computer science

Networked Help Desk

Networked Help Desk is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Networked Help Desk rather than just read about it. In short: Networked Help Desk is an open standard initiative to provide a common API for sharing customer support tickets between separate instances of issue tracking, bug tracking, customer relationship management (CRM) and project management systems to improve customer service and reduce vendor lock-in. The initiative was created by Zendesk in June 2011 in collaboration with eight other founding member organizations includi…

Key takeaways

Networked Help Desk belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Networked Help Desk to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Networked Help Desk from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Networked Help Desk is an open standard initiative to provide a common API for sharing customer support tickets between separate instances of issue tracking, bug tracking, customer relationship management (CRM) and project management systems to improve customer service and reduce vendor lock-in. The initiative was created by Zendesk in June 2011 in collaboration with eight other founding member organizations including Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Tracker, ServiceNow and SugarCRM. The first integration, between Zendesk and Atlassian's issue tracking product, Jira, was announced at the 2011 Atlassian Summit. By August 2011, 34 member companies had joined the initiative. A year after launching, over 50 organizations had joined. Within Zendesk instances this feature is branded as ticket sharing.

Basis Support tools are generally built around a common paradigm that begins with a customer making a request or an incident report, these create a ticket. Each ticket has a progress status and is updated with annotations and attachments. These annotations and attachments may be visible to the customer (public), or only visible to analysts (private). Customers are notified of progress made on their ticket until it is complete. If the people necessary to complete a ticket are using separate support tools, additional overhead is introduced in maintaining the relevant information in the ticket in each tool while notifying the customer of progress made by each group in completing their ticket. For example, if a customer support issue is caused by a software bug and reported to a help desk using one system, and then the fix is documented by the developers in another, and analyzed in a customer relationship management tool, keeping the records in each system up-to-date and notifying the customer manually using a swivel chair approach is unnecessarily time-consuming and error-prone. If information is not transferred correctly, a customer may have to re-explain their problem each time their ticket is transferred. For systems with the Networked Help Desk API implemented, it is possible for several different applications related to a customer's support experience to synchronize data in one uniquely identified shared ticket. While many applications in these domains have implemented APIs that allow data to be imported, exported and modified, Network Help Desk provide a common standard for customer support information to automatically synchronize between several systems. Once implemented, two systems can quickly share tickets with just a configuration change as they both understand the same interface. Communication between two instances on a specific ticket occurs in three steps, an invitation agreement, sharing of ticket data and continued synchronization of tickets. The standard allows for "full delegation" (analysts in both systems each make public and private comments and synchronize status) as well as "partial delegation" where the instance receiving the ticket can only make private comments and status changes are not synchronized. Tickets may be shared with multiple instances.

Implementation list

See also Comparison of issue-tracking systems Enterprise application integration Enterprise service bus OSS through Java Web-oriented architecture

References

Further reading Vaughan, Stafford; de Young, Anton (2014-03-15). "Chapter 5: Ticket Sharing". Practical Zendesk Administration. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1491900772. OCLC 882259856.

External links Networked Help Desk on X Networked Help Desk on ProgrammableWeb

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Networked Help Desk

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Networked Help Desk claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Networked Help Desk before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Networked Help Desk ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Networked Help Desk

In research: Networked Help Desk appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Networked Help Desk in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Networked Help Desk is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Application programming interfaces, Cloud computing, Cloud standards, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Networked Help Desk outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Networked Help Desk in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Networked Help Desk means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Networked Help Desk out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Networked Help Desk in simple terms?

Why does Networked Help Desk matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Networked Help Desk?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Networked Help Desk.