What would you say is the best workaround with minimum disruption for staff and customers?

Thanks

Have you looked at a free solution like Spiceworks for helpdesk? It seems like it will take care of most of your pain points:
* No duplication
* Updates are recorded with the ticket so everyone can see it in the portal
* Most/all of your 20 sub-folders can probably be used as tags to give more information without causing folder bloat

These issues then need to get escalated to IT and system vendors.

The thing I see as the biggest downfall (apart from duplication) is that there is no method of capturing updates and sharing these with the team (unless in a face to face meeting).

The team has tried using a shared inbox, but it has ballooned out to about 20 sub folders. They have tried colour coding the emails to identify who the email request is being actioned by – but it gets messy and this mess compounds.

We’re essentially acting as a middle man, and the shared inbox doesn’t work very well.

I’ve been thinking about using Sharepoint and PowerApps Help Desk template, but don’t want to introduce ‘another thing’.

Tricky situation, but it can’t carry on like it is!

Yes, usually you’d just escalate to the third party, have them log a ticket, and then cross-reference that in your own ticketing system.

To stop the replies getting turning into a new ticket, either send from a different address, or have an exception set up in your help desk system to not auto-log tickets for emails from that third party. Or a wider exception that says don’t auto-log tickets unless sender domain is @yourcompany.com.

So for example:

* Internal user sends an email to itsupport@ourdomain.com
* This gets auto forwarded to the helpdesk system of our choice where a ticket is created.
* Internal IT person looks at the ticket and sees, hmm thats something for our infrastructure provider

Now I am a bit puzzled how to solve it nicely.

* Internal IT person sends an email from the itsupport@ourdomain.com address to itexternal@thirdparty.com
* external it system comes back with an email “Hey we created your ticket”
* This ticket gets picked up by the helpdesk system and creates an internal ticket again?

So in an ideal world, would be nice you can easily create and communicate with your external provider using your chose helpdesk system. Would you have any thoughts how to tackle this or which helpdesk systems would work well in this way?

The nice thing about the shared inbox scenario is that this is quite easily done by just using email?

Thanks!

Sorry to hear that. Perhaps one of your more ambitious teams can move to a proper platform and then be cheerleaders/advocates for the other teams to follow once they see how much better life can be.

So many… sooo so many