We try hard to make Helpstream as easy to use as possible, so you can get up and running in minutes, without any training at all.

Under the hood, however, there are rich capabilities that are probably not obvious when you first sign up.  In this entry, I'll give a brief introduction to our Business Rules engine - one of of our most powerful, and most technical, components.  In future entries, I'll drill down into more technical details.

The Business Rules engine is designed to configure your Helpstream support desk according to your own workflow and rules.  Do you want tickets automatically assigned (based on problem type, priority, requester's account support level, geography, day of week, etc.)?  Business rules does that.  Do you want to be notified if a particular type of case is open for more than X hours?  Business rules does that too. 

Business rules are also completely integrated with the Custom Field engine, so your rules can be based on your custom attributes on Account, Case, or Person.

Each Business Rule boils down to three things:

1) Condition.  What causes this rule to run?  The condition is evaluated on every create/update transaction for a business object type.

2) Date.  Do the actions run immediately and transactionally, or are they scheduled for a future date?

3) Actions.  What should happen?  This can consist of updates to fields (such as assignment, automatic prioritization), email notifications (using customizable email templates), and data validation (presenting error messages and preventing a transaction).

I'll get into more technical details in the next entry, but for now here's an example.  This action assigns all networking tickets to Norm Network if they are created without an assignee.

Condition: $old.id = null and $assignee = null and $problemType = 'Networking'

Date: empty (now)

Action: Assignment.  Field: 'assignee'.  Value: query('Person', "record.emailAddress = 'norm.network@mycompany.com'")

Here's another example.  Let's automatically set the priority to High if the summary or description contains the word "urgent", "emergency", or "important", or something similar such as "urgently".

Condition: $old.id = null and fullTextSearch($summary + ' ' + $description, "urgent~ important~ emergency~")

Date: empty (now)

Action: Assignment.  Field: 'priority'.  Value : 'High'

More on what each field and expression means next time.

Dan