany.com and this email used to get converted in to helpdesk ticket and Staff could reply to those tickets by login to Vision helpdesk Staff area..

Now with Two Way Parsing — Vision helpdesk sends email alerts to Staff email address whenever a client opens a new or updates existing ticket.  Further staff replies to alert message and this staff reply gets appended to ticket in Vision helpdesk.

What’s the big deal?

Two way parsing allows your support staff to reply to tickets via email too. Your staff is not required to login to Vision helpdesk in order to reply to tickets.

Best scenario of two way email parsing –

A company staff can have their email address configured on their mobile  phone – They can receive email alerts on their mobile and reply to those alert messages without actually log-in to web-based helpdesk.

Everyone knows how e-Mail Spam can cause serious security and resource risks to an organization’s infrastructure: clogging mailboxes, defrauding recipients, overloading systems, reducing employee productivity and much more..

Vision Helpdesk does not tolerate SPAM!!

Vision Helpdesk integrates with Mollom (A tough nut for spam) – to combat spam e-mails.

Mollom is a well thought Anti-Spam system. It provides a one stop solution for all spam  problems – It is a web service that helps you identify content quality.

Mollom provides a quality score, based on automated content-analysis techniques, for each email content sent to Mollom for analysis. This makes it possible to ignore or reject low-quality or offensive emails..

Multi-lingual – Mollom stops spam and unwanted content in all languages.

To read about more on Mollom features click here

How does Mollom work with Vision Helpdesk?

Whenever email arrives at Vision email Parser it forwards the email content to Mollom for analyzing quality of content posted in email. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted – i.e. “spam” – or desirable – i.e. “ham.”  If Mollom is not certain, it will return an “unsure,” Mollom avoids incorrectly classifying legitimate contributions as spam.

It effectively eliminates the need to moderate messages that Mollom decides to block since they are unlikely to have come from legitimate users.

How to enable/disable Mollom Plugin in Vision Helpdesk?

You can login to Admin Area >> Plugin >> Manage Plugins >> You can enable or disable Mollom plugin for your vision helpdesk.

For enabling this plugin you will be prompted for Mollom login credentials — You can register at Mollom website.

Does Vision Helpdesk charge anything for this Plugin?

Absolutely NO, Mollom Anti-Spam Plugin is free!! To use this plug-in you need to be registered with Mollom (Its a free service ) — click here to register with Mollom