HelpCORE 1.3.2 review
DownloadHelpCORE can best be described as help- and service desk software, although it's use or options do not end there
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HelpCORE can best be described as help- and service desk software, although it's use or options do not end there. It's designed to aid the helpdesk, service desk or any similar process in a small to large scale organization.
HelpCORE has no known limitations on the amount of knowledge it can contain about your organization(s), people, hardware, software, incidents and so on.
HelpCORE acts as a central information hub for everybody that is involved in the help- and service desk process.
It's a web-based application where managers can see overview and decision making information, where system administrators can see the status of their network and software, and where users can see the current status of their problems.
Here are some key features of "HelpCORE":
Public Side:
Multi language
At any point in the program you can set your preferred language. Currently only Dutch and English are available.
Announcements
Administrators can announce news to the public. This is an aid in reporting large, system wide events or problems to the public.
Report Incidents
Users can report an incident themselves. These incidents are queued for approval by a real HelpCORE user who is allowed to add them to the other incident-list.
Request incident status
When users report an incident, or when they are involved in the incident-process, they can receive an incident-key. By using this key they can see the status of the incident. Users can also download files that where added to their incident.
Computer Inspector
The computer inspector can scan a computer for its hard and software configuration. Users can access this page to scan their computer upon request. Alternatively if you zdd this page to the startup scripts, computers are automatically scanned upon boot.
Knowledge base
All knowledge in the system can be flagged for being available to the public. This way, users can search for the solution to their problem themselves.
Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.)
Knowledge can be flagged for the FAQ, this is an easy way to help users find the answer to their main page.
Updates
Files can be attached to software in HelpCORE. All software that contains publicly accessible files is listed here, along with links to the files. Administrators can set files to a downloadable state so that users can download updates, notes or patches in a centralized and structured way.
Secure Side:
Multi language
At any point in the program you can set your preferred language. Currently only Dutch and English are available.
Customer and employee management
HelpCORE offers the possibility of storing all users in and around your organization. Each user can be given specific rights to a part of HelpCORE so that the administrator can determine who sees what. This is very handy if you want your customers to log in and create their own reports if they have to pay per incident for example.
As users can be coupled to hardware and locations your support staff can instantly see the situation. HelpCORE can even check if the user isn’t trying to double register an incident.
Incidents
Users within HelpCORE can create, change and delete incidents. Incidents are a major part of HelpCORE. There are several types of incidents: appointed to you, appointed to your group, public, open and closed.
Depending on your rights your list with incidents will vary. This way an administrator can easily appoint incidents to different users and support groups in order to handle them more efficiently.
Incidents themselves have a vast number of options, some more remarkable are full SLA support, escalation facilities, searching for solutions and different planning features.
If incidents are finished they are copied to the closed group; incidents are rarely deleted.
Every incident has a full audit trail, allowing helpdesk staff to see exactly what happened and what has been tried or done.
It’s also possible to create different reports and see statistics for incidents. This way, management can get all the information they require in running and assessing the department.
Hardware
Hardware in HelpCORE is stored as a set of different configurations which you can instantiate. Although this sounds difficult it’s actually quite simple. For example: you can tell HelpCORE how a HP© Proliant™ computer is configured, and what you want to store about it. Then you create a new piece of hardware with that configuration.
HelpCORE can store an arbitrary amount of data per configuration, and allows cascading, so that you can store configurations from a toaster to a space-shuttle.
The second part of hardware is devices. These are devices inside your users’ computers, for example hard disks and monitors. Devices are found by the Computer Inspector which can scan Windows computers for their hard- and software configuration.
Hardware has it’s own report generator which allows for the creation of detailed reports on the status of the machine park.
Maintenance
As you enter your hardware into HelpCORE you can schedule maintenance on it. This is known as the service desk part of HelpCORE. It’s possible to schedule two different maintenance intervals per device.
All maintenance is recorded and different people and groups can be assigned to maintenance tasks. The administrator can create different task-templates which the engineer can easily print along with his maintenance form.
If an incident is reported on a piece of hardware, and maintenance is due, HelpCORE will notify you and help you streamline the maintenance tasks.
Engineers that actually do the maintenance can get a handy print out of the job ahead and the already performed maintenance on the device so that they know what they’re heading into before arriving at the location.
It’s also possible to create different reports and see statistics for maintenance. So management can get all the information they require in running and assessing the department.
Knowledge base
Once an incident is finished you can allocate the knowledge generated by it in the knowledge base. Knowledge is the key to solving problems and allows lesser skilled personnel to solve complex problems.
Knowledge can be coupled to hardware, configurations, software, hardware types or incident categories. Knowledge can also be converted into Frequently Asked
Questions
The knowledge base makes use of advanced database word-matching technologies so that it can find the data you need – fast.
Organization and management
You can tell HelpCORE what your organization(s) look like. You can do that in a physical way by telling what sites you have, what buildings are upon it and what rooms are in those buildings. Next to that you can also tell HelpCORE how your organization is logically structured in it’s departments, groups and organizations.
You can also define Service Level Agreements and escalations, allowing for very fine grained control of how you will respond to different elements. For example a problem in a server-area is most likely more important then a broken printer. You can then attach the SLA’s to all of the items above.
Software and images
Software can be bundled into images. If your organization is larger then you will most likely have images of all the possible hardware-mixes. HelpCORE can help you by logically grouping software into images and assigning images to hardware or configurations.
Software can also be coupled to licenses so that HelpCORE can aid in the task of controlling how many of which software is in use inside your organization. This is becoming more and more an issue after large court-cases against the use of illegal software.
Software can even be assigned on a user-level, allowing for very close control of who can use what.
If you use the Computer Inspector you can even get a report of the changes in software-installation in your organization. This way it’s trivial to see what’s changed, what does not belong on the network and what licenses are exceeded.
Limitations:
30 days are free for any use
What's New in This Release:
Added process in database guard to set SLA dates from "0000-00-00 00:00:00" to NULL to prevent errors. This might happen after an import from another database.
Added buttons to the top of the add/edit forms aswell so you don't have to scroll all the way down.
Added dropdown list for database selection in the configurator.
Fixed SQL error when O_INC_USEESCALATION was set to FALSE
Fixed file upload when adding new incident, is now called upon from incident_callbacks.php
Fixed incident number increasing with 2 when logged in
Fixed broken link after adding incident in public mode when O_PUBLIC_SECURE_SHOW was false
Fixed query function not giving back a result in some cases
Fixed database not completely installing on windows systems
Fixed upload table showing up when file plugin wasn't active
Fixed files/forums not being shown when incident is closed
Fixed files/forums not being shown when incident was re-opened
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