Helpdesk Integration
This module provides a framework to integrate your Drupal site with dedicated helpdesk systems like Zendesk, Zammad, or GitLab. It allows your website users to submit and manage support tickets directly within Drupal, while ensuring your support agents can use the specialized tools of their dedicated helpdesk platform. User accounts and issue data are synchronized to provide a seamless experience for both users and agents.
This is a framework module. It provides the foundation for integrating your Drupal site with a dedicated helpdesk system such as Zendesk, Zammad, GitLab service desk, or others.
The idea behind that integration is, that users of a Drupal site, e.g. a portal, an intranet, or any other web application, already may have user accounts on such a site and use it for the purpose of that site. If the owner of that site wants to offer some helpdesk as well, the best user experience is to keep the users inside the application, i.e. on the Drupal site, and let them use it as their user front end to submit new issues and follow the progress of their issues until they get resolved.
While this is a great UX for end users, it would not be ideal for your support agents, as dedicated helpdesk systems offer a lot of specialized functionality that makes the agent's daily work much more convenient and efficient.
Getting the best UX for all participants
With this approach, you're getting the best UX for both, your users and your support agents. The users can stay within the application and don't have to worry about a separate user account, login or even the platform that's used by your agents, as that's something completely irrelevant to end users.
At the same time, your agents get the great tool from a dedicated helpdesk system which provides them with all the functionality they need. And most of the dedicated helpdesk system also come with more integrations like e.g. phone support and others.
How does it work
As a Drupal site owner, you can configure one or many integrations with the supported dedicated helpdesk platforms by installing the required modules and then going to /admin/config/services/helpdesk to create and setup the integration(s).
Supported Dedicated Helpdesk Platforms
The configuration of each integration depends on the platform and is described for each of them on their project's main pages or documentation.
User account synchronization
Drupal will automatically synchronize user accounts from the Drupal site into the helpdesk system, so that issues can be associated with the correct user and that the agents working in the helpdesk system also know, with whom they communicate. Only user accounts with the permission to use the helpdesk feature on the Drupal site will be synchronized.
Data storage
The data for issues, comments, attachments, issue status, etc. is owned and controlled by the helpdesk system. For better user experience on the Drupal site and for best performance, the relevant issue data is synchronized over to the Drupal site in the background. This happens only when needed, not all of the data from the helpdesk system will be available in Drupal as well.
To store that data, this module provides a new content type with comments and attachments. For comments, there is a dedicated comment bundle to the comment content type from Drupal core.
Usage
This module provides a new route at /helpdesk which is accessible by all permitted users. You can define a path alias if you want that to be available at a different route. And, of course, you can add that to a menu on the Drupal site, so that users can easily navigate there.
On that page, each user can see their own open issues, create new one, comment to existing ones, upload additional attachments or mark an issue as resolved.